“COME BACK TO ME”
Everard left St. Oswyth’s by the six o’clock train on Saturday morning.
Four hours later he was in Liverpool. Taking a cab for himself and his
portmanteau, he proceeded direct to the shipping office and there
booked a berth on board the _Arbaces_ for New York. Thence he was
driven to the landing-stage, where he found the tender whose duty it
was to transfer the passengers and their luggage on board the huge
liner anchored out in mid-stream.
On reaching the _Arbaces_ Lisle at once made his way to the stateroom
which had been allotted him. He knew already that he would have to
share it with a fellow-passenger, and when, on entering it, he found
there a dressing-case and a small portmanteau, a natural curiosity to
ascertain the name of the person who, for the next week or more would
be his nightly, if not his daily companion, led him to turn up one of
the labels and read what was written thereon. Rarely, perhaps never, in
his life had Everard Lisle been more amazed than he was when his eyes
took in these words: “John Alexander, Esq. Passenger to New York.” By
one of those singular coincidences, which are far more common than the
generality of people imagine them to be, he and the man of whom he was
in pursuit, and on whom he had not expected to set eyes till after a
journey of close upon four thousand miles, had crossed each other’s
path at the outset. Yet, but for the chance of his having read the
address label when he did, they would probably have been shipmates for
some time before discovering the relation in which each stood to the
other, and, in any case, as the _Arbaces_ did not call at Queenstown,
they would have been compelled in their own despite to make the voyage
out and home again.
Lisle had not recovered from his astonishment when the cabin door was
opened from without and he saw before him a tall, finely-built man of
middle age, with high aquiline features, dark, grave, earnest-looking
eyes, a somewhat worn and thoughtful-looking face, and a long flowing
beard already flecked with white.
“My cabin chum, I presume,” said the stranger in a deep mellow voice,
and with an exceedingly pleasant smile. “I hope we shall have a good
passage, and that at the end of it our companionship will remain a
pleasant recollection in connection with it.”
Everard smiled and bowed. “I have taken the liberty of reading the name
on your luggage,” he said. “Pray excuse the question. I have a special
reason for asking it, but are you Mr. John Alexander of Pineapple City
in the State of Michigan?”
The other lifted his eyebrows in surprise. “That is certainly my
address, and therefore I can only assume that I am the person to whom
you refer.”
“Then you must be the person whom I was going all the way to Pineapple
City in search of. I am especially glad that I have met you now and
here—for one thing, because my having done so will save me the
necessity of a voyage to the States and back. Mr. Alexander, I am the
bearer of a letter addressed to you from Sir Gilbert Clare of
Withington Chase.”
For a moment or two it seemed to Mr. Alexander as if the cabin floor
were rising and sinking, as it might have done in a heavy gale. He
seated himself on the edge of his berth; his face had faded to an ashen
grey.
“A letter from my—from Sir Gilbert Clare for me!” he said, speaking
like a man in a dream.
From the case which he carried in his breast pocket, Everard extracted
Sir Gilbert’s missive and handed it to the other. “I will see you again
in the course of a few minutes,” he said.
It will be enough to say that neither one nor the other sailed by the
_Arbaces_, but caused themselves and their belongings to be transferred
back to shore at the last moment.
A few hours later, as they sat together over their coffee and cigars in
a private room of the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, John Alexander Clare
proceeded to give his companion an outline of his history from the time
of the explosion of the lake steamer by which he was supposed to have
been killed. Of that narrative all that need be given here is such a
summary as will enable the reader to follow the sequence of events, the
outcome of which was the unpremeditated meeting of himself and Lisle on
board the _Arbaces_.
As may perhaps be remembered, Mr. Travis, Alec’s business partner,
could not reasonably have come to any other conclusion than that the
latter had lost his life by the explosion of the _Prairie Belle_,
seeing that week after week passed over without bringing any tidings of
him; and, indeed, it was not till nearly three months had gone by that
one day a tall, emaciated, almost ghastly figure stalked into the
office, and for the moment all but made Mr. Travis’s hair stand on end
when, in hollow tones, it said: “Well, Frank, old fellow, how are you
by now?”
It appeared that he had been picked up, clinging to a spar and all but
insensible, nearly an hour after the explosion had taken place. His
rescuer, a farmer who lived on the margin of the lake, caused Alec to
be taken to his house, where he was carefully nursed and tended by the
farmer’s wife and daughter. He had been terribly bruised and half
blinded by the explosion, and for several weeks he wandered in his mind
and knew neither where he was, nor what had befallen him.
The farmer and his family belonged to the sect known as Quietists, and
as they read no newspapers and held as little communion with the
outside world as possible, it followed that Alec’s name was omitted
from the published list of the survivors of the explosion. Small wonder
was it that Travis almost looked upon his partner as on one come back
from the grave.
Not till then did Alec learn of the inquiries which had been made about
him during his absence. That the man who made them had come specially
from England, Mr. Travis did not doubt, but as he had declined to state
the nature of his business, there was nothing more to tell. The fact
interested Alec but faintly, and soon passed out of his thoughts. He
was a banished man; his wife had deserted him; his child was dead; and
to him, after his accident and the illness which resulted from it, his
past life gradually assumed the faded proportions of a dream, and not a
real experience of his own.
And so one uneventful year after another dragged out its little span,
the partners meanwhile prospering in business, and never being other
than the best of friends.
At length, through the death of a relative, Mr. Travis succeeded to a
considerable property and at once made up his mind to return to
England. Alec, who for some years past had been pining for news from
home, and who could not but remember that his father was getting well
advanced in years, begged of his friend, on his arrival in the old
country, to go to Mapleford and make certain inquiries _sub rosa_, and
communicate the result to him. This Mr. Travis at once proceeded to do,
writing Alec to the effect that his stepmother and his three
half-brothers had all been some years dead, that a tablet to his,
Alec’s memory had been put up in the church where so many of his
progenitors were buried, that his son had been adopted by Sir Gilbert
as the latter’s heir, and that his wife, under the designation of Mrs.
Alexander Clare, was residing at the house known as Maylings, within a
mile of the Chase.
Alec was astounded. His child had been a girl, and he had still by him,
carefully preserved, his wife’s heartless letter and the certificate of
the infant’s death. The result of Mr. Travis’s letter was that, three
weeks later, Alec landed at Liverpool.
What followed is already known to the reader. Alec’s reason for not
denouncing Luigi to Sir Gilbert at an earlier date was owing to his
wife’s absence in Italy, of which he had learnt through certain
inquiries made on his account by Martin Rigg. Before taking any
positive steps in the affair he was desirous of obtaining some certain
evidence as to how far Giovanna was implicated in the fraud, his
intention being to seek an interview with her immediately upon her
return. Rispani’s attempt on the strong room had brought matters to a
climax a little sooner than he had anticipated.
He had not failed to hear of Luigi’s departure next day from the Chase,
but although his mission was accomplished and there no longer existed
any reason why he should not return to his far-away home, he stayed on
day after day, unable to tear himself from the haunts of his youth and
the roof-tree where he had been born. But at length he had made up his
mind that the next day should be the final one of his stay, and as the
evening shadows closed in he had gone to take his last walk in the
grounds and his last look at the old mansion. It was the evening on
which Sir Gilbert, finding himself alone indoors owing to the absence
of Lady Pell and the others on their expedition to Dunarvon Castle, had
gone for a twilight stroll in the shrubbery. From the shelter of a bank
of evergreens he had been watched by his son as he passed slowly to and
fro on the sward, puffing absently at his cigar and buried deep in
thought. Hence it had come to pass that Alec was within a dozen yards
of him when, overcome by a sudden dizziness, he stumbled and sank to
the ground. His son’s strong arms had lifted him and carried him into
the library by way of the French window. Then, after depositing him on
a couch and pressing a kiss on his forehead, Alec had rung the bell and
made a hurried exit by the way he had come.
Next morning he had decided to delay his departure till he should be
able to ascertain whether his father was suffering from any after
effects of the attack of the previous evening, but the sudden
appearance of Sir Gilbert as he emerged from the spinney on his way to
the Tower, to all appearance in his usual health, had at once
dissipated his fears on that score. It was through an upper window of
the Tower that he had seen his father’s approach; then had come the
latter’s unanswered summons at the door, and after that his departure
across the park in the direction of the lodge. Alec had rightly
surmised that it was a wish to question Martin Rigg that had brought
Sir Gilbert to the Tower, but he had of course no knowledge of the
motives which had prompted the visit. The same evening, a couple of
hours after nightfall, he had emerged from the Tower, and after locking
the door and depositing the key in a place where Rigg on his return
would know where to look for it, he had crossed the park, no longer
wearing the robe and cowl of the Grey Monk, but in his ordinary attire,
and after walking to Westwood station, four miles away, had taken the
train for London. After a brief stay in town, where nobody recognised
him, and where he made no effort to seek out any of his old-time
friends or acquaintances, he had journeyed to Liverpool and booked
himself as a passenger by the _Arbaces_.
It is not difficult to imagine with what absorbed interest Everard
Lisle listened to the narrative of Alec Clare. There still remained one
point, and others would doubtless crop up later on, as to which his
curiosity was unsatisfied. “Now that you have told me so much, Mr.
Clare,” he said presently, “perhaps you won’t mind enlightening me as
to the means by which you were enabled to make your way into and out of
the Chase, as it seemed, whenever you chose to do so, without anyone
being a bit the wiser.”
Alec laughed. “The explanation is a very simple one, or so it will seem
when you hear it,” he said. “The room which used to be my mother’s
boudoir, and which has latterly, I believe, been assigned to Lady Pell,
has two windows, both of which were originally of the long, narrow,
old-fashioned kind, but one of which, at my mother’s desire, was
modernised into what is called a French window, so that she might have
a means of ready access to the garden—for she was somewhat of an
invalid—without having to go round by the corridor and the side door.
The other window was left untouched and, to all appearance, was not
intended to open in any way. But one day, when a lad of ten, I lighted,
quite by accident, on a secret spring which, when pressed in a
particular way, caused the window to turn bodily on a swivel. Through
the aperture thus formed any ordinary sized person could squeeze
himself without much difficulty. I kept my discovery to myself, finding
it useful on several occasions, when I was a rackety young fellow home
for my holidays. To what use I put it of late you will have guessed
already.”
Next morning Alec Clare set out on his journey back to Withington
Chase. As a rule he was much averse to Sunday travelling, but the
present occasion was an altogether exceptional one. He already felt
like another man. The ban which had been laid on him more than a score
years before had at length been taken off. His father had written,
“Come back to me—I want you.” The long breach was about to be healed.
All was to be forgiven and forgotten. Not as a lonely childless old man
would his father henceforth drag out his days. And when he thought of
what he himself was going back to, his heart felt full to the point of
overflowing with deep thankfulness and that sort of chastened elation
which, in the case of those who have seen much tribulation and are
imbued with a sense of the unstableness of things mundane, often is all
they dare permit themselves to feel.
Everard in the course of the previous afternoon had despatched a
telegram to Sir Gilbert, informing him that he had overtaken “Mr.
Alexander” before the latter had sailed, and that he, the aforesaid Mr.
A., might be looked for at the Chase in the course of the afternoon of
the morrow.
He further wrote a brief note to the Baronet informing him that he was
called to London by some special private business, and that he had
taken the liberty of claiming a couple of days’ release from his duties
at the Chase.
Everard’s telegram arrived at the Chase while Sir Gilbert was at
dinner. When he had read it he passed it to Lady Pell, who, as soon as
she had taken in the message, gave it back to him with a look that was
more expressive than words. Then he got up and left the room. He felt
that he could not have spoken without breaking down. An hour later her
ladyship went in search of him and found him in his study, seated by
the fire with the telegram clasped tightly in his fingers. “May I come
in?” she asked, standing with the handle of the open door in her hand.
“To be sure, Louisa. I am glad you have come. You are the only person
who can understand what I feel without my needing to say a word about
it. Even now I can scarcely believe that in a few short hours I shall
see my boy and hold his hand in mine. Not till death steps in between
us, Louisa, shall anything part us again!”
It was Lady Pell who, next afternoon, met Alec at the railway station.
Sir Gilbert would not trust himself to go. He was afraid that his
emotion would overpower him, and he was nervously shy of making a scene
in public. Nor was he at the door to welcome his son when the latter
alighted at the Chase, but Lady Pell’s instinct told her where to look
for him. “Come with me,” she said to Alec, and with that she led the
way to the study. On reaching it she opened the door and motioned him
to enter. Sir Gilbert, his tall, gaunt figure drawn to its fullest
height, was standing on the hearthrug, supporting himself with one hand
on the chimney-piece, his face turned expectantly towards the door. He
was trembling in every limb, and as Alec went quickly forward he put
forth his arms and made a faltering step or two to meet him. “Oh, my
son—my son!” he cried, his voice breaking into a sob as the last words
left his lips.
Lady Pell gently closed the door and left them together.