In the _salon_ of a small dilapidated hotel in one of the southern
suburbs of Paris sat Roger, three weeks after the event recorded in the
last chapter. He had the dull place, apparently, to himself. The
billiard-room, visible through the folding-doors, was deserted. In the
dining-room the waiter dozed undisturbed by a single guest. The
landlady in her _bureau_ yawned and hummed, and had not even a bill to
make out.
She had already made out that of the young English gentleman, and a
pretty one it was! A guest such as he was worth a season to the
landlady of "L'Hotel Soult." Three weeks ago, half dead with cold and
weariness, he had come and asked for a bed; and in that bed till
yesterday he had remained, feverish, coughing, sometimes gasping for
breath. Compared with the attack he had had in London in the winter,
this was a mild one; but in this dreary place, with not a friend at
hand, with a doctor who could not understand a word he said, with a
voluble landlady who, when she visited him, never gave him a chance of
getting in a word, and with a few servants who stared at him blankly
whenever he attempted to lift his voice, it was the most miserable of
all his illnesses.
He was as close a prisoner as if he had been in jail. The doctor, who
took apartments at his expense in the hotel, would not allow him to
move. No one to whom he appealed could be made to understand that he
had friends in England with whom he desired to communicate. One letter
to Armstrong which he had tried to write the landlady impounded and
destroyed as waste-paper, perhaps not quite by accident. This well-to-
do young guest was worth nursing. His friends would only come and fetch
him away; whereas she, motherly soul! was prepared to take him in and do
for him. The pocket of the coat which on the day of his arrival she had
carried off to her kitchen to dry contained satisfactory proof that
Monsieur was a young gentleman who could pay; and although she was too
honest to recoup herself for her services in advance, she had kept the
coat hanging up in her room for a week, as a pleasant reminder of the
joys of hospitality.
Only yesterday the invalid had recovered sufficiently to rout the doctor
and stagger down to the telegraph-office; and to-day, propped up with
pillows on the uncomfortable stuff-sofa, he was expiating his rashness
with a day of miserable coughing.
At the sound of his handbell, the landlady, a buxom dame of forty-five
autumns, hastened to the couch of her profitable visitor.
Roger was too weak to oppose the flood of her congratulations and
compliments on his recovery, and allowed her to talk herself breathless
before he put in his word.
"Madame has not been many years in these parts?" he inquired in his best
French.
Madame threw up her shoulders and protested she had lived in those parts
from a child, when the dull suburb was once a festive little rustic
village, and the great city now gobbling it up once loomed mysteriously
in the north, with acres and miles of green fields and woods between.
"But this hotel," said Roger, "has not stood here so long?"
"_Ma foi_!" said she, "since I can remember, when I used to visit my
good uncle here every Sunday, I remember `L'Hotel Soult.' Why, when I
married my cousin and became _Madame l'hotesse_, it was all fields
between us and Paris. Yes, and little enough change about the house.
We cannot afford, Monsieur, to build and decorate. By a miracle we
escaped the German shells. Ah! a merry time was the year of the war!
France suffered, alas! but the `L'Hotel Soult' prospered. 'Twas the
year I was left a widow! I had ten waiters then, Monsieur, and two
billiard-markers, a _chef_ from the best kitchen in Paris, and stables,
and _chambrieres_, and--why, Monsieur, the wages of one week were
twenty--twenty-five napoleons!"
"That was after the war?" asked Roger.
"Yes. Before that I had more. But, alas! they left me for the field,
and came no more."
"Were all your waiters Frenchmen?" asked Roger.
Madame stared curiously at the questioner.
"Why do you ask? I have had many kinds. Some English, like Monsieur."
"A year or two after the war," said Roger, "there was an Englishman, a
relation of mine, who was a waiter in an hotel in one of the suburbs
south of Paris. I want to hear of him. I have hunted for weeks. I
could hear nothing of him. I came here before I gave it up as a
hopeless search, and, as you know, I've been laid up ever since. You
have been kind to me, Madame; something makes me think I was not kept
here for nothing. Can you help me to find my friend?"
The landlady began to have inward misgivings that she had not behaved to
this pleasant-spoken young guest of hers as nicely as she might have
done, and she secretly resolved to revise the bill in his favour before
presenting it.
"Why, Monsieur, I had plenty English in my time. The year after the war
I had--let me think--two or three. Your friend--was he the little lame
one who waited beautiful at table, but that he cough, cough, till I must
send him away?"
"No; that's not the one."
"Then it was the fat one?--John Bull, we call him, who eat more than he
served, never used a fork when he had his fingers. Ah, he was a dirty
one, was your friend!"
"No," said Roger; "that's not he. My friend was not much older than I
am, and a gentleman."
"A gentleman--and a waiter!" laughed the landlady. "But tell me, what
was his name?"
"He used to call himself Rogers."
She shook her head.
"No one of that name was here. I had English, one or two--Bardsley, and
Jackson, and Smith; he was a gentleman, but he was not young. He was
fifty years, Mr Smith--a good servant. Also there was Monsieur
Callow."
"Callot!" exclaimed Roger, starting at the familiar name. "Was he an
Englishman?"
"Surely. C-a-l-l-o-w--Callow. Ah! he was a droll one, was Monsieur
Callow, and a gentleman too. I never had a billiard-marker like him.
He could play any man, and lose by one point; and he could recite and
sing; and oh, he eat so little! Every one laughed at him; but he
laughed little himself, and thought himself too good for his fellow-
waiters."
"What was he like?" asked Roger, flushing with excitement.
"A fine young man, with long curly hair, and whiskers and a beard. He
was afraid of nothing, tall and strong. Ah me! I have seen him knock a
man down at a blow. He was a wild, reckless man, was Monsieur Callow;
but a good servant, and oh! a beautiful billiard player. He always knew
how to lose a game, and oh! it made my table so popular!"
"Had he any friends in Paris?"
"Yes; he went often to see his father--so he told me--an actor who gave
lessons. I never saw _Monsieur le pere_."
"How long did he stay with you?"
"Callow? For five years he served me well. Then there was a _fracas_,
a quarrel; I remember it now. An English officer was here, and played
with him, and was beaten. 'Twas the only time I ever knew Callow win a
game; but he lost his temper this time, and won. Then Milord called him
a cheat, and without a word Monsieur Callow knocked him down. The
police came, and Monsieur Callow knocked _him_ down. Then he put on his
hat and walked, and I never saw him more. He always said he would go to
sea, and I think he would keep his word. Ah, a telegram! 'Tis long
since telegrams came to my hotel. _Helas_! not for me; for you,
Monsieur."
It was from Armstrong.
"Shall be with you, ten to-morrow morning."
The three weeks which had passed at Maxfield had been terrible.
The discovery of Captain Oliphant's body at the foot of the cliff, with
the clear traces of a struggle on the brink above, had created a
profound sensation at Maxfield and the country round.
For a day the air was full of wild conjectures of suicide, incident,
foul play; until the last-named theory was finally confirmed by the
discovery in the tightly-clenched hand of the dead man of a fragment of
a promissory note bearing the signature of Robert Ratman.
To the tutor, as he held the paper in his hand, everything became
startlingly clear. This was the last act of a tragedy which had been
going on for months; and now that the curtain had abruptly fallen, he
could not help, in the midst of this horror, owning to a sense of
thankfulness, for the sake of others, that the troubled career of his
rival and enemy had stopped short at a point beyond which nothing but
disgrace and scandal and misery awaited it.
From that disgrace it was his business now, by every means in his power,
to shield the innocent brother and sisters who still honoured the dead
man as their father.
Many a grievous task had been thrown upon the tutor in his day, but none
cost him more effort than this, of breaking to the children of his enemy
the news of their father's death. But he went through it manfully and
ably.
Rosalind, on whom the blow fell hardest, because on her spirit the
burden of her father's cares had lain heaviest, rose, with a heroine's
courage, to the occasion, and earned the tutor's boundless gratitude by
making his task easy. She said little; she understood everything. She
remembered nothing but the father's love--his old caresses and
confidences and kindnesses. The tears she shed blotted out all the
anxieties and misgivings and heart-sinkings of recent weeks. All that
remained was crowded with love.
Tom, dulled and stunned, took the story in gradually, and got used to it
as he went along. He came and slept at night in the tutor's room, and
felt how much worse things might have been had it not been for the
stalwart protector who put hope and cheer into him, and filled the blank
in his heart with sturdier views of life than the boy had ever harboured
there before.
As for Jill, for a week all was blackness and darkness to her. She felt
deserted--lost. She cried herself to sleep at night, and by day
wandered over the house, peeping into her father's room, and half
expecting to see him back. Then her gentle spirit took courage, and she
looked up, and her eyes lit with comfort and hope on Mr Armstrong.
Everything could not be lost if he was there; and when he sometimes
came, and took her little hand in his, and invited her to be his
companion in his rides, or sought her out in her lonely walks and made
her teach him the haunts of her favourite flowers or read to him from
her favourite books, she began to think there was still some joy left on
earth.
"Dear Mr Armstrong," she said one day when, by invitation, she came to
make afternoon tea for him in his room, "you are so awfully kind to me!
If I was only as old as Rosalind, I would marry you."
This rather startling declaration took the tutor considerably aback. He
laughed and said--
"You are very nice as you are, Jill."
"You think I'm silly, I know," said she, "but I'm not. Would you hate
me if I was older?"
"I don't think I could hate you, not even if you were a hundred."
"I love you ever so much," said she. "Please don't believe what Tom
said about the Duke. I don't like him a millionth part as much as you."
"Poor Duke!" said the tutor.
"Really and truly. And oh, Mr Armstrong, if you would only wait I
would love to marry you some day! How soon shall I be big enough?"
This was getting embarrassing. But the tutor was in a tender mood, and
had it not in his heart to thwart the little Leap-year maid. "Time
flies fast," said he; "you'll be grown up before we know where we all
are."
She sighed.
"I know you'd sooner have Rosalind. But she doesn't care for you as
much as I do. She likes Roger best; but I don't; I like you fifty
thousand times better. Would it be an _awful_ bother, Mr Armstrong?"
"What! to have Jill for my little wife?" said he. "Not a bit. If ever
I want one, she's the first person I mean to ask."
With this declaration Jill had to rest content. It solaced her sorrow
vastly; and even though Rosalind, to whom she confided the compact under
a pledge of secrecy, scolded and laughed at her alternately, she felt a
new prospect open before her, and set herself resolutely to the task of
growing up worthy of Mr
Armstrong's affection.
But amid all these troubles and hopes at Maxfield, two questions were on
every one's lips: "Where was Roger? Where was Robert Ratman?"
Roger had written once after reaching Paris, a letter full of hope,
which had arrived a few days before Captain Oliphant's death. He had
succeeded at last in tracking the man Pantalzar to a low lodging in the
city, and from him had ascertained somewhat of the history of the Callot
family. They had lodged with him at Long Street in London, where they
had given lessons in acting, elocution, and music; and Pantalzar clearly
remembered the lad Rogers as a constant visitor at the house, partly in
the capacity of a promising student of the dramatic art, and partly as a
hopeless lover of his preceptor's wayward daughter.
After a year, his troubles in the latter capacity were abruptly cut
short by the illness and death of the young lady; a blow which staggered
the parents and broke up the establishment at Long Street. It failed,
however, to drive Rogers from the party, who, with a romantic loyalty,
attached himself to the fortunes of the old people, and became like a
son to them in their distresses.
Eventually the bereaved family migrated to Paris, whence Pantalzar had
once heard from the father, who had found employment as stall manager of
a third-rate theatre in one of the _fauxbourg_. Hither Roger tracked
him, and after dogged search, often baffled, sometimes apparently
hopeless, discovered some one who remembered the reputed son of the old
couple, who, as far as this witness could remember, was thought to have
hired himself out as billiard-marker in an hotel in one of the southern
suburbs of the city.
Thus far he had succeeded when he wrote home. What transpired
subsequently, and how he dropped for a season out of all knowledge, the
reader already knows.
The suspense occasioned by his sudden disappearance, as may be imagined,
added a new element of wretchedness to the situation at Maxfield.
Telegrams, letters, inquiries, alike failed to discover his whereabouts
or the secret of his silence. As post after post came and brought
neither message nor tidings, the hearts of the watchers grew sick. To
the tutor especially, tied as he was to the scene of the tragedy, those
three weeks were a period of torture. He urged Dr Brandram to go over
to Paris to make inquiries; but the Doctor, after a fortnight of
fruitless search, returned empty-handed.
Mr Armstrong thereupon resolved at all hazards to quit his post and go
himself. He knew something of Paris. He had old associations with the
city, and once, as the reader has heard, possessed acquaintances there.
If any one could find the boy, he thought he could; and with such trusty
substitutes as the Doctor and Mr Headland, who remained at Yeld, to
leave behind, he felt that he might, nay rather that he must, venture on
the journey.
It was on the morning of his departure, as he was waiting for the trap
to carry him to the station, that Roger's telegram was put in his
hand:--
"Come--have been ill--better now--Hotel Soult--no news."
Twenty-four hours later the tutor was at his pupil's side, with a heavy
weight lifted from his heart, and resolved, come what would, not to quit
his post till he had the truant safe back at Maxfield.
The news he brought with him served to drive from Roger's mind all
thoughts of continuing his sojourn a day longer than was necessary to
recover his strength.
"It seems pretty certain," said he, "that my brother, when he left here,
returned to England, and probably went to sea very soon after. There is
no object in staying here. Look in that room there, Armstrong. That's
the billiard-room in which he spent most of his time, and that's the
very table on which he let himself be beaten regularly for the good of
the house."
The tutor walked across to the folding-doors and surveyed the dingy room
with critical interest.
"And that must have been little more than twelve years ago," said he.
"Do you still hold to your theory that Ratman is your brother?"
"I have no theory. I must find my brother, even if he is a--a
murderer," said the boy with a groan. "But, I say, has nothing been
heard of him?"
"The police have traced him to London; there the scent ends for the
present. He is probably in hiding there, and one may have to wait weeks
or months till he gets off his guard and is caught."
About ten days later they started, by slow stages, on the homeward
journey. Whether Madame received all she expected for her hospitality
is doubtful. Mr Armstrong undertook the duties of cashier, and used
his eye-glass considerably in scrutinising the figures. He craved an
interview with Madame in her parlour to discuss her arithmetic, and
although he appeared eventually to arrive at a satisfactory
understanding with the good lady (so much so, that she shed tears at his
departure), he did not complain that her charges were extortionate, as
French hotels go.
The home-coming of the heir of Maxfield created a welcome flutter of
excitement among the desolate occupants of the manor-house and their
neighbours. But the flutter in their hearts was nothing compared with
that in the heart of the heir himself as he walked across the park on
the day after his return to call at the Vicarage and invite Rosalind to
accompany him in a ride. What passed--whether the flutter was
contagious, what brought back the deserted colour to Miss Rosalind's
cheeks, why they rode so slow and left so much of their course to the
decision of their steeds,--all this and many other matters for wonder,
history recordeth not, as is quite proper. But it does record that
when, on their return, Mr Armstrong chanced to come out on to the door-
step, where the two stood unmounted, Roger said--
"Armstrong, Rosalind has promised to be my wife."
The tutor flushed a little at this not unexpected announcement; then
taking his pupil's arm, he said--
"It means great happiness for you both. I am glad--very glad."
But why, if he was so glad, did he slink off to his study forthwith and
play a dirge on his piano, and there sit listlessly in his chair for the
rest of the morning staring out of the window through his glass, till
Jill tripped in and fetched him down to lunch, saying--
"Dear Mr Armstrong, try not to be too awfully sorry. _I_ think no one
is as nice as you."