KATE'S CONFESSION.
"I will give no such promise," I began furiously. "I will----"
Then I stopped short.
"Forgive me. I have some decent instincts left, I hope--in spite of my
being a detective," I added bitterly. "You are, of course, within your
rights; and if you so command, I have no option but to obey. But even
you cannot command me or compel me to cease from loving you. Am I to
have no explanation?"
"You are to have no explanation," she repeated in a dull, dreamy voice,
as if her thoughts were elsewhere, and with her eyes fixed on a far-off
space of sky which she could see through the window.
"Except, perhaps--you have already said it--it is because you hate me,"
I prompted bitterly.
Moveless as a listening sleep-walker, she made answer:
"It is _not_ because I hate you."
"Do you, or do you not, hate me?" I pleaded.
And again, dully, indifferently, like one speaking in her sleep, she
replied:
"I do _not_ hate you."
"But you dislike me," I urged.
With the same troubled, far-off look in her beautiful eyes, she
repeated, automatically:
"I do _not_ dislike you."
For a moment, like the defiant fluttering of a banner over a besieged
and well-nigh surrendered city, Hope sprang up to raise her red
flag upon the ramparts of my heart; but at the sight of the dull
indifference in the girl's eyes, banner and banner-bearer sank back.
"Perhaps even," I said in a foolish and feeble spirit of attempted
irony, "perhaps even you like me."
"Perhaps even," she echoed, "I like you."
"Kate," I cried, all the blood in my veins running riot, "it is
not possible--for God's sake don't play with me--but it is not
possible--tell me--it is not possible, it can't be--that--that--you
care."
In a moment she was alive again. Her eyes, all her soul in them, left
the far-off skies, and leapt to meet mine.
"I care," she said, softly.
The next instant, and before I could stay her, she was gone.
* * * * *
It is fortunate I did not see Miss Clara as I left the house. Had I
met that dear creature on my way out, I should, to a dead certainty,
not only have kissed her on the spot, but with never a thought for
horrified servants or scandalised neighbours, should have put my arm
around her capacious waist, and then and there have compelled her
to dance a Highland fling with me. That Metcalfe thought I had been
drinking (as I had--deep draughts of the most intoxicating of all
elixirs, the elixir of love), I am positive. Detecting me in the act
of tweaking the nose of the stone bust of a celebrated Nonconformist
divine, which stood in a recess at the bottom of the stairs, and of
painstakingly (mere absence of mind that!) wiping my boots on the
doormat, as if I were about to enter a drawing-room instead of passing
out into a muddy street, he inquired solicitously whether I wouldn't
like a cab, remarking with a surreptitious glance at the boots with
which I had been performing such unnecessary antics on the doormat:
"Yes, sir; the streets _is_ very muddy, but you'll get home nice and
dry and comfortable in a keb."
Telling him that I was tired out and half asleep from my long watch
overnight, and that to walk home would be the surest way to awaken and
freshen me, I slipped a sovereign into his palm, and made my way into
the streets, all the blood in my body dancing in my veins, all the joy
of first love singing in my brain.
At my rooms I found the expected notice requiring me to attend and
to give evidence at the inquest to be held that day at noon upon the
bodies of the three men who had been found drowned in the Thames.
That the inquiry was not wanting in painful interest the reader will
readily surmise, but except to say that I was subjected to a severe
and suspicious examination, I do not propose further to enter upon the
details of the inquest here.
I come now to a point in my narrative when the trend of events takes
a new turn, and when I shall have to relate happenings of infinitely
greater importance than the circumstances under which Parker and
Smudgy, the negro Black Sam, and the two Grants, met their death.
These were but the "curtain-raisers" preceding the drama in which the
man known to the readers of this history as "the Dumpling" took so
remarkable a part. Up to this point my tale--I had to tell it as it
happened--has been little more than a detective story. Now we shall
soon come to a story of quite another sort.