THE WOMAN AND THE MAN
Yes--the woman was dead. Ballingall had gone--and the fortune was
found.
Put in that way, it was a curious sequence of events.
Indeed, put in any way, there could be no doubt about the oddity of
the part which the woman had played.
Medical examination clearly showed that death had come to her from
natural causes. She must, the doctor said, have been within a
hand's-breadth of death for, at any rate, the last twelve months. He
declared that every vital organ was hopelessly diseased. Asked if the
immediate cause of death was shock, he replied that there was nothing
whatever in the condition of the body which could be regarded as
supporting such a theory. In his opinion, the woman had burned out,
like a candle, which, when it is all consumed, dies. Nothing, in his
judgment, could have retarded the inevitable end; just as there was
nothing to suggest that it came one instant sooner than might, in the
natural course, have been expected.
That was what the doctor said in public, at the coroner's inquest.
He listened to them when, in private, they told him the strange
story of the night's adventure, pronouncing at the conclusion an
opinion which contained in it the essence of all wisdom, for it
might be taken any way. The gist of it was this. Very probably for
some time before her death, the woman had been light-headed. When
people are light-headed they suffer from hallucinations. It was
quite possible that, in her case, those hallucinations had taken the
form--literally--of her injured husband. It was on record that
hallucinations had taken form, in similar cases. It was a perfectly
feasible and reasonable theory which supposed that the woman,
wandering, a homeless outcast, in the streets of London, delirious,
premonitions of her approaching dissolution being borne in upon her in
spite of her delirium, would turn her dying footsteps towards her
one-time home, to which, as her behaviour in forcing herself on Madge
plainly showed, her thoughts had recently returned. Nor, under the
circumstances, was there anything surprising in her delusion that her
husband had led her there.
It was when asked to explain how it was that she had hit upon the
hiding-place of her husband's fortune--hit upon it, as it seemed,
altogether against her will, that the doctor became oracular. But even
here he was not without his hints as to the direction in which an
explanation might be found.
He pointed out that our study of the science of mental psychology was
still in its infancy. But, even so far as it had gone, it seemed to
suggest the possibility of what has come to be called telepathic
communication between two minds--even when the whilom owner of one of
the minds has passed beyond the confines of the grave. This sounded a
trifle abstruse. But as the doctor professed his inability to put it
any clearer, they had to take his statement as it stood, and make out
just as much of it as they were able.
As for Ballingall's pretensions to having shared the woman's
hallucination--if hallucination it was--the doctor pooh-poohed them
altogether. The man was as mad as the woman, and madder; and an
impudent rogue to boot. Where was he? Let him come forward, and allow
himself and his statements to be scientifically tested. Then it would
be shown what reliance could be placed on anything which he might say.
But where Ballingall was, was exactly the problem which they found
insoluble. He had vanished as completely as if he had never existed.
The presumption was, that while they had been absorbed in watching
Madge's efforts to carry on the work of discovery from the point at
which the woman had left it, he had sneaked, unnoticed, from the room
and from the house. The curious feature was that they were unable to
agree as to the exact moment at which he could have gone. Bruce Graham
declared that he was in the room when he went to fetch the hammer and
chisel, and that he was still there when he returned. Madge protested
that he was in the room when she ran across to the recumbent figure on
Ella's bed. If so, since Jack discovered his absence within less than
a minute afterwards, it was during that scant sixty seconds that he
made good his escape.
Why he had gone at all was difficult to say. One might have thought
that after what he had undergone during his search for the fortune he
would hardly have disappeared at the moment of its finding. He had
suffered so much in looking, that he had earned at least a share, when
at last it was brought to light. Such, certainly, was the strong
feeling of its actual discoverer. He stood in need enough of money;
that was sure. Why then, at what from one point of view might be
described as the very moment of his triumph, had he vanished?
He alone could tell.
They could only give wild guesses. Nothing has been seen or heard of
him from that hour to this. They put advertisements for him in the
papers, without result. Then, as they felt that living the sort of
life which he probably was living--that is, if he was living at
all--it was within the range of probability that a newspaper would
never come his way, and that he would never glance at it if it did,
they distributed handbills broadcast through the slums of London,
beseeching him to apply to a certain address, and offering a reward to
any one who could give an account of his proceedings after the night
on which he had taken himself away.
To those handbills they did receive answers--in abundance. There were
evidently plenty of people who were willing, nay, anxious, to lay
their hands on that reward, just as there seemed several Charles
Ballingalls with whom they were acquainted. But no one of them was the
Charles Ballingall. More than once they thought they had chanced on
him at last; the stories told were such very specious ones, and they
followed up the trail till it proved beyond all manner of doubt to be
a false one. When the Charles Ballingall to whom it referred was
unearthed, he proved, in each and every case, to be not in the least
like theirs.
And so the presumption is that the man is dead. He was, probably, as
the doctor suggested, more than half out of his mind on that eventful
night; his sins had brought him suffering enough to have driven the
average mortal mad. It is not unlikely that the strange things which
then transpired, completing the work of destruction, robbed him of his
few remaining senses; and that, at that last moment, when Madge Brodie
announced her discovery of what he had sought with so much pain and
with such ardour, the irony of fate which seemed to have pursued him,
pressing on him still, had driven him out into the night, a raving
lunatic, seeking anywhere and anyhow for escape from the burden of
life which haunted him.
God alone can tell where and how he found it.