THE GREAT SKENE
MYSTERY
BY
BERNARD CAPES
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
[COPYRIGHT.]
_First Published in 1907_
[DEDICATION.]
TO
A. J. RICE-OXLEY
IN TOKEN OF SOME DEVOTED KINDNESS
THIS STORY IS DEDICATED
BY HIS FRIEND AND CONNEXION
The Author
“_Good is a good doctor_”--Emerson
CONTENTS.
PROLOGUE. MOTHER CAREY’S CHICKEN
I. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
II. I COME OF AGE AND TO A DETERMINATION
III. THE LODGE IN THE CADDLE
IV. A YOUNG LADY’S CHASTENING--PHASE ONE
V. A YOUNG LADY’S CHASTENING--PHASE TWO
VI. MY FIRST ENLIGHTENMENT
VII. MORGIANA
VIII. THE WRITING ON THE WALL
IX. I VISIT CLAPHAM
X. EDITORIAL
XI. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL. THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
XII. AN ODD RECOGNITION
XIII. JOHNNY DANDO
XIV. TWO INTERVIEWS AND A DISCOVERY
XV. THE LETTER IN THE BOOK
XVI. A STRANGE ENCOUNTER
XVII. NURSE ELLEN’S “YOUNG MAN”
XVIII. TELEGRAMS
XIX. LADY SKENE KNEELS TO ME
XX. ANTONIO GEOLETTI
XXI. SNOW AND FIRE
XXII. A VISIT FROM MR DALSTON
XXIII. GEOLETTI TELLS HIS STORY
XXIV. I ACCEPT THE BURDEN OF PROOF
XXV. JOHNNY AT HOME
XXVI. I REVISIT MOTHER CAREY
XXVII. CORRESPONDENCE
XXVIII. ON THE SCENT
XXIX. THE BODY IN THE CAVE
XXX. HARD PRESSED
XXXI. A NOTABLE INTERLUDE
XXXII. RUN TO EARTH
XXXIII. A REST BY THE WAY
XXXIV. THE GREAT SKENE CASE
ENVOI
THE
GREAT SKENE MYSTERY
PROLOGUE.
EDITORIAL.
MOTHER CAREY’S CHICKEN
I
Forty-Five years ago, one February evening, the fog lay thick over
Clapham suburb. Generated in the fat sink of Lambeth, it had come
sweltering up by way of the Westminster Bridge and Kennington Roads;
had poured, like smoke from a range, through the bars of the pike-gate
by the church; had pressed on, rolling up the last levels of twilight
in front of it, past the “Swan,” at Stockwell, and the “Bedford Arms”
beyond--before each of which popular hostelries it had deployed, in
order to post its pickets in a dozen of fuddled brains--and, thence
shouldering its passage densely through the main channel of the High
Street, had flowed out and camped itself sluggishly among the gorse
bushes of the open common to the south.
Incidentally, amongst other obscene “flushings” by the way, it had
entered and packed to the throat a certain White Square, which
already, in that stronghold of Evangelicalism, was of sufficiently bad
odour to need no reinforcement of supplementary brimstone to prove
itself. Like the fisherman’s bottle, this White Square was entered by
a narrow neck or gullet, through which the genie of viciousness could
compress itself into an inadequate house room, or thence issue to
expand into proportions which were a menace to its neighbourhood.
Thieves, harlots, and low Irish rapparees formed the bulk of its
population: costers, and a drunken washerwoman or two, were its
_élite_. How Mother Carey, with at least her better traditions, had
drifted into its fastnesses, let the recording angel note. It was
sacred from the police.
Mother Carey was certainly White Square’s most respectable unit--a
one-eyed queen among the blind. She rented an entire tenement, in
place of the fraction with which the most of her compeers must be
content; she enjoyed an “independence” (paid, quarterly, through a
lawyer, for value received); she had descended, in a cloud, from the
hallowed mysteries of the _tu-tu_ and the dancing sandal. She was a
superannuated coryphée, in fact, and, save for the redeeming grace of
that allowance, had long since sunk into squalider depths than her
present.
The fog made her eyes smart on this February evening, sootily
exaggerating on their rims the work of the “make-up” pencil, which had
not ceased to be a cherished equipment of her ignoble maturity. It
imparted, moreover, a sort of livid iridescence to the pearl powder
smearing her haggard cheeks, which suggested, in their unwholesome
“fishiness,” the under parts of a dead and stale mackerel. Her “front”
was false, her---- Sha! the horrible, sick old spectre of vanity!
But if a spectre, she was by no means dead to her own worldly
interests. Those possessed her, in exact proportion as her watching
and waiting at this moment were turned to the possession of the soul
of another, the latest, and not the least difficult, subject of her
ancient lures. Reversing the accepted ghostly procedure, she was
intent on procuring, instead of revealing, a treasure. Her
persistency, in matters of mean acquisition and blackmailing, was
great for so frail a creature. It had triumphed over decay,
infirmities, disenchantment in the past; yet, after all, she had
withdrawn from public life at a late hour, with a competence which--to
be properly in keeping with her long self-exposure--was only a bare
one. That she resented, of course. Her days were all punctuated with
petty resentments and malevolences, the fruits of a small, greedy
vanity which had been pensioned to retire--through a conspiracy of
jealousies, she would have told you. Wherefore she had since sought to
augment her pittance by a vicious exploiting--at second-hand--of the
arts which had procured it for her.
The rumble of distant omnibuses vibrated in her ears and in the walls,
from which latter gloomed down, dingy and faded, old daguerreotypes of
herself, smirking and ogling in the tights and kid boots and wreaths
of a vanished era--rosy, immoral young life of twenty years past, of
which this dry, stark immortelle was the spectre. As she sat waiting,
she leaned her elbows on the table, and stared at the solitary candle
alight before her, like an old, sharp-eyed hen half hypnotised by the
glow. Yet, if she were asleep, she talked in her sleep, small and
chuckling, as anyone, stooping his head, might have detected.
“Mark! Mark Dalston, O, Mark! O, my dear!” ran the thin strain. “Are
you going to think well of it, Mark--think well of it, Mark Dalston?
Have you started on your way to come and compound with Mother Carey,
Mark, my love? You’ve answered Yes to her message, haven’t you?--but
you aren’t always a gentleman of your word, you know, Mark. Best to be
it in this case, O, my dear, my dear! I could get my teeth into you
here, nicely, now--couldn’t I?”
Suddenly she came alert, pricking her ears to the sound of a quick,
soft footstep outside.
II
Mr Mark Dalston, a young man of particular ambitions and passions, had
also that hospitability of conscience which can welcome and reconcile
the most antagonistic emotions. He never suffered material
self-interests and moral scruples to fall at odds within himself, but
was the tactful and charming host to all that came to be entertained
within his breast. There one might see grossness and reason,
sensualism and intellectuality, the virtuoso and the Vandal, all table
couples at once, and at perfectly harmonious discourse. They met on
the common ground of sociability, and forbore all destructive
criticism of one another so long as Mark’s lights shone upon their
differences. He was extraordinarily popular with quite a number of
divergent familiars--a man without prejudices, and always ready to
entertain a new emotion.
Mark was of that good nature, in short, that he could never say No to
himself, however much the interests of other people might be affected
by the partiality. His sympathies were wide, but their application was
close. Like the centre of a venous system, he was all heart, and gave
nothing but what he was sure to receive back at compound interest.
Fortune having condemned him, for a brief period, to an ushership at a
suburban grammar school, he had not repined over his lot, but had
sought, quite naturally and amiably, an amelioration of its prosy
conditions in the pursuit of such supernumerary pleasures and
self-indulgences as its off hours could be made to yield. It was
always his principle to eschew consequences until they were upon him,
and insistent. And then he would set his fine wits and intellect at
work to neutralise them.
The young master was well destined, and more than physically, for the
success of his qualities. He was emphatically, according to the
feminine standard of fitness, a “ladies’ man.” His self-assurance, his
ready tongue (or tongues, for he commanded many), his easy
subscription to the correct fashions in dress, assumed in defiance of
the proverbial slovenliness of scholars, his whiskers, his quick
intelligence and his soft impertinences, were all so many _visés_ to
the passport to woman’s favour of which his handsome face and person
were the text. He might have wasted this text upon quite
inconsiderable issues, if Fortune, jealous for his capacities, had not
invited him to contests more worthy of his mettle. The post of
travelling “coach” to a young gentleman of fortune timely offering
itself, he had seized the opportunity to cut some connections, of
which the one which turned upon the training of the young idea had
come to figure as the least undesirable; and, at the present date,
Clapham had not seen him for six months or more.
It is not the purpose of the moment to recount how, once abroad, Mr
Dalston had lost his pupil and married “money”; nor even much to dwell
upon how, returning home a man of substance and position, he had been
brought, at once and sharply, to realise that “of our pleasant vices
the gods make instruments to plague us.” But he was a man of swift
comprehension, resource, and decision; and his brows had hardly drawn
to a pucker over a difficulty suddenly confronting him, before a way
out of it, and a very daring one, had occurred to him.
The message--Mother Carey’s--referring to this difficulty, had reached
him at the house, his wife’s, in Eaton Square, whither he, it was
understood, had, on business grounds, preceded his lady’s return from
abroad by a few weeks. That was, actually, a mystification, a
_suppressio veri_; for Mrs Dalston was at the moment installed in
comfortable but obscure rooms at Kennington, where she was scarcely
arrived before she was delivered, a little prematurely, of a male
child. But so far was this fact from being allowed to interfere with
the fiction of her absence, that particular pains had been taken by
Mark to procure his wife’s confinement in the house of a doctor, a
friend of his, who could be fee’d into any silence, or bought into any
intrigue where irregular services were required. To all practical and
moral intents, Mr Dalston was never so remote from his lately wedded
bride as at the moment when he stepped from her bedside to do an
infamous act upon her child. But even then there was enough sentiment
in his gaze to make the fortune of a mid-Victorian picture.
The young mother’s reason had never fully returned to her since that
poignant grapple, four nights ago, with the great and astonishing
secret. She was sound, unhurt from the contest; but her faculties
slept in a sort of exhausted abeyance. She was very white and
still--incurious--not greatly troubled: so far things were fortunate.
And here was the enwrapping fog for a final cloak, or pall.
As Mark stepped softly from the room, closing the door, a rather
livid-faced, stale-smelling young man in a black frock coat and black
peg-top trousers, revealing frowzy white socks beneath, accosted him
whisperingly.
“Well, sir; all in train?”
Mark nodded, smiling.
“All in train, Blague. It’s really a providence, and your conscience
may sleep sound to-night--as sound as she’s sleeping in there. Don’t
wake her--don’t _let_ her wake, rather--to a sense of her loss, you
comprehend, till I return.”
“Quite so. The _vis inertiæ_--the vegetation of a sensitive plant, no
more; we will see to it. The business shall not miscarry through us,
sir, depend upon it.”
“That’s right. You sha’n’t lose by this little divagation in our
plans, rest sure of that.”
He put his finger to his lips, and tiptoed down to the hall, where
stood a pallid-faced young woman in a shawl and poke bonnet, gently
rocking a bundle in her arms. She looked at the husband gravely,
questioningly; but she was silent. The poor thing, in fact, was
helpless under his dominion. Those dark eyes and ambrosial whiskers,
with the cleft chin between, had, in a few days, brimmed the measure
of her romance. Engaged for nurse to Mrs Dalston, she was fallen a
slave to the lamp of a brighter magician than duty.
The two entered a “growler” of the ancient dimensions, and the fog
lapped them up. Jogging its apathetic course through the smoke, as it
seemed, of a vast glimmering conflagration, the squalid vehicle gained
at length the Clapham Road, and drew near its destination. Then the
pale little nurse spoke for the first time.
“Are we nearly there?”
“Nearly there, my child.”
“Your child!”
She raised the little bundle in her arms to her breast. The pressure
seemed to convey abroad from it a waft of that warm, milky nidor
inseparable from newly born infants. Mr Dalston’s white teeth
glimmered through the fog.
“For the dozenth time,” he said softly, “I must assure you, little
Ellen, that grave issues hang upon the preservation of the tiny life
in your arms. That life is threatened only so long as I fail to
convince a certain person of its actuality. You mustn’t ask me how or
why. It embraces matters above your comprehension.”
“I can’t help it--I’m frightened,” was all she could find voice to
whisper.
He put his arm confidently about her. She shivered, but let herself
settle into it.
“Hush!” he said. “What is there to be frightened about? I shall do
nothing but take it in, show it, and return with it to you.”
“Why do you want me at all?” she protested, half whimpering. “You
might have brought it by yourself.”
“What!” he said, “and had Dr Blague questioning my sanity? Do fathers
generally take their new-born babies for an airing in cabs? You are to
witness, Ellen, if the necessity should ever arise--which, however,
there is not the least probability of its doing--that I returned it to
you sound as I had taken it.”
“Why should it arise? O, Mark, don’t mean me any evil!”
He sighed, shrugging his shoulders. The crawling cab drew up with a
jerk.
“Now,” he said quickly, taking the girl’s burden from her, “stop here
till I return with it. I shall be back before you can count a
hundred.”
III
Mother Carey raised her bleary face with a start, and looked round.
The owner of the name she had been apostrophising stood in the room
beside her. She twisted an involuntary little shriek into a titter.
“Well, I’m sure,” she said, “to take me like that, in a moment, and
anything possible! Was the door ajar?”
“Still ajar,” said Mark, with a smile--“and the trap still baited as
of old, I suppose?”
“Always the same quick gentleman,” she chuckled venomously. “What has
my lovey got in his arms there?”
“Something for _your_ discounting, old mother,” he said. “I’ll show
you in a minute.”
“_My_ discounting!” she echoed. Her lips tightened on the word. She
looked at him evilly--searchingly. “What do you mean? You got my
message?”
“Yes; I got your message.”
“And you’ve come to answer it?”
“To answer it, yes.”
“That’s as well for you. You know what I want?”
“Do I?”
“And what I mean to have, or show you up, my gentleman?”
“Well, I can guess. I’m to be bled, I suppose?”
“Ah!” she gave a snapping laugh. “You never spoke a truer word.”
“Well,” he said, as cool as she was malevolent, “I’m here to _be_
bled, but on hard and fast conditions. Understand that, you old
Jezebel, or understand nothing.”
She made as if to claw him, but mumbled away her rage. Better than
many worthier she could see into his terrific places.
“I’ll be fair to fair,” she said, cowed and scowling. “You’re
married?”
“Yes,”
“A fine match?”
“Yes.”
“It would go hard with your honeymooning if I spoke out?”
“Harder with you, I think.”
“Ah, I’m salted, my man!”
“You’d need to be. Is _she_ here?”
“_Isn’t_ she!”
“Where?”
“In her bed.”
“Ill?”
“A touch of the fever. She’ll get over it.”
“Very well,” he said. “Now, attend. Look at this.”
She followed the motion of his hand, as, very gently, it lifted a
corner of the wrappers on his arm.
“A living baby!”
“It looks like one.”
She discussed him sombrely a minute, then spoke in a shrewd whisper:
“You’ve got some dark game on here, my gentleman.”
He dropped the shawl again.
“A secret--and a proposal, old mother,” he said. “How much, or,
rather, how little will you take for helping me to keep it?”
“Do you want me to commit murder? I’m an honest woman.”
“I know; that’s why I can depend on you.”
She fawned with her hands.
“Tell me what it all means, lovey dear.”
“I’m going to. Shut that door first.”
She did as she was told. The listening spirits of the fog were
baffled. When the door opened again, Mark was standing in the entry,
the burden still in his arms, while Mother Carey pleaded urgently
behind him.
“A lump sum, deary. Come!”
“No,” he said; “a pension. A quarterly gag on your tongue, or nothing.
You can take or leave.”
“I take!” she whispered shrilly--“I take! Be careful of that step,
deary.”
He vanished into the fog. At the mouth of the passage the cab was
drawn up by the kerb, watching for him like a squat, red-eyed dragon,
and gulping him the moment he appeared.
Half way home the pale little nurse broke suddenly into hysterical
panting and weeping.
“Why don’t you give it me back? Why do you always keep it in your own
arms?”
“I’m afraid of you, Ellen,” he said quietly. “You look somehow as if
you weren’t to be trusted.”
They were passing a lighted shop at the moment. With a quick,
unsuspected action she snatched the veil from the baby’s face.
“Ah!” she screamed--“it’s dead! You’ve had it killed!”
For a single instant the naked soul of him looked
out--obscene--murderous. But he drove it back.
“You little wild fool,” he said deeply. “Wasn’t I right? Your nerves
are anyhow. You aren’t to be trusted, with your fancies.”
She hardly seemed to hear him. All of a sudden she was struggling with
the door handle.
“Let me out! I’m fainting! I can bear no more. I will be good--I want
to go home--I----”
Sore encumbered as he was, she proved too quick for him. In an instant
she had jerked open the door and flung herself into the fog. Some
heavy vehicle was lumbering past at the moment. A scream like the cry
of a rusty axle broke from among its wheels. The cab rolled on, its
driver unnoticing, or diplomatic, perhaps, over an accident which he
connected, if at all, with other than his fare. Paralysed for an
instant, the next, Mark had softly closed the swinging door.
“There’s no help for it,” he thought, momentarily death-white. “I must
go on and play the game.”
He played it, for all that rebuff, so convincingly, that the issue
left him full twenty years’ triumphant enjoyment of its fruits.
That same night his wife woke for the first time to her full reason,
and looked intently into his eyes.
“Am I to be allowed to see it?” she said.
He bowed his head distressfully.
“By my full will, if not the will of a Greater,” he murmured.
“It is dead?”
He rose, and went and brought, and placing the little forlorn shape in
her arms, left her with it a while. When he returned, it was put aside
gently but indifferently.
“Bury my poor past,” she said. “It reproaches me with an altered face.
Yet I can’t help myself--I think I never could. You wouldn’t wish it,
you know; and what you wish or don’t wish comes to happen or to fail.”
He looked at her mildly, but with protesting eyes.
“Why are you so bitter?” he said. “Has not Fate after all been
considerate with us? You can face the world again now, unsuspected, a
spotless wife--no suspicion of our having loved not wisely but too
well. Cannot you forgive me yet, Lucy? And after all I have done to
safeguard your honour? Yet, if Providence had not thus mercifully
intervened, I swear that I would have been a dutiful father to
it--have acknowledged my own, and taken all the blame and burden of
the sin. I can say no more.”
“Nor I,” she answered. “What does it matter now. The money--my
money--that you’ve played to get--it’s all yours to use, and fling
away if you like. Treat me as you will--I’m indifferent----” And she
lay down resolutely, and composed herself to sleep.
As, chin in hand, he stands pondering her a little, curiously, fondly,
cynically, we see the fog droop and engulf him, her, the bed, the
room. Not for twenty years does it lift and roll itself up to the
flies, to reveal the maturing of a drama of which this chapter is the
prologue.
CHAPTER I.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
I suppose my days have been involved in as tragic circumstances as
most. It is fair that the truth of them should be set down _en grande
tenue_ by the one whom, after all, it most concerns. Not that for my
own sake I desire for them more publicity, God knows, than they have
received; but there is the question of the moral heirloom. The
sensational Skene claim before the Lords of Common Pleas will be in
the memory of a generation now passing: it is for the benefit of the
generation to come, and the many thence ensuing, that I clothe these
legal bones in the nerves and flesh of living actualities. There is
such necessary omission and distortion in all trials of equity, that
the plainest of their stories is grown a “Russian Scandal” before the
senior counsel who engineered it has gone to his long home on the
Bench. And this was an intricate story, which it is now my purpose,
for the sake of myself and my own, to detail in full.
As to that story, it will be recalled that a Mr Richard Gaskett was,
legally, its protagonist. Very well: I am that person.
At the first and from the first I was something less than nobody. My
mother, as I regarded her, was of obscure origin, but of manners
naturally quiet and refined. A habit of self-guarding, indeed, which
dated probably from her social promotion, had come to make of her even
a cold, colourless, impenetrable woman. She was very pretty, with a
sort of passionless severity in her face, and in her attitude a custom
of what Miss Burney would have called “repulsiveness,” meaning, as we
read it, “repelling.” No gleam of demonstrativeness on her part lights
my memory of her; from my first lispings I always, by her desire,
called her Lady Skene.
As habitually, my stepfather, Baron Skene of Evercreech, called me
Gaskett. I was officially an “encumbrance” to the two, and not always
spared the knowledge. Of the indifferent union which had produced me I
neither was informed, nor thought to ask, anything. Curiosity was the
last thing encouraged at Evercreech. That my stepfather had been a
childless widower when he bestowed the lustre of his name on the
obscure young widow “with an encumbrance,” was the most of my
information, and, even as such, something less, probably, than the
common one. The rakish reactionary (one-time famous judge of the
Queen’s Bench Division, and ennobled for his services during the
Salisbury administration of ’86) who, after the death of his only
child and heir, young Charlie Skene, in an Alpine accident, had
contracted a reckless _mésalliance_ with the lady who now bore his
name, was a figure revealed only to my later understanding.
Very early, I think, Lady Skene had “found religion,” as one may speak
of “finding” the unpleasantly obvious. Ignorance, irreverence, and
vulgarity build on every highway. There is a sort of evangelical
butcher who deals with assurance in things of the flesh, and, on a
simple knowledge of their parts, preaches the constitution of their
spiritual anatomy. He is the purveyor of such theological joints as
the vulgar understanding can recognise. Insight, imagination,
erudition are strange beasts to the popular view.
I think, perhaps, that Lady Skene’s early influences were to account
for her natural inclinations in these respects. When I say that her
marriage had socially elevated her from the ground to the leaf,
without her quite shaking off the dust of her origin, I may be
understood to imply that her beauty, and no exceptional quality in
addition, was her fine recommendation. She had had little education, I
am sure, but the education of a precise observation, which is the most
excellent tutor of mind and manners, though unpossessed of the exact
secret of what constitutes the _comme il faut_. That may be said,
broadly, to be the secret of making a grace of necessity in all
things--the secret of a frank unself-consciousness. Self-suspicion
spells restraint in intercourse, and leads to gusts of mutinous
self-assertion in some wrong directions. Lady Skene at least made no
affectation of adopting creeds which were caviare to her
understanding. She was and remained a raw evangelical through all the
spiritual evolutions of fashion.
There was an unseemly old heathen visited us once upon a time, who
made himself very merry over Lord Skene’s “atonement,” as he called
it. This was Sir Maurice Carnac, ex-governor of Madras, who had been
an intimate friend of his lordship in the sixties, and who now, on his
retirement, after twenty years’ service, came to renew the
acquaintance. From him I learned, at discretion, not a few facts
hitherto unknown to me: how, for instance, my stepfather, in the
matter of his second marriage, had been “cast into a net by his own
feet” in their very hope of going astray, which was to imply that he
had been caught to matrimony in the act of trying to evade it; how
Lady Skene had no sooner conquered him by her beauty, than she had
used it to the subjugation of the old Adam she had entertained, by
holding it the prize to his strict reformation; how, in short, she had
made a tame and orderly spouse out of the most unpromising material
possible.
Sir Maurice had no great delicacy, it is to be feared, though he could
be mum on some points on which I sought enlightenment. Of Lady Skene’s
social status before her marriage he would not speak; though I
certainly gathered from him that it was inconsiderable.
“Take Fortune’s gifts, my lad,” he said, “and hold your silly tongue.
It’s time to question her when she turns on you.”
“Scruples,” I began.
“Scruples be damned,” said he. “What has a ranker need of scruples?
Ain’t you promoted for your mother’s son?”
That was the truth of it, and, to confess myself, the sorrow. I was
not a loved child, conscious of rights or merits. I was an
“encumbrance.” A dreamy, rather morbid temperament oppressed me with
the weight of my own burden on the situation.
Not that I was ever treated unkindly; but there is an endurance that
is harder than neglect. It might be thought that Lady Skene would have
wished to exalt her own, especially as she bore her husband no family.
She was indifferent to me, however, and so I could not but be to her.
We were not kindred spirits, and were antipathetic to one another. Her
soul inhabited a chapel; mine the woods and mountains of a roaming
fancy. I never felt “at home” with her; and I think she had writ me
down early for one of the unelect. Predestination is a comfortable
creed for those who would eschew parental responsibilities. It is vain
carving a brand that is destined for the burning.
I suppose Lord Skene was of the chosen. His lady, at least, took
infinite pains to preserve him to her pattern of respectability. From
my first conscious recollection of him he was the slave to her soft,
monotonous rule. Yet I came early to wonder how much or how little of
his bondage was due to her physical fascination; for he was not
naturally, I felt sure, susceptible to moral influences, or possessed
of a bump of reverence that a threepenny-bit could not have hidden. In
pose, in feature, in colouring, her ladyship was near flawless--an
angel, whose ichor was drawn from the peaches of Paradise. Strange, I
thought, that so ethereal a tabernacle should contain so unimaginative
a pyx. I was not the first to marvel over a common incongruity, or to
overlook the fact that a satin skin often means a thick one. However
that may be, Lord Skene was devoted to his wife, and, I think, not a
little afraid of her. She had lived to convince him that he had taken
her, encumbrance and all, on something better than her merits.
At the period with which this record is mainly concerned she was
rising forty, and he, perhaps, sixty-five years of age. I had passed
my school career, and had alighted on no other. Those vanished terms
of absence from home had been my dearest ones. I have nothing to
relate of them but what is pleasant in the retrospect--one thing in
especial, my friendship with Johnny Dando, which is infinitely
comfortable. At the end Johnny went to a university, and I returned to
Evercreech. I was then nineteen, and already the predestined
protagonist in a drama, the full intricacies of which Fate was to need
but a year or two to unfold. My life, during the interval from boy to
manhood, has no concern in this matter; and therefore I shall say
nothing of it but what is essential to the context. Childhood is a
thing apart and sacred. To come of age is to join posterity and the
detectives.