CHAPTER IV.

LUCIUS MAKES A CONFESSION.

It was nearly six o’clock when Geoffrey and his cousins left Mardenholme. On descending from Lady Baker’s apartments in quest of Belle and Jessie, Mr. Hossack had found those two damsels wandering among the shrubberies in the forlornest manner, vainly striving to stifle frequent yawns, so unentertaining had been the society of the devoted Mr. and Mrs. Wimple, ‘who scarcely did anything but whisper and titter to each other all the time we were with them,’ Belle said afterwards.

‘I thought you were playing croquet,’ said Geoffrey, when he found this straggling party in a grove of arbutus and magnolia.

‘We _have_ been playing croquet,’ answered Jessie, with some asperity; ‘but one can’t play croquet for ever. There’s nothing in Dante’s infernal regions more dreadful than that would be. We played as long as we could; Mr. and Mrs. Wimple were tired ever so long before we finished.’

‘No, indeed,’ exclaimed the Wimples simultaneously.

‘What have you been doing all this time, Geoffrey?’ asked Belle.

‘Lady Baker has been so kind as to show me her pictures.’

‘Yes, of course; but you needn’t have been hours looking at them. We must get back directly, or we shall be late for dinner. Ah, there is Lady Baker,’ cried Belle, as her ladyship appeared on the terrace before the drawing-room windows. ‘Come and say good-bye, Jessie, and get the boat ready, Geoff. You’ll have to row us back in an hour. Nothing vexes papa so much as any one being late for dinner. I don’t think he would wait more than ten minutes for an archbishop.’

‘I’ll row like old boots,’ answered Geoffrey; whereupon the young ladies ran off to take an affectionate leave of Lady Baker, while their cousin sauntered down to the weeping willow to whose lowest branch he had moored the wherry. In five minutes they had embarked, and the oars were dipping in the smooth water.

They were at Hillersdon in time to dress, somewhat hurriedly, for the all-important eight-o’clock dinner, which went off pleasantly enough. All that evening cousin Geoffrey made himself particularly agreeable—listened to Belle’s breakneck fantasias and Jessie’s newest ballads with every appearance of rapture; played chess with Belle, and bézique with Jessie, and allowed himself to be beaten by both.

‘What a delightful evening we have had!’ said Belle, as she wished him good-night. ‘Why don’t you come to us oftener, Geoffrey?’

‘I mean to come very often in future,’ replied the impostor, hardly knowing what he said.

At breakfast next morning there was no sign of Geoffrey; but just as Belle had seated herself before the urn, the butler appeared with a letter.

‘Mr. Geoffrey left this for you, ma’am,’ said the domestic, ‘when he went away.’

‘Went away! My cousin, Mr. Hossack, gone!’ cried Belle, aghast, while Jessie rushed to her sister’s side, and strove to possess herself of the letter.

‘Yes, ma’am. Mr. Geoffrey left by the first train; Dawson drove him over in the dog-cart. The letter would explain, Mr. Geoffrey said.’

‘Belle, read the letter, for goodness’ sake!’ cried Jessie impatiently; ‘and don’t sit staring like a figure in a hairdresser’s window.’

The butler lingered to give a finishing touch to the well-furnished sideboard, and to hear the contents of Geoffrey’s letter.

It was brief, and, in the opinion of the sisters, unsatisfactory—the style spasmodic, as of one accustomed to communicate his ideas by electric telegraph, rather than in the more ornate form of a letter.

‘Dearest Belle,—Most unfortunate. Have received telegram summoning me to town. Most particular business. Must go. Regret much. Thought I was in for no end of fun down here. Hope to return shortly. Make my excuses to my uncle, and be lenient yourself towards your affectionate cousin

‘GEOFF.’

‘Was there ever anything so annoying?’ cried Belle, ‘and after Lady Baker’s politeness to him yesterday! Particular business! What can he have to do with business?’

‘I daresay it’s horse-racing or something dreadful,’ said Jessie. ‘I saw a great change in him. He has such a wild look sometimes, and hardly ever seems to know what one says to him.’

‘Jessie,’ exclaimed Belle with solemnity, ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if Geoffrey were going to be married.’

‘O, Belle,’ cried Jessie with a gasp, ‘you don’t think he’d be mean enough for that—to go and get engaged, and never say a word to us.’

‘I don’t know,’ answered her sister gloomily. ‘Men are capable of any amount of meanness in that way.’

* * * * *

Geoffrey Hossack went up to London as fast as the South-Western Railway would take him thither, and straightway upon his arrival transferred himself to a hansom, bidding the driver convey him at full speed to the Shadrack-road.

He reached that melancholy district before noon, and found the shabby-genteel villa, with its fast-decaying stucco front, its rusty iron railings, in which his friend Lucius Davoren had begun his professional career. But, early as it was, Lucius had gone forth more than two hours.

‘I must see him,’ said Geoffrey to the feeble little charwoman, whose spirits were fluttered by the appearance of this rampant stranger, his fiery impatience visible in his aspect. ‘Have you any idea where I can find him?’

‘Lor, no, sir; he goes from place to place—in and out, and up and down. It wouldn’t be the least bit of good tryin’ to foller him. You might wait if you liked, on the chanc’t. He do sometimes come home betwigst one and two to take a mossel of bread-and-cheese and a glass of ale, if he’s going to make a extry long afternoon. But his general way is to come home to a tea-dinner betwigst five and six.’

‘I’ll wait till two,’ said Geoffrey, ‘and if he’s not home by that time, I’ll leave a letter for him.’

So Mr. Hossack dismissed the cab, and went into his friend’s small parlour—such a dreary sitting-room as it seemed to eyes accustomed only to brightness: furniture so sordid; walls so narrow; ceiling darkened by the smoke of gas that had burned late into the long winter nights. Geoffrey looked round with a shudder.

‘And Lucius really lives here,’ he said to himself, ‘and is contented to work on, happy in the idea that he is a benefactor to his species—watching the measles of infancy, administering to the asthmas of old age. Thank God there are such men in the world,—and thank God I am not one of them!’

He looked round the room in quest of that refuge of shallow minds, the day’s paper; but newspaper there was none—only that poor little collection of books on the rickety chiffonier: well-thumbed volumes, wherewith Lucius had so often solaced his loneliness.

‘Shakespeare, Euripides, Montaigne, _Tristram Shandy_,’ muttered Geoffrey, running over the titles contemptuously. ‘Musty old buffers! Come out, old Shandy. I suppose you’re about the liveliest of the lot.’

He tried to settle himself on the feeble old sofa, too short and too narrow for muscular young Oxford; stretched his legs this way and that; read a few pages; smiled at a line here and there; yawned a good deal, and then threw the book aside with an exclamation of impatience. Those exuberant energies asked not repose; he wanted to be up and doing. His mind was full of his interview with Lady Baker, full of anxious longing thoughts about the woman he loved.

‘What became of that man we met in the forest?’ he asked of the unresponsive atmosphere. ‘If I could but track him to his miserable grave, and get a certificate of his death, what a happy fellow I should be.’

He paced the little room, looked out of the window at the enlivening traffic of the Shadrack-road; huge wagons laden with petroleum casks, timber, iron, cotton bales, grinding slowly along the macadam; an organ droning drearily on the other side of the way; a costermonger crying whelks and hot eels, as appropriate refreshment in the sultry August noontide; upon everything that faded, burnt-up aspect which pervades London at the end of summer; a universal staleness, an odour of doubtful fish and rotten fruit.

After the space of an hour and a half, which to Geoffrey’s weariness had seemed interminable, a light step sounded on the little stone-paved approach; a latchkey clicked in the door, and Lucius came into the parlour.

There was surprise unbounded on the surgeon’s side.

‘Why, Geoff, I thought you were in Norway!’ he exclaimed.

‘I changed my mind about Norway,’ answered the other somewhat sheepishly. ‘How could I be such a selfish scoundrel as to go and enjoy myself shooting and fishing and so on, while she is lonely? No, Lucius, I feel somehow that it is my destiny to win her, and that it will be my own fault—_de mon tort_, as the lawyers say—if I lose my chance. So when I got as far as Hull I turned tail, and came back to town, where I found a letter from my cousin Belle Hossack offering me the very opportunity I wanted.’

‘Your cousin Belle! the very opportunity! What do you mean? What could your cousin Belle have to do with my sister?’

‘An introduction to Lady Baker. Don’t you see, Lucius? From Lady Baker I might find out all about that villain who called himself Vandeleur. Now, for heaven’s sake, old fellow, be calm and hear what I have to tell you. I’ve travelled up from Hampshire post haste on purpose to tell you all by word of mouth. I might have written, but I wanted to talk the matter over with you. You may be able to throw some light upon this business.’

‘Upon what business?’ asked Lucius, mystified by this hurried and disjointed address.

‘You may be able to tell me what became of that wild fellow who came in upon us in our log-hut out yonder—whether he is alive or dead. Why, good heavens, Lucius, you’ve turned as white as a sheet of paper! What’s the matter?’

‘I’m tired,’ said the surgeon, dropping slowly into a chair by the table, and shading his face with his hand. ‘And your wild talk is enough to bewilder any man; especially one who has just come in from a harassing round amongst sickness and poverty. What do you mean? You speak one minute of my sister and Lady Baker, and in the next of that man we met yonder. What link can there be between subjects so wide apart?’

‘A closer link than you could ever guess. The villain who married your sister and that man yonder—’

‘Were one and the same!’ cried Lucius, almost with a shriek. ‘I suspected it; I suspected it out yonder in the forest, as I sat and watched that man’s face in the firelight. I have suspected it since then many a time; have dreamt it oftener than I can count; for half my dreams are haunted by the hateful shadow of that man. Was I right? For God’s sake speak out, Geoffrey. Is that the man?’

‘It is.’

‘You know it?’

‘I have had indisputable proof of it. Lady Baker showed me a photograph of the man who stole your sister from her home, and the face in that photograph is the face of the man we let into our hut in the backwoods.’

‘Mysterious are Thy ways,’ cried Lucius, ‘and Thy paths past finding out. Many a time have I fought against this idea. It seemed of all things the most improbable; too wild, too strange for belief. I dared not allow myself to think it. It was he, then. My hatred of him was a natural instinct; my abhorrence hardly needed the proof of his infamy. From the first moment in which our eyes met my soul cried aloud, “There is thy natural enemy.”’

‘It is your turn to talk wildly now, Lucius,’ said Geoffrey, surprised by the other’s passion, ‘but you have not answered my question. While I lay delirious in the log-hut, not knowing anything that was going on round me, did nothing happen to throw a light upon the fate of the guide and that man Matchi, as we called him? They set out to try and find the track; did they never return?’

‘The guide never returned,’ answered Lucius, looking downward with a gloomy countenance, in deep thought. ‘Now, I’ll ask you a question, Geoffrey. In all your talk with our German friend, Schanck, while _I_ was ill and unconscious, did he tell you nothing, hint nothing, about that man?’

‘Nothing,’ replied the other unhesitatingly. ‘He was as close as the grave. But had he anything to tell?’

‘Yes, if he had chosen to betray. He might have told you that I, your friend—I, who had watched by your bed through those long dreary nights, Death staring me in the face as I watched—that I, whom you would have trusted in the direst extremity—was an assassin.’

‘Lucius,’ cried Geoffrey, starting up with a look of horror, ‘are you mad?’

‘No, Geoff. I am reasonable enough now, Heaven knows; whatever I might have been in that fatal time yonder. You want the truth, and you shall have it, though it will sicken you as it sickens me to think of it. I have kept the hideous secret from you; not because I had any fear of the consequences of my act—not because that I am not ready to defend the deed boldly before my fellow men—but because I thought the horrid story might part us. We have been fast friends for so many years, Geoff, and I could not bear to think your liking might be turned to loathing.’

Tears, the agonising drops which intensest pain wrings from manhood, were in his eyes. He covered his face with his clasped hands; as if he would have shut out the very light which had witnessed that horror he shuddered to recall.

‘Lucius,’ exclaimed Geoffrey, at once anxious and bewildered, ‘all this is madness! You have been overworking your brain.’

‘Let me tell my story,’ said the other. ‘It will lighten my burden to share it—even if the revelation makes you hate me.’

‘Even on your own showing I would not believe you guilty of any baseness,’ answered Geoffrey. ‘I would sooner think your mind distraught than that I had been mistaken in your character.’

‘It was no deliberate baseness,’ said Lucius quietly. He had in some measure recovered his composure since that burst of passionate grief. ‘I did what at the moment appeared to me only an act of justice. I took a life for a life.’

‘You, Lucius!’ cried the other, his eyes opening wide with horror. ‘You took the life of a man—yonder—in America?’

‘Yes, Geoffrey. I killed the man who blighted my sister’s life.’

‘Good God! He is dead then—this scoundrel—and by your hand.’

‘He is. And if ever man deserved to die by the act of his fellow man that man most fully merited his fate. But though in that awful hour, when the deed of horror which I had discovered was burnt into my brain, I took his life deliberately and advisedly, the memory of the act has been a torment to me ever since. But let me tell you the secret of that miserable time. It is not a long story, and I will tell it in as few words as possible.’

Briefly, but with an unflinching truthfulness, he told of the night scene in the forest; the ruffian’s attempt to enter the hut; and the bullet which struck him down as he burst open the window.

‘You lay there, Geoffrey, unconscious; sleeping that blessed sleep which Gods sends to those whose feet have trodden the border-land betwixt life and death. Even to awaken you roughly might have been to peril your chance of recovery. The firing of the gun might have done it. But my first thought was that he, the assassin and traitor who had slaughtered the faithful companion of our dangers and privation—that he, brutal and merciless as any savage in the worst island of the Pacific—should not be suffered to approach you in your helplessness. I had warned him that if he attempted to cross our threshold I would shoot him down with as little compunction as if he had been a mad dog. I kept my word.’

‘But are you certain your bullet was fatal?’

‘Of what followed the firing of that shot I know nothing; but I have never doubted its result. Even if the wound were not immediately fatal the man must have speedily perished. The last I saw was the loosening clutch of his lean hand as he dropped from the window; the last I heard was a howl of pain. My brain, which had been kept on the rack for many a dreary night of sleeplessness and fear, gave way all at once, and I fell to the ground like a log. I have every reason to believe that what I suffered at that moment was an apoplectic seizure, which might have been fatal, but for Schanck’s promptitude in bleeding me. After the shock came brain fever, from which, as you know, I was slow to recover. When my senses did return, I seemed to enter upon a new world. Thought and memory came back by degrees, and the vision of that scene in the forest shaped itself slowly out of the confusion of my brain until it became the vivid picture which has haunted me ever since.’

‘Had you met the man who betrayed your sister, would you have killed him?’ asked Geoffrey.

‘In fair fight, yes.’

‘He who rules the destinies of us all decreed that you should meet him unawares. You were the instrument of God’s vengeance upon a villain.’

‘“Vengeance is mine,”’ repeated Lucius thoughtfully. ‘Often, when reproaching myself for that rash act, I have almost deemed the deed a kind of blasphemy. What right had _I_ to forestall God’s day of reckoning? For every crime there is an appointed punishment. The assassin we hang to-day might pay a still heavier price for his sin were we to leave him in the hands of God, or might be permitted to repent and atone.’

‘Lucius,’ said Geoffrey, stretching out his hand to his friend, ‘in my eyes you stand clear of all guilt. Was it not chiefly for my defence you fired that shot? and for my own part I can assure you that cold-blooded scoundrel would have had a short shrift had I been his executioner. So let us dismiss all thought of him, with the memory of the last murderer who swung at Newgate. One fact remains paramount—a fact that for me changes earth to Paradise; your sister is free.’

Lucius started, and for the first time a look of absolute fear came into his face.

‘What!’ he exclaimed. ‘You will tell her that her husband fell by my hand? You forget, Geoffrey, that my confession must be sacred. If I did not pledge you to secrecy, it was because I had so firm a faith in your honour that I needed no promise of your silence.’

‘Let me tell her only of that man’s death.’

‘She will hardly be satisfied with a statement unsupported by proof,’ answered Lucius doubtfully.

‘What, will she doubt my honour?’

‘Love is apt to be desperate. The lover has a code of his own.’

‘Not if he is an honest man,’ cried Geoffrey.

‘But Janet has been once deceived, and will be slow to trust where she loves. Put her to the test. Tell her that you know this man is dead, and if she will believe you and if she will be your wife, there is no one, not even yourself, who will be gladder than I. God knows it is a grief for me to think of her lonely position, her lifelong penance for the error of her youth. I have entreated her to share my home, humble as it is, but she refuses. She is proud of her independence, and though I know she loves me, she prefers to live aloof from me, with no other society than her child’s.’

They talked long, Geoffrey full of mingled hope and fear. He left his friend late in the afternoon, intending to go down to Stillmington by the mail train, to try his fortunes once more. Lucius had told him he was beloved; was not that sufficient ground for hope?

‘She will not be too exacting,’ he said to himself. ‘She will not ask me for chapter and verse, for the doctor’s certificate, the undertaker’s bill. If I say to her, “Upon my honour your husband is dead,” she will surely believe me.’

Book the Third.