PART II

—THE RESURRECTION

VI

Peter Deeming died on the thirtieth of June, in the year 1900. In June of the following year, as I was walking past the Knightsbridge Barracks, I met Vernon strolling along in the sunshine, with a cigarette in his mouth. When he saw me, he stopped, took my hand, and clasped it warmly.

“Back at last!” he said.

“Yes. I only arrived yesterday. Did you winter in Rome, as usual?”

“No. I’ve not been out of England.”

“Good Heavens!” I exclaimed. “You don’t mean to say you’ve been facing the London fogs while I’ve been in Africa and Sicily?”

He nodded.

“What can have been your reason?”

He put his arm through mine.

“Let’s go into the Park,” he said. “We’ll take a stroll, and I’ll tell you.”

We turned into the Park by the nearest gate, and walked gently along under the trees. It was a strangely radiant day for London—a day that seemed full of hope and gaiety. Many children were about laughing, playing, calling to each other. Poor people basked in the sunshine, stretched upon the short grass. Carriages rolled by, drawn by fine horses. In the trees the birds were singing, as innocently as they sing in retired country places. And I felt glad and at ease. It was pleasant to be with Vernon once more, pleasant to be once more in my own land among my own people.

“Well, Vernon?” I said.

“First,” he answered, “you must tell me something. You must tell me why you left England after the death of your mother, without coming to say good-bye to me.”

“I felt upset, broken down, as if I didn’t want to see anyone, as if I wanted to get away and be alone among new scenes and people who were strangers.”

“That was it?”

I heard the doubt in his voice, and added—

“There was another reason, too, an under-reason.”

“Yes?”

“That sudden death of poor Deeming, coming just after my mother’s, upset my nerves, I think. It made me feel as if—as if I had been cruel. It filled me with regret.”

“Cruel! I don’t understand.”

“No. How could you? But when a man’s dead, one thinks very differently about him often. And I had been suspicious of Deeming. At the end, indeed, I had been unfriendly.”

“I am quite in the dark,” he said, rather coldly, I thought.

I explained to him what I meant. I told him of my last meeting with Deeming, of the incident of the fox-terrier, of Deeming’s note to me, of how I had left it unanswered. He listened with a profound attention.

“When I read of his death in the paper I wished I had answered his note,” I concluded. “I wished it more than I can tell you. And I regretted bitterly that the last weeks of our intercourse had been clouded by suspicion, by misunderstanding.”

“Ah!”

His voice still sounded cold. After a moment he said:

“And you didn’t come to see me because⸺”

“Well, you had been mixed up with my suspicion of Deeming, and⸺”

“Now I understand. You felt a very natural longing to be away from all that recalled sadness to you, that might deepen your grief or serve to irritate your nerves.”

“I suppose that was it. I went right away. I wanted to forget, to escape out of a dark cloud into a clear atmosphere. But you? Why have you been in London all this time?”

“I’ve been working.”

“Working! You?”

“Even I—idler, dilettante.”

“Music?”

“I’ve been working with Arthur Gernham.”

“For the animals?”

“Exactly. For our brothers and sisters who do not speak our language. I’ve been writing pamphlets, I’ve been gathering subscriptions, I’ve been stirring people up, and by doing so I’ve been stirring myself up, my slothful, sluggish, unpractical self.”

“Wonderful!”

“Isn’t it? Do you know that I’ve toured the United Kingdom giving lectures on the subject of man’s duty to the animals, that I’ve helped to form a league of kindness? Luttrell, I’m a busy man now, and I am an enthusiastic man.”

While he spoke his animation had been growing, and as he ended his voice was full of energy.

“And when did the impulse come to you to begin this new life?” I asked.

“I can tell you the very day,” he said. “It was on June the 30th of last year.”

“June the 30th!” I said. “Why, that was the day that Deeming died!”

“Well, it was on that day.”

I looked at him sharply. I had never yet heard any details connected with the accident that had brought about Deeming’s illness and so caused his death. I wondered if Vernon knew any. He had lived next door. I longed to ask him, but something, some inner voice of my nature, advised me not to.

“Is Gernham a good fellow?” I said carelessly.

“A splendid fellow. You must know him.”

“As you have changed so much,” I continued, “have you altered that resolution of yours?”

“What resolution?”

“Never to make another animal happy as you made your spaniel, Whisper, happy?”

“Ah, that—no! I could never have another pet. I suffered too much from my affection, Luttrell. I am resolved not to suffer again in that way. The mountains may fall, but I shall never keep another dog.”

He spoke with a decision that carried conviction. At that moment I should have been ready to stake my entire fortune on his sticking to his assertion and backing it up by his acts. If anyone had come to me that night and said, “Your friend Vernon has just bought a dog and taken it home to live with him,” I should have laughed, and answered in polite terms, “You’re a liar.” But one cannot deny the evidence of one’s own eyes.

Now this is exactly what occurred.

While we walked along beneath the trees, not very far from the Statue of Achilles, I saw in the distance a man approaching us, leading a number of dogs by strings and carrying a couple of puppies under his arms. He wore a fur cap and earrings, a short, loud-patterned coat with tails, and a pair of very tight trousers. As he drew near I saw that among the dogs who accompanied him there was a fine black spaniel.

[Illustration: “THAT DOG THERE,” SAID VERNON; “HOW LONG HAVE YOU HAD HIM?”]

“Here comes a choice assortment of dumb friends,” I said to Vernon.

“Yes.”

I saw him looking at the dogs, which were sniffing the air, and pulling at their leads in the endeavour to investigate delicious smells. Suddenly he stopped short, just as the man was passing us. At the same moment I saw the black spaniel shrink back and cower down against the ground, pressing his broad, flapping ears against his head.

“What is it, Vernon?” I said.

He did not reply. He was staring at the spaniel. The owner of the dogs saw a possible purchaser, and at once, in a soft and very disagreeable voice, began to enumerate their merits.

“H’sh!” Vernon hissed at him.

The man stopped in astonishment.

“That dog there,” said Vernon, pointing to the black spaniel, which was still shrinking down, and pulling back from his lead in an effort to get away. “How long have you had him?”

“Ever since he was baun, gen’leman,” replied the man. “’E’s the gentlenist, the best-mannered dawg as hiver⸺”

“How old is he? What’s his age?”

“Just upon a year, Sir, a year ’e’ll be this very selfsame month. ’E was one of as fine a litter o’ pups as⸺”

“You bred him?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“A year old, is he?”

“Just upon, Sir. The thirtieth’s the day, Sir—the thirtieth of this selfsame month. Law bless you, I knows the birthdays of hivery dawg as hiver⸺”

“What’s his price?”

The man licked his lips, and I saw a gleam in his small eyes.

“Well, Sir, I dunno as I’m dispoged to part with ’im. You see, I gets to love⸺”

“How much?”

The tone was sharp. The words came almost like a pistol-shot.

“Ten puns, Sir,” said the man. “I should say, fifteen puns, Sir.”

“I’ll give you twelve.”

“I reely couldn’t tike it, Sir. The dawg’s the very happle of⸺”

“There’s my address—301, Wimpole Street.” He gave the man his card. “Bring the dog there at six o’clock this evening, and you shall have twelve pounds, not a penny more. Good-day.”

“I’ll be there, Sir. You can trust me, you can⸺”

We walked on. As we did so, the spaniel whimpered, ran to his master, and fawned about his legs as if demanding protection.

For several minutes neither Vernon nor I said a word. I was in amazement. What had just happened may seem to some a very small matter. To me it seemed extraordinary, mysterious, even—I could not tell why—horrible. There had been something peculiar in Vernon’s attitude, in his face, while he stood looking at the spaniel, something fatal that had affected my nerves. Then my wonder was naturally great that such a man should thus abruptly go back from his word. And the spaniel’s cringing attitude of terror when Vernon had gazed at him, had spoken to his master, was disagreeable to me, acutely disagreeable in the remembrance of it! It seemed to me very strange and unnatural that such an ardent lover of animals as Vernon was should inspire an animal with fear. Animals have an instinct that always tells them who loves them. This spaniel was apparently without this instinct.

Perhaps it was this lack in him that made me now think of him with a faint dislike, even a faint disgust, such as the healthy-minded feel when brought into contact with anything unnatural.

I broke the silence first.

“I did not know you were a changeable man,” I said.

“You mean that I have changed my mind about keeping a dog.”

“Yes, and with such extraordinary suddenness.”

“I suppose it does seem odd,” he remarked. “But who knows what he will do?”

“But—what was your reason?”

He looked at me, very strangely, I thought.

“A sudden impulse,” he answered. “A memory, perhaps, moved me.”

“The memory of Whisper?”

“Of Whisper—of course.”

His voice seemed to me just then as strange as his face. Perhaps seeing that I still wondered, he added—

“That spaniel appeared to be nervous, terrified. Perhaps that man is cruel to it.”

“Oh, but⸺” I began, and stopped.

“What is it?”

“You didn’t think—it seemed to me that it was you who inspired the dog with fear.”

“I!” He laughed. “My dear fellow, a dog-lover like myself cannot inspire a dog with fear. You must be mistaken. Animals always know who loves them.”

“Yes. It’s very strange,” I murmured.

“What is strange?” he asked, in rather a hard voice.

“Oh, I don’t know—nothing,” I answered evasively. “Here we are at the gate.”

“Yes. Well, you are coming to see me?”

“Of course. You are still in that house?”

“Oh, yes. It suits me. When will you come?”

“Whenever you like.”

He stood for a moment, making patterns with his stick on the pavement and looking down. Then he glanced up at me.

“Come and have a cup of tea this afternoon at half-past five, will you?” he said.

I immediately thought of the man with the earrings and the fur cap. Then I was to see the transfer of the black spaniel.

“I’ll come,” I answered.

“Right!”

Vernon nodded and walked away slowly in the direction of Hamilton Place.

VII

At a quarter past five that day I started for Wimpole Street, filled with a sensation of strong curiosity, for which, in mental debate with myself, I could not quite satisfactorily account. It was a very ordinary matter, surely, this selling and buying of a dog. Why, then, did it seem to me an affair of importance? I asked myself that question while I waited. The only answer I could find was that the dog was a black spaniel, and that before the sad death of my friend Deeming a black spaniel, the creature that had caused the tragedy, had mysteriously complicated, and indeed altered, my pleasant relations both with him and with Vernon. But all that was a year ago. The past does not return, and therefore it was absurd to be—to be—what? What was really the exact nature of the emotion that now beset me? Had I been strictly truthful with myself I should, perhaps, have called it apprehension. But we are not always strictly truthful even with ourselves. I think that day I named it nervousness. I was nervous, out of sorts, a little bit depressed. Vernon’s _volte-face_ had surprised me. The dog’s cringing fear had made an unpleasant impression upon me. And so, now, as I drew near to Wimpole Street I was slightly strung up. That was the long and short of it.

In some such fashion I think I spoke to myself, explanatorily, falsely.

When I turned into Wimpole Street the image of poor Deeming was very present in my mind, and I could scarcely believe that he did not still inhabit the house to which I had come that Sunday morning. I wondered who lived there now, who was Vernon’s neighbour; and when I reached the house I looked towards it with a sad curiosity, which quickly changed to surprise. The house was transformed. Where once had been a doorstep there was now an area railing. The front door had vanished. In its place was a window, with a box in which roses and geraniums were blooming. In a moment I realised what had happened. Formerly the two houses—Nos. 300 and 301—had been one house. Since I had been there they had once more been thrown together. Vernon, then, was living now in the house that had been Deeming’s. As I grasped this fact, Vernon appeared at a window of what had been the second house. Seeing me, he smiled and waved his hand. Before I could ring, the door was opened by Cragg, his faithful man.

“Glad to see you again, Sir,” said Cragg, with a respectful bow which he had learnt, I think, in Italy.

He had several little foreign ways, but was extremely English in appearance—calm, solid, neat, and closely shaven.

I returned his greeting and stepped in.

“Ah,” I said, looking round. “So it’s all changed.”

“Yes, Sir. After Doctor Deeming’s death we got rid of the old stuff, and Mr. Kersteven bought the Doctor’s house and threw the two houses into one. It’s more suitable now.”

“It was awful before.”

“Well, Sir, it was scarcely to Mr. Kersteven’s taste. We rather roughed it for a time, Sir.”

He took my hat and stick and showed me upstairs into a charming drawing-room, in which I at once recognised many beautiful things from Vernon’s house in Rome. Here Vernon met me with an outstretched hand.

“By Jove, what a transformation!” I exclaimed.

“To be sure, you haven’t seen it since⸺”

“Since the frogs and the beetles and the Japanese umbrellas were turned out. No. And so now you’ve got Deeming’s house too?”

“Yes. I have joined the two together, but I use his chiefly for my work in connection with our dumb friends.”

“Oh!”

His voice was significant in that last sentence, and I realised that in him imagination was often the guide, leading him strangely, dominating him powerfully.

Tea was ready, and we sat down.

Giving expression to my thought, I said, “Strange that you should be living in Deeming’s house.”

“Why so?”

“Oh, well, you were antagonists, weren’t you?”

“Could the difference between us be called antagonism?” he asked, pouring out the tea.

“Wasn’t it? Once Deeming told me that he knew⸺”

I hesitated.

“Knew what?”

“Knew that you hated him.”

“Really. Did he say that?”

“Was it true?”

“Why discuss it?”

“You’re right. It’s all over now. And he, poor chap, has gone beyond the reach of earthly love or hate.”

He made no rejoinder, and I had an odd feeling as if he were silent because I had said something with which he did not agree; yet that was not possible.

“Do you think,” I said, to change the subject, “do you think that fellow will come?”

“The dog-fancier? Oh, I suppose so. He won’t let slip a chance of making twelve pounds. His dog isn’t worth more than six.”

“Then why do you give double?”

“A caprice.”

“I begin to think you are a capricious man,” I said.

“The dilettante generally is.”

He drew out his watch.

“It’s close upon six. That chap ought to be here in a moment. Ah, there’s the bell! He’s come, no doubt.”

I was conscious of a certain discomfort, but scarcely knew its cause. Putting down my cup, I sat listening intently. Vernon, too, was listening. There was in his face an expression of strained attention. When the door opened gently, I started and looked hastily round.

“Lord Elyn!” said Vernon, getting up from his chair.

“Yes. Glad to find you at home. Hulloa, Luttrell! So you’re back at last! I haven’t seen you since the death of our poor friend Deeming.”

He shook my hand.

“That was a sad business. No one to take his place. No one like him, is there?”

He sat down and stretched his legs. I said something suitable, but with rather an uncertain voice. This unexpected arrival irritated me. And yet I thoroughly liked Lord Elyn. Vernon, too—I felt sure of it—was vexed by his arrival, but he was charmingly courteous, though, in the trifling conversation that followed, he showed traces of absent-mindedness. I knew he was listening for the sound of the bell. I knew he was eagerly awaiting the arrival of the black spaniel. Six o’clock struck. The hand of a clock on the mantelpiece pointed to five minutes, then to ten minutes past six. Vernon began to betray a certain restlessness, a certain uneasiness. He twice changed his place in the room. Finally, he got up and remained standing.

“You are expecting someone?” said Lord Elyn, looking at him in some surprise.

“Yes. The fact is I’ve bought a dog—or named my price for one—and he ought to be brought here this evening.”

“Oh, I’m very fond of dogs. Kept them all my life. What sort of animal is this one?”

“A black⸺there’s the bell!”

He broke off, went swiftly over to the window and looked out. As he stood with his back turned to us I heard him utter a low exclamation.

“What did you say, Vernon?” I asked sharply.

I had not heard a word, but there was a thrilling sound in his voice which startled me. I got up also from my chair, possessed, gnawed by an inexplicable restlessness. Vernon turned round from the window. I saw the strange light in his eyes which I had sometimes noticed there when he talked about the animals and their relation with man.

“It’s the spaniel,” he said.

The words were simple enough, but the way in which he said them was not simple. It sounded cruel and triumphant.

Lord Elyn looked more surprised. He also got up.

“The arrival of this dog seems quite an event,” he said.

“Yes, quite an event,” repeated Vernon, looking towards the door. “It’s years since I’ve had a—pet.”

“If you please, Sir, there’s a person here with a dog.”

“I know. I expected him.”

“Indeed, Sir. Am I to admit him?”

“Certainly.”

“And the dog, Sir? Is he to come in too?”

“Of course. It’s the dog I want, not the man.”

Cragg remained in the doorway, looking at his master.

“What is it, Cragg?” asked Vernon. “What the deuce is the matter?”

“Well, Sir, I don’t see—I don’t, really—how we are ever going to get that dog into the house.”

“What do you mean?” said Vernon.

On his lips there was playing a slight smile.

“I never see an animal in such a state, Sir; I really never did. Hark, Sir!”

He lifted his hand. From below there came to us the sound of a long-drawn howling. Again I felt a cold chill go over me. Lord Elyn, too, was unpleasantly affected. He shook his shoulders, and said—

“Good God, what a dreadful noise! It sounds like something being tortured.”

Vernon was still smiling.

“Oh!” he said; “it’s only the natural nervousness of a dog brought to a strange house to change one master for another. Go along, Cragg. Show the man into my study. I’ll come down in a moment.”

Still looking very doubtful, Cragg disappeared, shutting the door. We three remained silent for a moment. Then Vernon said—

“I’m afraid you’re having a very fussy visit, Lord Elyn. Do sit down. I’ll go and pay the man, and be back in a minute.”

It was evident to me that he wanted—wanted ungovernably—to see the dog brought into the house. As he stopped speaking he was gone. He had almost darted out of the room.

“Dear me!” said Lord Elyn. “Dear me.”

He was a delicate, naturally nervous man, and highly sensitive. I could see plainly that he was upset, mystified by this affair of the arrival of the dog. He looked at me as if inquiring of me what it all meant.

“I wonder⸺” he began.

Then he broke off. After a pause he said—

“If the dog often howls as he did just now, Vernon won’t have much peace. I never in my life heard a more distressing noise, eh?”

“It was very distressing,” I assented.

Lord Elyn did not sit down, but went to and fro in the room like one disturbed.

“A most distressing noise!” he repeated, uncomfortably. “Most distressing. It really almost sounded like a human being in agony, didn’t it?”

“Yes, it did.”

“What sort of dog is it?” he asked presently, standing before me. “Do you know?”

“A black spaniel.”

“A spaniel? They’re the most sensitive breed of dog I know, intensely nervous and easily frightened, but very affectionate. They attach themselves in an extraordinary manner to those who are kind to them.”

“Hulloa!” he exclaimed. The door had reopened, and Vernon came in.

“Well,” he said, “it’s all right. I’ve got the dog for twelve pounds.”

“Where is it?” said Lord Elyn.

“Downstairs in my study. I’ve had to tie him up for the moment. Poor fellow, he’s nervous at getting into a strange house.”

“Let’s have a look at him,” said Lord Elyn.

I saw that Vernon hesitated, and thought he was going to refuse the request, natural though it was. But if he had intended to do so, he quickly changed his mind.

“Certainly,” he said. “Come downstairs. My study is in the part of the house that once belonged to Deeming.”

Lord Elyn went out of the room, I followed, and Vernon came last.

“To the right!” he said, when we reached the bottom of the staircase. “This corridor unites the two houses.”

We followed the direction indicated.

“Here’s the study,” said Vernon. “It’s a real workroom, dedicated to the cause of our dumb friends.”

“The animals?” said Lord Elyn. “It seems to me, after this evening, that dumb is scarcely the appropriate adjective to apply to them.”

Vernon laughed. He had his hand on the door of his study, and was still laughing as he opened it.

VIII

Lord Elyn went in first. I followed. The study was, as Vernon had said, a real workroom. There was little furniture in it, and what there was was plain and serviceable. Near the one window, which looked out at the back on to the backs of other houses, was a large writing-table covered with documents, pamphlets, magazines, address-books, gum-bottles, elastic bands, balls of string, a Remington typewriter, piles of paper bands for fastening newspapers and manuscripts, etc. In the midst of this ordered rummage stood a cabinet photograph of a man. I did not examine it then, but I knew later that it was Arthur Gernham, the notorious anti-vivisectionist. A few chairs, a thick Turkey carpet, and two revolving bookcases completed the furniture. The walls were tinted a dull red, and there were red curtains at the window. There were no pictures or ornaments. On the mantelpiece stood a clock which struck the quarter after six as we came in.

“Where’s the—oh, there he is!” said Lord Elyn.

The black spaniel was lying crouched upon the floor in a corner near the window, a dark patch against the red of the curtain which touched him. He had been tied by a piece of cord to the writing-table, but had shrunk back, as if in an effort to escape, until he could go no farther. Now he lay with his face turned towards the door, motionless, staring. When we saw him he did not move. He only looked at us.

He only looked at us, I have said. Then why did Lord Elyn stop short just inside the door, as if startled? Why did I feel an almost invincible desire to get out of this room, even out of this house of my friend? It must have been the violence of terror in the dog’s eyes contrasted with the absolute stillness, the stillness as of death, of his body. Yes, I think it must have been that which affected us. For in violence there is always contained the suggestion of intense activity, the suggestion of movement, and the dog’s eyes conveyed to me the feeling that his soul was rushing from us, while his body lay there before us against the red curtain like a carven thing.

“There he is!” Lord Elyn repeated in a low voice.

He looked at me and then at Vernon. I thought he was going out of the room, and I am sure he wanted to do so; but he stood where he was in silence and again looked towards the spaniel.

“Well, what do you think of him?” asked Vernon.

The sound of his voice perhaps made Lord Elyn conscious that we were behaving somewhat absurdly, that we were almost huddling together, he and I, beside the door. For he took a step—but only a step—forward, and answered, with an evident effort to speak more naturally:

“Oh, he looks a good specimen. He’s well bred; I should say, well bred—yes.”

Again he glanced at me as if questioning me. All this time the spaniel did not move, but lay staring at us with eyes full of horror. His stillness appalled me.

“And what do you think, Luttrell?” said Vernon.

It was with a difficulty that was extraordinary to me that I answered him.

“You’ll have a lot of trouble with him,” I said.

“Why?” said Vernon quickly.

“Why? Why, he’s evidently a very nervous dog. I should think it’ll take time to reconcile him with his new home and his new master.”

“Good God!” said Lord Elyn.

As I finished speaking the dog had suddenly howled again. Involuntarily I stepped back.

Vernon laughed once more.

“Why, anybody would think you were afraid of him,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

[Illustration: “POOR BEAST! POOR BEAST!”]

I tried to laugh too—to laugh at myself.

“He gave tongue so very unexpectedly,” I said. “Poor fellow! Poor fellow!”

I was speaking to the dog, but I did not go towards him. The faint disgust with which he had already inspired me in the Park was stronger now that I was with him in a room. I was conscious of an almost invincible desire to go straight out of the house, to get into the open air, quickly, without delay. But with this feeling blended another, more subtle, one that surprised me by its force.

I longed, before I went, to untie that crouching dog, to let him escape from the room, the house, to set him free. With the disgust of him mingled a curious pity for him that was inexplicable to me then.

I think Lord Elyn shared my feelings, but he acted differently from me. For, whereas I now moved away to go, he suddenly, with determination, walked forward towards the spaniel. Seeing this, I stopped just outside the door in the corridor. From there I witnessed a sight that increased my sensation of pity, and at the same time deepened my sensation of disgust.

Lord Elyn, when he was near the spaniel, bent down a little, snapping his fingers and saying, “Poor beast! poor beast!” whereupon the dog suddenly sprang up from the floor against his breast, in an obvious attempt to nestle into his arms as if for protection against some danger. Lord Elyn, surprised, tried to hold him, but failed, and let him drop heavily to the floor.

Vernon interposed. Going forward quickly he said, “I’m awfully sorry, Lord Elyn. He’s muddied you. Come out and Cragg shall brush it off.”

The dog shrank back against the curtain.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Lord Elyn began.

But Vernon took his arm and drew him with a sort of gentle inflexibility towards the door and into the corridor where I was standing.

“Cragg,” Vernon called; “Cragg.”

“Sir,” said the man coming from the hall.

Vernon shut the door of the study sharply.

“Just get a brush, will you? The dog has put his dirty paws on Lord Elyn’s coat.”

“Certainly, Sir.”

He turned on the electric light. Lord Elyn stood under it to be brushed. I noticed that his face looked very white, but thought it might be the effect of the light upon it. When Cragg had finished, Lord Elyn said—

“Good-night, Vernon,” and walked hastily towards the hall door.

“May I come with you?” I said.

“Do.”

I bade Vernon good-bye with a word and a hand-grasp, and in a moment Lord Elyn and I were out in the street.

“Ouf!” said Lord Elyn, blowing out his breath.

He stood still, looking towards that part of the house which had been Deeming’s.

“By Jove!” he said, as if speaking to himself.

Then, suddenly conscious that he was not alone, he exclaimed—

“Pray forgive me, Luttrell, but the fact is I—well, I don’t know why, but that dog has made a very disagreeable impression on me, very disagreeable. D’you know, when he sprang upon me just now I felt a sensation—by Jove, it was a sensation of horror, of abject horror.”

He walked on slowly.

“I noticed you were looking very pale in the hall,” I said.

“Pale? I should think so! The whole business—I say, what did you think of it, eh?”

“How do you mean?” I asked evasively.

“What d’you think of the dog?”

“Poor beast! It seemed very nervous.”

“Nervous! It was half-mad with terror. I never saw a dog in such a state before. And Vernon such a lover of animals, too! That’s the strange part of it.”

“You think it was Vernon it was afraid of?”

“To be sure. Didn’t you see it spring upon me for protection, and directly he approached it shrank away like a thing demented? Now, I’ve been with animals all my life—brought up among ’em—and never before have I seen an animal’s instinct betray it. Animals know in a second the men that are fond of ’em and the men who hate ’em. But this dog’s all at sea. It thinks Vernon’s a regular devil—a dog-torturer. It’s half-crazed with fear of him. That is as plain as a pikestaff. The thing’s unnatural, Luttrell—it’s d⸺d unnatural!”

He spoke with a vehemence that showed how greatly his nerves were upset. I could not contradict, because I absolutely agreed with him.

“That dog,” he added, “gives me the shudders.”

“Poor wretch!” I said.

“You pity him too?” he asked.

“Yes. But when he gets to know Vernon it will be all right. Vernon has a positive passion for animals.”

I strove to speak with conviction, for I was trying to convince myself.

“I know he has. And yet⸺”

He hesitated.

“What, Lord Elyn.”

“Well, didn’t it strike you that he looked at the dog very queerly?”

“Queerly?”

“Yes, not as if he had a great fancy for it.”

I said nothing.

“What made him buy it?” said Lord Elyn.

“I’ve no idea” I answered.

And indeed at that moment I was wondering, wondering almost passionately.

“I’ll swear he doesn’t like the dog,” said Lord Elyn, still with vehemence. “He may be as fond of animals as you like, but he isn’t fond of this one.”

“If he hadn’t taken a liking to it why should he buy it?”

“That’s more than I can say. It’s a queer business. I had an idea that—that you perhaps, had some inkling what was up.”

And again his look questioned me.

“I haven’t indeed,” I said.

And I spoke the truth. I was in the dark, in blackness.

A hansom passed us slowly at this moment. Lord Elyn hailed it.

“I must get home,” he said. “I’m dining out. Shall I give you a lift?”

“No, thank you. I’ll walk. I like the exercise.”

“Good-bye, then.”

He stepped into the cab and drove off, while I walked slowly back to Albemarle Street.

Lord Elyn had made my thoughts clearer to me by his blunt expressions. He had asked me if I had any inkling of what was up, and, when he said that, I knew quite certainly that, to use that slangy phrase, I thought something was up. Vernon had been moved by some strange impulse to buy the black spaniel, had some strange purpose in connection with it. I felt sure of this. My instinct told me that it was so. What had caused this impulse? What was this purpose?

I wondered, but could not tell.

I reviewed Vernon’s character as I knew it carefully, considered all that I had heard of him from others, trying to find a clue that would guide me to comprehension. But I remained perplexed. I knew good of him. I had always heard praise of him, except from one person, the man who was dead and in whose house he now lived. Deeming had said to me once that Vernon was a black fanatic; the phrase was strong, brutal even. It recurred to my mind as I walked, and stayed there. Then I thought of the terror in the spaniel’s eyes as it lay motionless against the red curtain of the workroom. And I was troubled, I was strangely ill at ease. It seemed to me that in my friend, hidden away like a thing hidden in a cave, was something mysterious, something even terrible, and that the black spaniel was connected with it. But how could that be? Vernon loved all animals. He was at this very moment devoting his life to the advancement of their welfare. For them he had thrown off his long idleness of the lounging traveller, the luxurious art-lover, who wandered from country to country buying to please his whim. For them he stayed in England and lived laborious days. Why, then, when I thought of the spaniel shut up in his study, should I be chilled with fear? I reasoned with myself, but in vain. The sense of fear, of mystery, remained with me. It was deepened by an incident which occurred six days later.

During those days I had not seen Vernon; I had heard nothing of him or of the black spaniel.

The incident to which I alluded was my meeting for the first time with Arthur Gernham.

At a man’s dinner, given by a famous throat-specialist renowned not only as a surgeon but as a host, I found myself sitting opposite to a very remarkable-looking man of about forty years of age. I had not been introduced to him, and had no idea who he was, but he at once attracted my attention by his air of fiery vitality and his unconventional attire. Instead of the ordinary evening dress, he wore a pair of black trousers, a loose silk shirt with a turned-down collar and very small black tie, and a double-breasted smoking-coat which concealed his waistcoat, if he had one. His powerful, sinewy wrists were unfettered by cuffs, and his powerful throat was free from the stiff linen ramparts over which the average Englishman faces the world in the evening. He was evidently a man who hated restraint. His face was pale, of the hatchet type, with a long hooked nose, the bridge of which was unusually marked; a large mouth, unsmiling but not unkind; a narrow, very high forehead, and gleaming hazel eyes. His head was sparsely covered with odd tufts of light-brown hair.

During dinner Gernham talked a great deal in a rasping voice. His conversation was interesting, for he was not only intelligent, but obviously an enthusiast, and one who was entirely fearless of the opinion of others. I wondered much who he was, and as we were getting up from the table I found an opportunity to ask my host.

“Arthur Gernham,” he said. “Very down on us doctors, but an interesting fellow. In another age he’d have courted persecution for the faith that is in him. Let me introduce you.”

And he did so.

Gernham shook me warmly by the hand.

“My dear colleague Kersteven has often spoken of you,” he said. “You sympathise with our efforts, don’t you?”

He jerked his head upwards and looked at me keenly. I said something—I’ve forgotten what—and he continued abruptly—

“Come along. Let’s have a good talk. Have a cigar.”

He gave me a very large one, flung himself down in an armchair, and talked enthusiastically of Vernon.

“I’ve been almost living in his house this last week,” he said. “We’re preparing a fresh campaign on behalf of the blessed beasts, our brothers. We’ve got together some statistics that’ll startle the comfortable elbow-chair Englishmen, I can tell you. I’ll never rest till I’ve roused the country to the horrors that are being perpetrated every day, every hour, every minute, upon the defenceless animals God has committed to us to be good to. And Vernon—what a splendid chap he is! What a colleague! All pity! The man’s made of pity, made of tenderness. Ah, but you know that!”

“Yes!” I said.

I thought of the black spaniel. Here was an opportunity to find out how Vernon and his pet were getting on together.

“You’ve been in the house with Vernon a great deal lately?” I began.

“Every day and all day,” he said, “this last week.”

“How’s that new pet of his?” I asked. “Reconciled and happy in his new home?”

“Pet?” said Gernham.

“Yes, the dog.”

“He hasn’t got one. Don’t you know the hideous story? He once had a spaniel called⸺”

“I know,” I interrupted. “And he’s got another.”

“Not he!” rejoined Gernham, with sledge-hammer certainty. “He’ll never have another. I understand the poor chap’s feelings. At the same time⸺”

But here I interrupted again, and told Gernham the story of Vernon’s acquisition of the spaniel. He heard me with an amazement he did not try to conceal.

“And you mean to say the dog’s in the house now?” he cried, when I had finished.

“I suppose so, unless he’s got rid of it already.”

Gernham sat quite still with his thin hands spread out on his knees staring at me hard.

“This is extraordinary,” he said at last, with a sort of biting decision.

“You mean that he didn’t mention the fact that he had a dog?”

“I mean more than that. I mean that he concealed it from me.”

“Concealed it?”

“Certainly. I’ve got any amount of animals—dogs, cats, the whole show—and I’m always urging Kersteven to set up a happy family. We preach kindness, he and I. We ought to practise it actively as much as we can. But his feelings about his dead dog have always stood in the way. I’m perpetually trying to convert him to my view. I’ve been at it this week.”

“And he said he hadn’t a dog?”

“No. But he never said he had one. It’s much the same thing under the circumstances. I should never have thought Kersteven could be deceitful. I don’t like it. I—I hate it!”

At this moment we were interrupted. Two of the other men came up and we had no more private talk that evening. When I was going away Gernham said—

“Come and see me—will you? Here’s my card.”

He gave it to me, shook my hand, and as I turned to go said—

“You’ve spoilt my evening, I can tell you that.”

I thought, “And you’ve spoilt mine,” but I did not say it.

IX

I went home that night wondering whether Vernon had got rid of the black spaniel. Perhaps he had found it impossible to reconcile it to its new quarters, and had sold it or given it back to the man with the fur cap. Or perhaps it was still in the house. If that were so, it was very strange, very unlike Vernon to have concealed the fact from Arthur Gernham. But, in either case, he had been deceitful, deliberately deceitful, with a friend, and a friend whom he greatly admired and respected.

This incident of my meeting with Gernham deepened my sense of fear, of mystery. My instinct—I now felt sure of it—was right. Some strange under side of Vernon’s character was active at this moment. I knew him only in part; much of him I did not know. A stranger now seemed to confront me in the night, a stranger by whose feet crouched something black and terrified. What was this stranger’s purpose? What could it be?

I reviewed carefully my whole acquaintance with Vernon, but especially the latter part of my acquaintance with him, when Deeming was in relation with us both. It was then, when Deeming came into his life, and only then, that Vernon had shown me for the first time a man in him whose presence I had not suspected, whose exact nature I did not know. This man was roused by Deeming. I should have let him sleep. But, having been roused, he had surely been sleepless ever since. Yes, that was so. Thus far, things were clear to me. Something—the strange man in Vernon—had been wakeful, ardent ever since, was wakeful, ardent now. This man it was who worked shoulder to shoulder with Gernham. This man it was who had bought the black spaniel.

So far, light. But now came the darkness. What had been Vernon’s purpose in buying the black spaniel? When he saw it he had looked at it fatally. At that moment, while he looked at it, his purpose had sprung up full-grown in his mind, full-grown and fierce. I was not to know that purpose. Arthur Gernham was not to know it. He now had some purpose in connection with an animal that Arthur Gernham, his close friend and colleague, his leader in a campaign of kindness, of pity, to which he was dedicating all his activities and giving all his enthusiasm, was not to know or even suspect. That purpose, since it was in connection with an animal, must surely be one of kindness, of pity.

But here my instinct rebelled violently against my knowledge of Vernon. My instinct said that it was not so; that Vernon’s purpose in buying the black spaniel had been sad, even perhaps terrible. Yet how could that be?

The dog’s eyes haunted me. They seemed to me to know what I did not know, to know what Vernon’s purpose was.

Deeming—again I thought of him, of Vernon’s short and strange connection with him. Once Vernon had said to me that he believed Deeming was a man haunted by a mania for persecution. He had spoken without knowledge then. Later, he had travelled to England to gain knowledge. He had taken the house in Wimpole Street to gain knowledge. Had he gained it? I did not know. Vernon had never told me. Was that why I was in the dark now? It began to seem to me that, perhaps, if I could find out what Vernon knew of Deeming I should understand something of his present purpose, of his purpose in buying the black spaniel.

At this stage in my mental debate I reached the Piccadilly corner of Albemarle Street, and was just going to turn towards my house, when a familiar face, a face respectable, close-shaven, English, looked upon me in the lamplight, and a bowler hat was deferentially lifted.

“Cragg!” I said.

“Good-night, Sir,” said Cragg. “A fine night, Sir.”

“Yes—wait a minute, Cragg.”

“Certainly, Sir.”

Vernon’s man stood still.

“Just walk with me to my door, will you?”

“With pleasure, Sir.”

We turned side by side into the comparative quiet of Albemarle Street.

“How is Mr. Kersteven, Cragg?”

“Well, Sir⸺” The man slightly hesitated. “Oh, Sir, he’s in his usual health, I think.”

“Working hard, isn’t he?”

“Very hard, Sir.”

“With Mr. Gernham.”

“Yes, Sir, with Mr. Gernham.”

“And—and how’s the dog, Cragg?”

I looked at him as I spoke, and saw his forehead contract.

“The dog, Sir?—oh, the dog is getting on all right so far as I am aware.”

“How do you mean—so far as you are aware?”

“Well, Sir, I don’t see much of it. That’s a fact.”

“Really. How’s that?”

I was pumping the man, I acknowledge it. I can make no excuse for it. I was driven by something that seemed to me then more than an ignoble curiosity.

“Well, Sir, Mr. Kersteven keeps the dog shut up mostly. I suppose he thinks that till it gets accustomed to the place and to us it’s better.”

“But if it’s always shut up, how can it get accustomed to you?”

“That’s more than I can say, Sir.”

I could see that the man was constrained, was not telling me something of which his mind was full. We had now reached my door, and I had no further excuse for keeping him with me.

“Well, Cragg,” I said. “Good-night.”

“Good-night, Sir.”

“I hope the dog will settle down and be friendly with you.”

“Friendly with me, Sir! That dog! The Lord forbid!” cried Cragg.

He seemed startled by the sound of his own lamentable exclamation, looked at me as if asking pardon, lifted his hat, and walked quickly away into the darkness. I stood staring after him. I longed to follow him, to question him, to find out what he meant. But how could I?

That night it was late before I went to sleep. The black spaniel seemed to be crouching at the foot of the bed. I seemed to see its yellow eyes fixed upon me, trying to tell me what I longed to know.

Late in the afternoon of the next day I received a very unexpected visit from Arthur Gernham. When I saw him come into my room, dressed in a suit of homespun, with a flannel shirt and a red tie, and holding a soft brown wideawake in his hand, I jumped up from my chair eagerly. I guessed at once that he had something to say with reference to our conversation of the previous night.

“How are you?” he said, in his rasping, energetic voice. “I got your address from the Red Book.”

He sat down and stretched out his long legs.

“I’m delighted to see you,” I said. “You’ve been at work with Vernon?”

“I’ve been with him.”

He ran one hand over his tufts of scanty hair.

“I’m disappointed in Kersteven,” he said. “I never should have thought he was a shifty fellow.”

The word shifty, applied to Vernon, roused my sense of friendship.

“Oh, you’re mistaken,” I exclaimed. “Vernon’s not a shifty man.”

“I beg your pardon—he is.”

I waited in silence for him to explain himself. I saw plainly that he was going to. There was a sledge-hammer honesty about Gernham that was startling but rather refreshing. He now proceeded to give me a specimen of it.

“I can’t stomach a friend who isn’t perfectly straight with me,” he said; “and what’s more, I’m bound to tell him so. I can’t keep anything in. Whatever I feel I have to out with it. That’s my nature. It’s got me into plenty of trouble, and it will get me into plenty more. Fights were my lot at Eton, and fights have been my lot, more or less, ever since.”

He unbuttoned one of the cuffs of his flannel shirt, pushed the flannel higher up his arm, and went on:

“With Kersteven I got on magnificently until to-day.”

“Have you had a wordy fight with Vernon to-day, then?” I asked.

“I went straight to him this morning and told him I’d met you last night. He asked me how I liked you, and I told him, ‘Very much.’ Then I said, plump out, ‘You’ve been tricky with me, Kersteven.’”

“Oh!” I exclaimed.

He took no notice of my interruption, and went on—

“‘You’ve let me make a fool of myself with you. That’s nothing. One makes a fool of oneself most days one way or another.’ ‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘That you’ve allowed me to think that you would never keep a dog or animal of any kind in your house, that you’ve sat here and listened to me trying to persuade you to keep one, while all the time there is—or was—one perhaps within a few feet of me. You’ve let me think what wasn’t true, you’ve made me think what wasn’t true. I don’t know what your reason is, but I know that I hate your action, and that I never thought you were capable of doing such a low thing to a friend.’”

“Pretty strong,” I said. “How did he take it?”

“That’s the nastiest part of all. He took it lying down.”

“Lying down?”

“Yes. Merely said the matter of the dog was such a trifle he hadn’t thought it would interest me to know of it, that he wasn’t sure of keeping it for any time, that he’d been so busy with me that—etc., etc. The lamest excuses man ever offered to man. I was disgusted, and showed it. It’s my way to show things—can’t help doing it. ‘Let’s get to work,’ he said, trying to change the subject. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t work with you to-day. That’s certain.’ And I took up my hat and went.”

“And you—you didn’t see the dog?”

“Oh, dear no. But it wasn’t that I cared about.”

“I wish you had seen it. I wish you would see it.”

I was speaking almost involuntarily, as if the words were forced from me, words scarcely prompted by any thought in me, words that were uttered for me.

“Why?” he asked. “Why? What do you mean?”

His face and manner were always alert, but now they had suddenly become intense with a sort of quivering vivacity.

“What’s wrong about the dog?”

“I don’t know that anything is wrong.”

“Know! Do you suspect anything is wrong?”

I waited a minute. I was repeating to myself Gernham’s question.

“Yes,” I said at last, “I do. But I don’t know why I suspect, and I don’t know what I suspect. That’s the honest truth and vague enough. But I can’t help it.”

He looked me straight in the eyes for a full minute, I should think. Then he said—

“I want you to be less vague, Luttrell; and I think you can. A man doesn’t say such a thing as you’ve said without more meaning than you’ve acknowledged.”

“I assure you⸺” I began.

But he stopped me.

“Now look here,” he said. “One often has a thought behind one’s thought, like a body behind its shadow. You’ve found the shadow; now look for the body, and I’ll bet you’ll find that too.”

His words seemed to clear away some mystery from my mind, but I shrank from what was now revealed—the body behind the shadow.

“I see you know now what you suspect,” he said, still looking into my eyes with intensity. “What is it?”

“I do know now,” I answered. “But it’s monstrous, and upon my word I’m ashamed to say it. For you must know that I’ve a great regard for Vernon.”

“And so have—or had—I. His tenderness for the suffering of the animal world drew me to him. I can’t forget that even now, after this beastly affair of the dog.”

“His tenderness for the animal world,” I repeated. “It’s just that—just my knowledge of that, which makes my suspicion so monstrous.”

“Let’s have it, I must have it!” he said. “You’re no backbiter, you’re an honest fellow. I can see that. Go ahead. I shan’t mistake your motives.”

There was a compelling frankness about him. I yielded to it.

“My suspicion is that perhaps Vernon is being cruel to that dog,” I said.

Gernham sat quite still. I saw that my words had deeply astonished him. But he did not burst forth, as many another man would have done, in a denial of the possibility of my suspicion being roused by a horrid fact, being well founded. He was a very quick man, and full of finesse despite his bluntness.

“What are your reasons?” he said slowly.

“I can scarcely say I have any. Let me think, though.”

After a minute I described to him minutely how Vernon had regarded the spaniel in the Park, the dog’s fear there, its much greater terror on being brought into the house in Wimpole Street, Vernon’s strange excitement on its arrival, and excitement in which there seemed to be an admixture of triumph, his laughter as he opened the door of the room in which the spaniel was confined; the dog’s rush for safety to Lord Elyn, and shrinking away when Vernon approached it. When I had finished, I added—

“There’s one thing more.”

“What is it?”

Then I related to him my meeting with Cragg on the previous night, and what the man had told me about Vernon’s keeping the spaniel perpetually shut up.

“That’s all,” I ended. “Not much, is it?”

“D’you know,” he said, “what’s far the most striking fact in all that you’ve told me?”

“What?” I asked.

“The dog’s horror of Kersteven. The rest may be nothing—fancy of yours or oddity of manner on Kersteven’s part. But the dog’s horror of Kersteven is very strange, and—unless your suspicion is correct, which God forbid—very unnatural.”

“Unnatural—that’s just what Lord Elyn called it.”

“Ah!”

“And his trying to keep the fact of the dog being in the house from you. Isn’t that very strange?”

“Certainly it is. But—by Jove!—the strangest thing of all would be that Kersteven should be cruel to an animal.”

“Yes, that’s true. I can’t—no, I can’t believe it possible.”

“What could be his motive?”

“I can’t conceive.”

“I know the man. He has a passion of pity in him for the sufferings of the animals, a real passion. Only one thing could account for his being cruel, deliberately and persistently cruel, to a dog.”

“What?”

“If he were mad.”

“Oh, that—impossible!”

“It would be the only thing,” he repeated. “I know something of insanity. A chief feature of it is this, that it often creates in a man the reverse of what he was before it took possession of him. Thus the kind, sane man becomes the cruel madman; the lively, mercurial sane man the bitter, melancholy madman—and so on. You take me?”

“Vernon isn’t mad,” I said with conviction.

“Then he isn’t being cruel to his dog,” he said with equal conviction.

“I can’t understand it,” I said dubiously. “The whole thing’s a mystery. Why should he buy the dog after swearing he would never have another? A whim, he said it was, a caprice. But I don’t believe that. No, there was some deeper, stranger reason. What could it be?”

I was asking myself, not him.

Gernham got up to go.

“One thing I promise you,” he said. “I’ll set at rest your doubts in a very short time. I’ll find out for certain that Kersteven is treating that dog properly. I devote my life to our dumb friends, as you know. Well, they shan’t find me wanting now, though a man who has been my chum and my colleague is concerned in this matter.”

“What are you going to do?”

“To-morrow I ought to be working with Kersteven. After to-day I didn’t mean to go, I didn’t feel as if I could go. But now I will, and I’ll see the spaniel and see him with Kersteven. Never fear!”

He spoke with biting decision. I looked at him and felt that he would do what he said.

“Brush my suspicions away,” I said, “and I’ll be only too thankful. Good-bye.”

He went off quickly.

When the door was shut behind him I thought how strange it was that Gernham’s purpose in connection with Vernon was exactly the same as had been Vernon’s in connection with Deeming when he left Rome for London.

He had wanted to see a black spaniel with Deeming. Gernham wanted to see a black spaniel with him.

X

Just before lunch the next day Gernham was announced.

“Good morning,” he said, coming into the room close upon the heels of my man. “Can I lunch with you?”

“Certainly. Lunch for two, Bates.”

“Yes, Sir.”

The man went out and shut the door. Then I turned to Gernham.

“You’ve been to Wimpole Street?” I asked.

“Yes. Do you remember I told you yesterday that Kersteven had taken my punishment lying down?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well, since then he’s thought it over, and got up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Yesterday I declined to work with him. To-day, he’s declined to work with me. He’s refused me admittance to his house. See that!”

He put a note down on the table beside me. I took it and read as follows:

+Dear Gernham+—I don’t know whether you will come to-day; but should you do so, I’ve told Cragg to give you this. I did not care to quarrel with a man in my own house; and so yesterday, when you were impertinent to me, I did not appear to resent it. As you know, I admire your character and respect your enthusiasm, and it has been a great pleasure to me to be associated with you in a work which I love with my whole heart and soul. But I allow no man to criticise my conduct as you have chosen to criticise it. I am sorry, therefore, that unless you feel inclined to apologise, I cannot admit you to my house.—Believe me, faithfully,

+Vernon Kersteven+.

“What do you think of that, eh?” asked Gernham, when I finished reading the note. “Pretty blunt, isn’t it?”

“Vernon has decidedly got up,” I said.

I looked again at the note.

“Tell me just what you think,” Gernham said.

“Well,” I answered, with some hesitation, “it’s an abrupt change of front after his behaviour yesterday.”

“Too abrupt,” he said. “I don’t like it; I don’t like it at all. You were right, Luttrell; there is a mystery here—a mystery connected with that dog. But I haven’t got your opinion yet!”

He was a persistent man, and did not readily lose sight of his object.

“You want to know how I explain Vernon’s change of front.”

“Exactly.”

“It seems to me that he has thought things over since yesterday, and resolved to avail himself of this pretext to keep you out of his house.”

“That’s it!” exclaimed Gernham. “I’ve given him his opportunity like a fool, and he’s taken it, like a clever man. But where an animal is concerned I’m not so easily dished. A good many people who’ve appeared in the London police-courts know that.”

“When you got this note, what did you do?”

“I tried to question Cragg.”

“And the result?”

“Nil. Directly I mentioned the dog, he looked as grim as death, and became monosyllabic. There’s something up, and Cragg has an inkling of it. But he’ll never tell it to me. You’ve got to go into this, Luttrell.”

At this moment lunch was announced, and the rest of the conversation took place in the dining-room. Directly after lunch Gernham hurried away, leaving me pledged to act where he could not act, pledged to probe to the bottom, and without delay, the mystery of the black spaniel.

My relation with Vernon was now almost exactly similar to his former relation with Deeming, and Gernham was to be the inactive watcher, the waiter on events engineered by others, that I had formerly been. But there was a difference in this new situation which had followed so strangely upon the death of Deeming. Vernon had never been Deeming’s friend. From the first moment when they met the two men had been instinctively hostile to one another. But I was Vernon’s friend. I cared for him. Till now I had believed in him. This fact complicated matters painfully. And yet I did not hesitate, did not feel that in my understanding with Gernham I was being treacherous, disloyal.

For the eyes of the black spaniel haunted me, summoned me, seemed to force me to go on, to investigate this mystery. By them I was driven to do as I did. By them I was told that in my friend a new man, a stranger, had arisen, and that in attacking this stranger—if attack were necessary—I should not be false to my friendship with the man who had lived in Rome, the quiet lover of pictures, the gentle, idle, cultivated Vernon of the Trinità dei Monti.

Vernon was generally at home after six in the evening. I resolved to seek him at that hour on the same day, and carried my resolution into effect. Cragg opened the door to me.

“Mr. Kersteven at home, Cragg?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Can I see him?”

“If you’ll wait a moment, Sir, I’ll ask.”

He paused, then added in explanation—

“I don’t think Mr. Kersteven is very well to-day, Sir. Perhaps he may not wish to be disturbed, even by you. You’ll excuse me, Sir.”

“Of course. Go and see. I’ll stay here.”

“Pray take a seat, Sir.”

He placed a chair for me in the little hall, and went discreetly away up the stairs.

I sat down and waited.

The hall was quiet and dim. Somewhere a large clock was ticking. Now and then I heard a carriage roll by outside. As I sat there I fell into deep thought. What was I going to do? I had come to the house without making any plan. I could not make any plan till I had seen Vernon. His demeanour, his action, must guide me. Would he see me? I thought it probable. There was evidently no one with him. Had there been, Cragg would have told me; and, if I saw him, should I find the black spaniel with him? I glanced round me. On the opposite side of the hall, close to where I was sitting, opened the short corridor, or passage, which linked the two houses in one. I could see the darkness of what had been Deeming’s house where the passage stretched away beyond the door of Vernon’s workroom. Poor Deeming! Gone, with all his fine abilities, his energy, his persistence, his ambition—his cruelty, perhaps! Had he been cruel? Possibly Vernon knew. If he had, he was perhaps now being punished in that other mysterious world of which we know nothing, of which we seldom think in health, but which seems to loom near us when we are ill, or weary, or in trouble of mind—to loom as a great vault before whose entrance we stand, gazing but seeing naught. As I stared down the corridor into the dimness of the other house, the thought of Deeming haunted me, came to me vividly, till I almost fancied that something of him, some thrown-out essence of his personality, of his strong soul, still remained in the dwelling that had been his, still knew what went on there, still watched the coming and going of the man who governed where he had governed once.

I fancied, did I say? It was more than that. I felt as if he were near me, as if he were even intent upon me.

Then from the thought of him, and still with that sensation of his nearness, of his attention, upon me, my mind travelled to the black spaniel. His dog, that mysterious creature never seen by me, had pattered in the dimness towards which I was gazing. And now, as Deeming’s place was taken by Vernon, its place was taken by the black spaniel Vernon had first seen in the Park cowering down against the earth, its ears laid back, its body trembling, its eyes full of a message of voiceless fear. Perhaps it was close to me now, this successor of Deeming’s pet or victim. Perhaps it was shut up in the room in which I had seen it lying against the red curtain. I could see the door of the room. It was shut. A few steps would bring me to it. I glanced towards the staircase. Cragg was not coming down. I got up. Again I had the sensation that Deeming was near me, was intent upon me, wanted something of me, and with this sensation was mysteriously linked my consciousness of the nearness of the black spaniel, till—till the two sensations seemed to merge the one into the other, to become one, in some indefinable, fantastic way. I can hardly explain exactly what I felt at this moment, but my feeling was connected with Vernon’s workroom. It was as if—as if I almost knew that, did I but take those few steps to the shut door, did I but open that door, I should find awaiting me within the room not only the black spaniel, but the dead man, Deeming, with it. It was as if—as if⸺

I moved across the hall, walking softly, reached the corridor, gained the door, stood by it, listening for the uneasy movement, for the whimper of a dog, for the stir, for the murmur of a dead man. But there was no sound within. There was no sound, and yet I felt positive that the spaniel was inside the room, separated from me only by a piece of wood. Once, twice, I put my fingers upon the handle of the door, yet refrained from turning it. I felt a strong desire to open the door, yet at the critical moment I was held back from doing so by an imperious reluctance which seemed to me to be physical, as if my body sickened and protested against what my mind told it to do.

How long I stood thus uncertainly before the door I do not know. It seemed to me a very long time. At last—in the struggle between mind and body, if it were that—the body conquered. I turned to move away without opening the door. I even took a step towards the hall. But I was arrested by a sound that startled me, that sent—I could not tell why—a chill through me.

I heard the scratching of a dog against the inside of the door.

I stood still, held my breath, and listened. The scratching was repeated, prolonged. It was gentle, surreptitious almost, yet insistent, a summons to me to return.

Again my body sickened. I was physically afflicted. Nausea seized me. But now my mind rose up and protested against the condition, against the domination of my body, like a thing angry and ashamed. Suddenly I took a resolution. I would open the door without delay in answer to the appeal of the black spaniel. Swiftly I went back to the door, grasped the handle, turned it, pushed. The door resisted me. It was locked. As I realised this I heard from within the desolate whining of a dog imprisoned.

“Luttrell! Luttrell!”

Vernon’s voice called to me from above, and at the same time I heard a footstep. Cragg was coming down. I moved swiftly back into the hall and met him. He glanced at me inquiringly, looked down the passage, then at me again. His face for an instant was eloquent with inquiry—with—was it sympathy? Then he was once more the discreet servant, saying in a formal voice—

“Please come up, Sir; Mr. Kersteven will be very glad to see you.”

Vernon met me on the landing by the drawing-room door. I saw at once that he was not well. His face was very pale, and had a peculiar look, as if the skin were drawn upward towards the wrinkled forehead, which I had sometimes noticed in people suffering from prolonged insomnia. It gave a horribly strained appearance to his countenance, in which the eyes looked unnaturally eager and full of curious observation.

“Were you in the hall?” he said, taking my hand for the fraction of an instant, and then dropping it as if with relief.

“I waited in the hall,” I replied evasively.

“You were there then while Cragg was up here?”

“He asked me to wait there,” I said. “While he went to see if you were well enough to receive me. I’m sorry to hear you’re seedy.”

“Oh, it’s of no consequence. Come in.”

We went into the drawing-room.

“What’s been the matter?” I asked, as we sat down.

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been overworking, I suppose.”

“With Gernham?” I said.

“Gernham!”—he looked at me narrowly. “You—have you seen Gernham to-day?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

He sat silent for a moment. I could see that he was hesitating whether to tell me about his breach with Gernham or not.

“How d’you like Gernham?” he said at length. “He likes you. He told me so.”

“I know him very slightly, but one can’t help respecting such a genuine fellow,” I replied.

“Genuine—yes, he’s that.”

“If he undertook a thing, nothing would stop him from going through with it.”

“You think so?”

He slightly smiled.

“But suppose he were to encounter an opposition as thorough as his own attack? What then?”

I knew at once that he was thinking of Gernham and himself.

“Then,” I said, “there would be a battle royal.”

“A battle royal, would there? Yes, no doubt.”

With the last words his interest seemed to fail suddenly. He slightly drooped his head, and sat like one listening for some distant sound. I watched him closely. Gernham’s declaration that if Vernon were maltreating the spaniel he must be mentally diseased was present in my mind. I was looking for symptoms that would guide me to a conclusion one way or the other. I saw a great change in Vernon—a painful change. He looked like a man suffering under some terrible distress, which had altered, for the time, his whole outlook upon life. But I felt that I was with a perfectly sane man. As I regarded him he seemed to recover his consciousness of my presence, glanced up, and met my scrutiny.

“What is it?” he said. “Why do you look at me like that?”

I felt embarrassed.

“What’s Gernham been saying to you?” he added sharply.

“Gernham—oh, you know him,” I answered. “You know where his heart is, with the animals. What an enthusiast he is!”

“He’s been talking to you about his work then. Well, did he tell you that we’ve had a quarrel, he and I?”

“He said your work together had come to a stop, for the moment. Why should it?”

“Why? Oh, well, sometimes Gernham is too blunt, says more than he, than any man ought to say to another. There is a limit to frankness; occasionally he oversteps it. He overstepped it with me, and I resented it. Don’t you think I was right?”

I felt that he was being strangely insincere with me as he had been insincere with Gernham, trying to raise a cloud which would obscure the reality of his mind, the true scope of his intentions.

“I see no reason why two such men as you should quarrel,” I answered. “Especially if it interrupts, and perhaps, to some extent, cripples a splendid work. You should sink your little differences, and go on together, hand in hand, to further the noble cause you love.”

He had been trying to play me. I was now trying to play him. Yet, as I finished, a genuine warmth came, I think, into my voice. It moved him. I could see that, for he looked up at me as if demanding my sympathy. Suddenly I felt a profound pity for him, a profound desire to help him. But how? Against what?

“Perhaps we shall be friends again,” he said. “But he misunderstands me, and you, Luttrell, perhaps you misunderstand me too.”

“I!”

“Yes—you. Are you sure that, in these last days, you have never had any cruel suspicions of me? Are you sure you have not any cruel suspicions of me now?”

“If I had, if I have, you could easily clear them up,” I answered. “By the way, how’s the dog getting on? All right?”

His face changed at once, hardened.

“Oh, yes!” he said.

“I should like to have another look at him,” I said. “Where is he?”

“He’s downstairs in the study. Didn’t you know it?”

“I—I did think I heard something scratching and whining. Why do you keep him shut up?”

“He hasn’t got accustomed to being with me yet. If I let him out he might bolt.”

“Oh!”

“I don’t want to have spent my twelve pounds for nothing,” he added.

His face had hardened. Now his voice was hard too—hard and fatal.

“May I have a look at him?” I said.

The sense of mystery was returning upon me. I tried to combat it by speaking bluntly, expressing my desire plainly. At least, I would no longer deal in subterfuge. Instead of answering my question he said, throwing a curious, wavering glance upon me, “Are you engaged to-night?”

I was, but I said at once, “I’m entirely at your service, Vernon.”

“Dine with me, then.”

“Here?”

“Yes, here.”

“Certainly.”

“That’s right. And now let’s have some music. I’ve got a new piano since last year.”

We spent the next hour with Richard Strauss and Saint-Saëns.

XI

Night had closed in. Vernon and I were seated opposite to one another at the oval dining-table. Cragg waited upon us. Now and then, as he moved softly to and fro, I glanced at him, and I thought I detected in his well-trained face a flicker of anxiety as his eyes rested upon his master, a flicker of appeal as they rested upon me. It seemed to me at such times that he wanted me to do something to help Vernon, that he was longing to have a word with me alone.

The dinner was excellent, but Vernon ate scarcely anything. He talked, however, a good deal, though hardly with his usual nerve and relish. When dessert was on the table, he said—

“Bring us our coffee here, Cragg; at least, one black coffee.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“I won’t take it,” Vernon said to me. “I’ve been sleeping wretchedly lately. Morphia would be more the thing for me than coffee.”

“I knew you had been suffering from insomnia.”

He laughed drearily.

“I don’t look up to much, do I?”

Cragg brought my coffee and cigars.

“You can leave us now, Cragg; go and have your supper; go downstairs.”

The man looked slightly surprised, but said nothing and went away.

When he had gone Vernon lit a cigar, puffed out some rings of smoke, watched them curling up towards the ceiling, then said—

“You wanted to have a look at the spaniel, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, if I bring him in, be careful with him, will you?”

“Careful with him! Why? Is he dangerous?”

“I don’t say that. But he’s got an odd temper. I keep him muzzled.”

“In the house?”

“Yes, always. I don’t want to be bitten. You remember how Deeming died? Well, I don’t want to die like that.”

His mention of Deeming gave me an opportunity of which I at once availed myself.

“That was a sad business,” I said. “Did you see much of him before he died, as you were living next door?”

“Oh,” he interrupted, “Deeming was not a friendly neighbour. Do you know that I took your advice?”

“What advice?”

“To get into his house as a patient.”

“You really did that!”

“Yes. One morning, as he never invited me in as a friend, I went in as a patient.”

“How did he take it?”

“Well, he could hardly decline to treat me. It happened that I was really unwell at the time, so I had a good excuse.”

“And—and—your strange suspicions”—I was almost stammering, conscious, painfully conscious of my own—“your strange suspicions—did you ever find out whether they were justified?”

“They were justified, fully justified. But the dog took its own part in the end and killed its persecutor.”

I felt a sensation of horror take hold upon me.

“Do you really mean that Deeming was treating his spaniel cruelly?” I asked.

“I do. He had the mania for persecution that I suspected. He was venting it upon his dog. The servants had some inkling of the truth, especially his butler. He knew, I believe, all that was going on. But—he was well paid, very well paid.”

I remembered my Sunday morning call, and the butler’s exclamation when the fox-terrier ran into the house.

“This is horrible, Vernon,” I said. “Are you sure of what you say?”

“Quite sure. I heard—well, I heard things at night, and at last I saw the dog.”

“How?”

[Illustration: “WHILE I WAS THERE DEEMING CAME BACK UNEXPECTEDLY.”]

“I got into the house when Deeming was out. I bribed his butler, paid him more than Deeming did, I suppose. Anyhow, I got in. I think the man was sympathetic; was anxious really that an end should be put to the disgusting business. I burst open the door of the room in which the spaniel was confined, and then I saw—no matter what. It was quite enough. While I was there Deeming came back unexpectedly.”

“Good God!” I exclaimed. “What a ghastly situation!”

“It was not exactly pleasant. I saw the man’s soul naked that night—stark naked. It was on that occasion the dog bit him.”

“Ouf!” I said.

Again nausea seized me.

Vernon looked at me steadily.

“Don’t you think Deeming deserved anything he got?” he asked. “Anything he could ever get?”

“But he was mad—he must have been mad!”

“I suppose that sort of thing is what might be called a form of madness. Unfortunately a good many sane people have it—people as sane as you or I in all other respects.”

When he said the words “or I” a flush, I think, came to my cheek. It seemed to me that he spoke with significance—as if he knew what Gernham and I had spoken of the day before.

“As sane as you or I,” he repeated. “This work I’ve been doing with Gernham has opened my eyes to a good deal in human nature that they were shut to before. I once said to you in Rome, to you and Deeming, that man’s cruelty sprang often from a lack of imagination. Sometimes it springs from just the opposite, from a diseased imagination that lusts for gratification in ways we won’t discuss.”

“But Deeming—that he should be such a man, he whose profession it was to make whole!”

“Yes, that made the thing more strange and, to him, more enticing.”

“Enticing!” I exclaimed.

My voice was full of the bitterness of disgust mingled with incredulity that I was feeling.

“Just that,” he said. “He healed, as it were, with one hand, and destroyed with the other. Deeming was one of the human devils who have an insatiable craze for contrast. They revel in virtue because it is so different from vice. They revel in vice because it is so different from virtue. Deeming quivered with happiness when the last patient was gone and he could steal to the room where the spaniel⸺”

“Enough! Enough!” I exclaimed. “I won’t hear any more! Thank God he’s dead! Thank God it’s all over now! Why did you do that?” Vernon had suddenly laughed.

“Why did you do that?” I repeated. “What is there to laugh at?”

“I was laughing at your certainty, Luttrell, at the calm assurance with which we—poor, ignorant beings that we are—assert this or that regarding the fate of a soul, without knowing anything of the purposes of the Creator.”

“I don’t understand.”

“And yet you say—‘Thank God, it’s all over now!’”

He looked at me so strangely that I was struck to silence. I opened my lips to speak, but, while his eyes were upon me, I could say nothing. He made me feel as if, indeed, I were plunged in a profound gulf of ignorance, as if he watched me there from some height of understanding, of knowledge.

“Now I’ll go and fetch the spaniel,” he said.

And he got up and quietly left the room.

I turned in my chair and sat facing the door. The room was softly lit by wax candles, and on the walls were the pictures of gentleness, of mercy, of goodness and adoration which had hung upon the walls of Vernon’s dining-room in Rome. My glance ran over them, while my mind dwelt upon the horrors of Vernon’s narrative—horrors that seemed all the greater because he had told me so little, had left my imagination so unfettered. Then I looked again towards the door, and listened intently. Presently I heard a door shut, the sound of a step. Vernon was coming with the spaniel. I had asked to see the dog; I had wished to see it. Yet now my wish was about to be gratified I felt an extreme repugnance invade me. I longed to escape from the fulfilment of my wish. I was seized with—was it fear? It was something cold, something that lay upon my nerves like ice, that surely turned the blood in my veins to water. But, I could do nothing now, nothing to escape. Something within me seemed to make a furious effort to take up some weapon and attack the cold heavy thing that was striving to paralyse me. I was conscious of battle. In the midst of the battle the door opened and Vernon came in.

He was carrying the black spaniel in his arms.

He walked in slowly, kicked the door backwards with his heel to shut it, came to the table and sat down, still keeping the dog in his arms.

The dog was muzzled, and had on a collar to which a steel chain was attached; but, for the first moment, the only thing that struck me was his thinness. He was excessively thin—almost emaciated. He sat on his master’s knee, with his chin on the edge of the table and his yellow eyes gazing at me. A long trembling ran through his body, ceased, and was renewed with a regularity that reminded me of the ticking of a clock. Vernon kept his two hands upon the spaniel. They shuddered on the dog’s back when he shuddered.

“Well,” Vernon said. “What do you think of him?”

“He’s horribly thin,” I said. “Horribly.”

I turned my eyes from the spaniel to Vernon’s face.

“Do you think⸺” I began and hesitated.

“What?” he asked calmly.

“Do you think you give him enough to eat?” I said.

“Oh, it’s very bad for dogs to overfeed,” he answered. “Nothing ruins their health like overeating, and spaniels are like pugs, inclined to be greedy.”

I noticed that he had not answered my question.

He lifted one hand, laid it on the spaniel’s head, and smoothed the black hair, moving his hand backwards to the neck. The dog turned its head back towards him and showed his white teeth, as if his master’s hand drew him but to a demonstration of hatred, not of affection. Vernon smiled, lifted his hand, and repeated the action. The dog gave a low growl ending in a whine.

“Now you haven’t told me what you think of him,” Vernon continued, “and I want to know. I want very much to know.”

I looked into the spaniel’s eyes, and again something cold lay upon my nerves like ice.

“Why?” I said. “What does it matter what I think?”

“Do answer my question!” Vernon said with unwonted irritation.

“There’s something about the dog,” I said, “that’s—that’s⸺”

“Yes?” he said sharply.

“That’s uncanny.”

“Ah!” The word was a long-drawn sigh. “You think that!”

“Yes, I shouldn’t care to have him about me. I shouldn’t care to sleep with him in my room.”

“Sleep! Heaven forbid!”

His exclamation was almost shrill. It startled me.

“Where does the dog sleep?” I asked. “Where do you put him at night?”

“There’s a dressing-room opening out of my bedroom. He’s shut in there.”

“And you—you say you’ve been sleeping badly lately?”

“I haven’t been sleeping at all.”

“Does he whine? Does he disturb you?”

“He never makes a sound at night. I think he’s afraid that if he did I should punish him. He’s evidently had an unkind master, poor fellow.”

There was something so hideously insincere in Vernon’s voice as he said the last words that I could not help expressing the thought, the suspicion that had been, that was haunting me.

“Has he got a kind master now?” I said.

I fixed my eyes on Vernon’s.

“Has he?” I repeated.

At that moment I wanted to force things. The entrance of the dog had deepened my sense of moving in mystery until it became absolutely intolerable. A hard determination took hold upon me to compel Vernon to explain—what? I did not know. But that there was something to be explained, some strange undercurrent of motive, of desire, of intention, deep and furtive, I seemed to be aware.

“What do you mean?” Vernon said. “Surely you know my feeling for animals.”

“I do.”

“Then what do you mean?”

“I mean that as regards this animal, this spaniel, I don’t—I can’t trust you,” I said. “I don’t know why it is, I don’t understand, I don’t understand anything. But I don’t trust you, Vernon. That’s the truth. It’s best to speak it.”

To my great surprise, he did not indignantly resent my words, nor did he look guilty or ashamed. Indeed, it seemed to me that an expression of something like relief flitted across his face as I finished speaking.

“I knew it,” he said. “I knew quite well you didn’t trust me. And Gernham? Have you spoken to him of your mistrust?”

“He knows I don’t understand why you bought this dog, and what you’re going to do to him. He knows I’m—I’m afraid of—of what you may be going to do.”

He was silent, and again drew his hand across the spaniel’s soft black coat. The dog struggled. He struck his open hand down on the dog’s head, and the dog lay still, cowering upon his master’s knees.

“Gernham doesn’t enter into this,” he said inflexibly.

“And I?”

“You! That’s different. You introduced me to Deeming.”

Again the dog began to struggle upon his knees, but this time more violently.

Vernon lifted his hand again.

“Put him down!” I said. “For God’s sake put him down! Don’t strike him!”

“Very well.”

He dropped the spaniel to the floor. The spaniel ran under the dining-table. I sprang up from my seat.

“Don’t, don’t!” I began.

“It’s all right,” said Vernon. “I’ve got him by the chain.” He dragged the spaniel out, and fastened him up to the sideboard at the far end of the room.

“Why, you’re trembling!” he said, as he came back to his chair.

“Am I?” I said, ashamed. “I’m not a coward, but—but this dog—I can’t stand him near me, close to me, when I can’t see what he’s doing.”

I cleared my throat, went to the window, threw it open, leaned out, and spat. Leaving the window open, I came back to the table. The spaniel was now lying down on the floor, close to the sideboard.

“What is it?” I said, almost fiercely, I think, in my inexplicable physical distress, “what is it that’s wrong with the dog? What is it that’s unnatural about him?”

“You have no idea?” said Vernon.

“Not the slightest. The poor beast seems harmless enough, though he’s terrified. One can see that.”

“Exactly. He is terrified.”

“And the strange thing is that his terror terrifies me.”

“Now you’re getting to it,” Vernon said. “Why should the spaniel be terrified?”

“Why? How should I know? Isn’t that for you to say?”

“Sit down again,” he said. “The dog can’t get to you now.”

As he spoke, he sat down. I glanced towards the dog, saw that what Vernon had said was true, and followed his example.

“The dog’s terror,” he said. “Think of that, Luttrell! Seek for an explanation in that.”

“I have, but I haven’t found one.”

“Whom is it terrified of?”

“Of you,” I answered. “The first time we saw him, I noticed that he was abjectly terrified of you.”

“Perfectly true. Why should that be? Is it natural?”

“Utterly unnatural,” I said. “Unless he’s been badly, brutally treated, and is afraid of everybody.”

“He is not afraid of everybody. He is only afraid of me. Was he afraid of Lord Elyn?”

“No.”

“He is only afraid of me.”

“Are you certain?”

“Would you like to test it?”

“How?” I asked.

“I will leave the room for a moment—leave you alone with the dog.”

“No!” I exclaimed.

“You are afraid?”

“I’m not a coward, but there’s something about this spaniel which horrifies my imagination as a spectre might horrify it.”

“Nevertheless, you must summon your courage. I wish it. I wish to know how the spaniel will be with you when you are alone together. Come, make the experiment.”

He got up and went towards the door. I did not try to keep him.

“I’ll be back in a moment,” he said.

And he went softly out of the room and shut the door behind him.

When he had gone, I sat where I was, looking at the black blot on the floor by the sideboard. A strong curiosity was awake in me fighting my strange physical repulsion. I longed to put the thing to the test, yet I feared to approach the spaniel. How long I sat there I do not know, how long I might have sat there I cannot tell had nothing occurred to bias me towards action. But something did occur. The spaniel suddenly whimpered softly, as if to attract my attention, whimpered again and struck his feathery tail upon the floor. Those natural sounds of an anxious dog reassured me. I got up quickly and went over to the sideboard. Instantly, with a sort of strangled wail, the spaniel sprang up, put his forepaws on my legs, and thrust his hot nose into my hand, pushing, pushing hard, as if he sought to hide himself in a friendly shelter. I felt a wetness on my hand, the wetness of an animal’s tears. Then all my horror vanished and only pity remained. I knelt down on the carpet. I put my arms round the dog. I felt his trembling body with my hands. He was thin, hideously thin. His piteous eyes begged something of me. Still holding him with one arm, I stretched out the other, and opened a door in the sideboard. Within I saw a basket with some cut bread in it. I took out the bread. The spaniel sprang upon it passionately, tore it out of my hand, and devoured it ravenously. Then a wave of hot indignation went over me. At that moment I hated Vernon with all my soul. I hated him so much that I lost all sense of everything except my fury against him. I held the dog tightly as I knelt on the floor, and, turning my head towards the door, I called out—

“Vernon! Vernon!”

Instantly the door opened and Vernon appeared. The dog looked as he had looked when he was being brought into the house.

“Vernon,” I said, “you’re a d⸺d blackguard!”

“Why?” he said.

“This dog is starving. You’re starving him! D’you hear? You’re starving him!”

“I know I am,” he answered.

I got up. The spaniel rushed against my legs and leaned against them as I stood.

“Then Gernham was right,” I said. “You are a madman.”

“Is it madness to see what is when others are blind to it?”

“To see—to see?” I exclaimed. “What is there to see but this dog, this spaniel that you are torturing?”

“There is this spaniel—yes. Look at him. Look into his eyes. Look at the soul in them.”

There was something compelling, something almost mystical, in his voice. I looked down into the yellow eyes of the spaniel. They met mine, then looked away from mine as if unable to bear my gaze.

“What is it?” I said, in a whisper. “What is it?”

Again I was assailed by the sensation which had come to me when I waited in the hall to know if Vernon would receive me, a sensation that, with the black spaniel, linked with it, mysteriously mingled with it, was something of the man who was dead—something of Deeming.

“Deeming!” I stammered. “Deeming!”

I did not know what I meant, but I was compelled to pronounce the name of my friend.

“Deeming?” I said once more, looking towards Vernon.

“Don’t you feel that he is here?” said Vernon.

“But he is dead.”

“Don’t you feel that he is here?”

“Yes,” I said. “But it can’t be. He is dead.”

“His body is dead—yes. But his soul, is that dead?”

When he said that, I understood what he meant, and I recoiled from the black spaniel as from a nameless horror.

“Vernon!” I said. “Vernon!”

“Do you understand now?” he asked. “Do you understand why I bought the spaniel, why I have kept the spaniel here in the house where he tortured his dog? It was to punish him as he punished it, to torture him as he tortured it. Directly I saw the spaniel crouching down in the Park, directly I looked into his eyes, I knew. Deeming died on the 30th of June, the spaniel was born on that very day. The soul of the dog-torturer passed at the death of the body of the man into the body of the dog. I am not mad—no. I am only just. I am the instrument of the justice of Providence. Deeming’s soul has been sent back into the world to pay its penalty. And I am here to see that the penalty is paid.”

There was blazing in his eyes the light which I had seen in them for the first time in the restaurant in Rome, the light which had made Deeming say that in Vernon there was the spirit of a black fanatic.

“It’s not true!” I said. “It can’t be true!”

“But Lord Elyn has felt it, Cragg has felt it, you have felt it—the strangeness of the spaniel. You know now, you know that what I say is true. Deny that you know it is true! Deny it then!”

I opened my lips to deny it, but they refused to speak. I was filled with a horror of the imagination, but I was resolved not to succumb to it. I seized the steel chain that was attached to the collar of the spaniel, and untied it from the sideboard.

“What are you doing?” said Vernon sharply.

“Good-night, Vernon,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm; “I am going to take the spaniel with me.”

As I spoke I moved towards the door. The spaniel slunk along beside me, with its belly close to the floor, trying to press itself against my legs.

[Illustration: “I WENT OUT INTO THE NIGHT CARRYING IT IN MY ARMS.”]

“What!” said Vernon, “to happiness—to affection!”

I was close to the door. I had my fingers upon the handle.

“That!” he cried with violence. “No! Rather than that, let it end now and here!”

He made a rapid movement; the spaniel howled and cowered against the door. I heard the crack of a pistol-shot. I felt the chain leap in my hand as the spaniel sprang upwards and fell on the floor.

I bent down, touched him, turned him over.

He was dead.

Then I faced Vernon.

“Murderer!” I said. “Murderer!”

“But—he was only a black spaniel!” Vernon said, laying the revolver down on the table.

“Murderer!” I repeated.

Then I lifted up the corpse of the spaniel, and went out into the night carrying it in my arms.

_THE MISSION OF MR. EUSTACE GREYNE_

I

Mrs. Eustace Greyne (pronounced Green) wrinkled her forehead—that noble, that startling forehead which had been written about in the newspapers of two hemispheres—laid down her American Squeezer pen, and sighed. It was an autumn day, nipping and melancholy, full of the rustle of dying leaves and the faint sound of muffin bells, and Belgrave Square looked sad even to the great female novelist who had written her way into a mansion there. Fog hung about with the policeman on the pavement. The passing motor cars were like shadows. Their stertorous pantings sounded to Mrs. Greyne’s ears like the asthma of dying monsters. She sighed again, and murmured in a deep contralto voice: “It must be so.” Then she got up, crossed the heavy Persian carpet which had been bought with the proceeds of a short story in her earlier days, and placed her forefinger upon an electric bell.

Like lightning a powdered giant came.

“Has Mr. Greyne gone out?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Where is he?”

“In his study, ma’am, pasting the last of the cuttings into the new album.”

Mrs. Greyne smiled. It was a pretty picture the unconscious six-footer had conjured up.

“I am sorry to disturb Mr. Greyne,” she answered, with that gracious, and even curling suavity which won all hearts; “but I wish to see him. Will you ask him to come to me for a moment?”

The giant flew, silk-stockinged, to obey the mandate, while Mrs. Greyne sat down on a carved oaken chair of ecclesiastical aspect to await her husband.

She was a famous woman, a personage, this simply-attired lady. With an American Squeezer pen she had won fame, fortune, and a mansion in Belgrave Square, and all without the sacrifice of principle. Respectability incarnate, she had so dealt with the sorrows and evils of the world that she had rendered them utterly acceptable to Mrs. Grundy, Mr. Grundy, and all the Misses Grundy. People said she dived into the depths of human nature, and brought up nothing that need scandalise a curate’s grandmother, or the whole-aunt of an archdeacon; and this was so true that she had made a really prodigious amount of money. Her large, her solid, her unrelenting books lay upon every table. Even the smart set kept them, uncut—like pretty sinners who have never been “found out”—to give an air of hap-hazard intellectuality to frisky boudoirs. All the clergy, however unable to get their tithes, bought them. All bishops alluded to them in “pulpit utterances.” Fabulous prices were paid for them by magazine editors. They ran as serials through all the tale of months. The suburbs battened on them. The provinces adored them. Country people talked of no other literature. In fact, Mrs. Eustace Greyne was a really fabulous success.

Why, then, should she heave these heavy sighs in Belgrave Square? Why should she lift an intellectual hand as though to tousle the glossy chestnut bandeaux which swept back from her forcible forehead, and screw her reassuring features into these wrinkles of perplexity and distress?

The door opened, and Mr. Eustace Greyne appeared, “What is it, Eugenia?” upon his lips.

Mr. Greyne was a number of years younger than his celebrated wife, and looked even younger than his years. He was a very smart man, with smooth, jet-black hair, which he wore parted in the middle; pleasant, dark eyes that could twinkle gently; a clear, pale complexion; and a nice, tall figure. One felt, in glancing at him, that he had been an Eton boy, and had at least thought of going into the militia at some period of his life. His history can be briefly told.

Scarcely had he emerged into the world before he met and was married to Mrs. Eustace Greyne, then Miss Eugenia Hannibal-Barker. He had had no time to sow a single oat, wild or otherwise; no time to adore a barmaid, or wish to have his name linked with that of an actress; no time to do anything wrong, or even to know, with the complete accuracy desired by all persevering young men, what was really wrong. Miss Eugenia Hannibal-Barker sailed upon his horizon, and he struck his flag to matrimony. Ever since then he had been her husband, and had never, even for one second, emerged beyond the boundaries of the most intellectual respectability. He was the most innocent of men, although he knew all the important editors in London. Swaddled in money by his successful wife, he considered her a goddess. She poured the thousands into Coutts’ Bank, and with the arrival of each fresh thousand he was more firmly convinced that she was a goddess. To say he looked up to her would be too mild. As the Cockney tourist in Chamonix peers at the summit of Mont Blanc, he peered at Mrs. Greyne. And when, finally, she bought the lease of the mansion in Belgrave Square, he knew her Delphic.

So now he appeared in the oracle’s retreat respectfully, “What is it, Eugenia?” upon his admiring lips.

“Sit down, my husband,” she murmured.

Mr. Greyne subsided by the fire, placing his pointed patent-leather toes upon the burnished fender. Without the fog grew deeper, and the chorus of the muffin bells more plaintive. The fire-light, flickering over Mrs. Greyne’s majestic features, made them look Rembrandtesque. Her large, oxlike eyes were fixed and thoughtful. After a pause, she said:

“Eustace, I shall have to send you upon a mission.”

“A mission, Eugenia!” said Mr. Greyne in great surprise.

“A mission of the utmost importance, the utmost delicacy.”

“Has it anything to do with Romeike & Curtice?”

“No.”

“Will it take me far?”

“That is my trouble. It will take you very far.”

“Out of London?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Out of—not out of England?”

“Yes; it will take you to Algeria.”

“Good gracious!” cried Mr. Greyne.

Mrs. Greyne sighed.

“Good gracious!” Mr. Greyne repeated after a short interval. “Am I to go alone?”

“Of course you must take Darrell.” Darrell was Mr. Greyne’s valet.

“And what am I to do at Algiers?”

“You must obtain for me there the whole of the material for