Charley Meredith walked home from St. John’s Wood to his chambers, which
were in one of the streets about Berkeley Square, between two and three
o’clock in the morning. It was in the week between Christmas and the New
Year, when the fashionable parts of London were very quiet, but the
other parts--the domestic quarters, so to speak, where people live all
the year round--more lively than usual. Yet it is needless to say that
he had on the whole a quiet walk; and it was a long one--a capital
opportunity for thinking, which is an exercise that often goes on best
when it is accompanied by physical movement, and the sensation of the
fresh air in one’s face.
Meredith had spent an exciting night. Had it been nothing but the two
interviews above recorded, he would not have been without something to
think of, and the consideration of the fertile crop of embarrassments
and conflicting questions which no doubt would spring from them might
have occupied him not unprofitably for an hour or two. He had gone
further in one way than he had ever done before, having deliberately
deceived Gussy and given her to understand that within a definite period
he would present himself as an avowed suitor for--nay, claimant of her
hand. In the passing thought he gave to this subject he said to himself
that it was silly to have indicated a definite time. Yet, as nobody
could prophesy what a year might bring forth, there was perhaps but
little harm, and a hundred things might happen in the meantime to blow
all that nonsense away. And he had also committed himself in respect to
Janet, for whom he felt a real inclination as much resembling love as
anything he knew of. Yes, if circumstances permitted, if it should turn
out to be anything but the last folly to a man in his position, he felt
that he should like to carry off that little girl, to marry her, and pet
her, and be amused by her quick understanding and her piquant looks. She
was not too rigid about duty and so forth, though she took upon her that
little schoolmistress’s manner and reproved him for his levity.
It was perhaps not quite the most appropriate thing she could have done
to betray the secrets of the house, and help him to the means of
satisfying a long-smouldering curiosity; but it was very clever of her
to find out, and, very engaging as well as serviceable to choose him for
the confidant of her discoveries. Poor little thing! He felt that
henceforward his attentions to Gussy, which it would now less than ever
suit him to break off, would plant thorns in the bosom of the governess,
which was a pity, for she was a nice little thing, far more tempting
than---- But these thoughts were all disposed of before Mr. Charles
Meredith got to the end of the street; or at least before he got to the
boundaries of St. John’s Wood: and a much more important matter filled
the foreground of his thoughts.
To enter into a history of the Harwood family at this period of our
story would be too great a tax upon the reader, and it may be enough to
say that this most respectable family had not been altogether so
spotless as was supposed by the respectable inhabitants of St. John’s
Wood. There was a break in the tradition, and that a very recent and
important one. The husband of Mrs. Harwood and father of her children
had been one of those bold speculators who often ruin whole
communities. When a number of bubbles burst which he had been
instrumental in blowing about the world it had been necessary for Mr.
Adolphus Harwood to disappear; and he had done so, leaving but one
feeling of pity for his wife and young children, and for his father--an
old man, who was said to be bowed down to the dust by his son’s
iniquities.
After a while, though the interval was one of several years, information
was received that he had died in Spain, and imperceptibly things mended
for the family. His father being dead, Dolff became without any trouble
the legitimate heir of the little entailed property upon which his
grandfather lived, and the money matters of the house in general were
cleared up, though I cannot explain how, having small knowledge of such
subjects. It was found that Mrs. Harwood was not so badly off as had
been supposed. She had some money of her own, which it was said formed
the greater part of her living, and there were other resources of which
nobody knew any particulars except, it is to be hoped, her man of
business. She had at once rejected any quixotic notion of giving up what
she had for herself and her children to satisfy the creditors of her
husband. It would not have been enough to give them a pittance all
round, and in the meantime she and her son and the girls would be added
to the army of the destitute without doing anybody good. Some people
think differently on such matters, but Mrs. Harwood had never wavered in
her determination, and in general her conduct was at least not
disapproved by her friends, who thought her an excellent woman of
business and as full of integrity and steadiness as her husband had been
the reverse.
These things had happened when the children were very young, and they
were now forgotten, save in the tenacious memories of a few who had
suffered through the failure of Mr. Adolphus Harwood, and who did not
fail to bear a certain grudge against his family. It had all taken place
at a distance, in Liverpool, where his business was, and where failures
and ruin are commonplace matters such as occur every day; and their home
where old Mr. Harwood lived was in North Wales, far away from any
communication with St. John’s Wood.
Mrs. Harwood had never lived in that house, which had been let from the
period of her father-in-law’s death, and was not known much in the
neighborhood. She had been nearly fifteen years in St. John’s Wood,
where she had soon become known as a liberal supporter of the parish
charities and an acquisition to the neighborhood in every sense of the
word; and where nobody inquired into the family history of an agreeable
widow, very well off, and with nice children. Now the description of the
household was changed--nice young people with an agreeable mother was
how they now presented themselves to the knowledge of the world; and any
little episodes that had happened in Liverpool or in the wilds of North
Wales were totally unknown.
Meredith, however, was an exception to this ignorance. He was a
Welshman. He had known them all his life, and he knew everything about
them. It had been at first unpleasant to Mrs. Harwood to acknowledge his
claims, for she preferred to ignore altogether their previous
circumstances. But, seeing that it was impossible to shake him off, she
had taken the part of making the best of him and speaking freely to him
of relations and connections like a woman who had nothing to conceal.
Meredith had friends who were well off, if he was not, for the present,
very well off himself; and when it became apparent that there was a
mutual inclination between him and Gussy, Mrs. Harwood was glad of it,
partly because his father had been one of the sufferers by her husband’s
failure, and might thus be partially recouped for his losses, and partly
because Meredith’s mouth would thus be effectually stopped, and no
revelations need be apprehended from him--though, as she sensibly
remarked, “What does any scandal matter after fifteen years?”
Meredith’s motives were perhaps more difficult to read. They had indeed
been easy enough at first, for he had really liked Gussy, and had felt
her to be as good a match as he could aspire to. Latterly, however,
several circumstances had struck him as strange in the house with which
he was so familiar. They had been scarcely of note enough to call for
any consideration singly; but put together they had awakened a
suspiciousness not unnatural in a mind trained to the complexities of
the law.
Had he been ignorant of the history of the Harwoods; had he been
altogether without the tradition of animosity which lingers in the mind
of a man who has a hereditary injury in his thoughts, it is probable he
would not have remarked these little incidents. The chief of them was
Vicars, whose countenance seemed one of evil omen to the young man. He
had come by degrees to the belief that there was something in the house
to be found out.
Nothing, however, had prepared him for Janet’s extraordinary revelations
and for the discovery more extraordinary still which he had himself
made. It was this which he turned over in his mind, viewing it from
every side, considering it in every possible light, as he walked
briskly along the long line of silent streets. It seemed a thing almost
incredible that an unsuspecting family could have a man hidden in their
house with such elaborate precautions, shut up in rooms which were given
out to be uninhabitable, yet surrounded with comforts, kept from all air
and vision yet manifestly cared for--a mystery in the midst of the
commonest matter-of-fact details of life.
The face which he had seen, though but for a moment, communicated no
idea to Meredith’s mind. It was not like anyone whom he had ever seen
before. The long white hair, the long pallid countenance, was more like
those of a hermit in the desert than of a dweller in an ordinary English
house.
The eagerness with which the young man had followed up the mystery had
fallen somewhat blank when he got to the climax and saw the cause of
all. The thread which he had seemed to hold in his hand broke off short.
He had not known or been able to imagine to what it might lead, yet had
associated it somehow with the story of the family, and expected it to
throw some light upon that. But the light he had been hoping for seemed
suddenly to go out as he gazed through the curtains at this strange old
man. Who was he? What connection could he have with the family in whose
house he was hidden? Was it Vicars who was responsible--Vicars, who was
the representative of mystery in the house--the old servant who was no
longer a servant? Could this be some private undertaking of his own of
which not even Mrs. Harwood was aware?
But when Meredith thought of the curtains, the softly-moving noiseless
spring doors, all left, no doubt, that Vicars at a moment’s warning
might rush back to his patient, or his prisoner, or his victim--which
was it? he was again stopped suddenly as by a blank wall of
impossibility. Vicars could not have fitted up the rooms with all those
elaborate precautions. He could not without Mrs. Harwood’s knowledge
have arranged everything for secrecy and at the same time for comfort in
that way. Was it then some one whom Mrs. Harwood was hiding? But whom?
But whom?
Gussy and Janet and all the embarrassments connected with them died away
from Meredith’s mind as this problem presented itself to his
intelligence. Who was it? That curious curtained room--it suddenly
flashed upon his mind that it might be a padded room prepared for a
lunatic: and this seemed for a moment to throw an illusive light upon
the problem, but only for a moment: for he could not think that Mrs.
Harwood would permit Vicars to harbor a lunatic in her house, in the
near neighborhood of her children; and who could it be whom she could
shut up like that in lawless disregard of all rules? Nobody. There was
not a madman in the family that he had ever heard of.
This last idea, however, seized upon Meredith with greater force as he
considered. He remembered the cry which he himself had heard more than
once, and which had been put aside with careless explanations as
something which was to be heard from time to time from a neighboring
house, or from the streets, or a shriek from the railway, or the effect
of the wind when it blew in certain directions. He remembered even to
have asked, “Is there any private asylum near?” and how it had been
suggested by some one that there was somebody out of his mind next door.
He had said that in that case he hoped the people next door were aware
that it was unlawful to keep a maniac capable of uttering cries like
that in an unauthorized house.
This forgotten conversation suddenly surged up before him as if it had
been laid up in his memory for future use. Was the man mad? Was it
Vicars who had him in charge, backed up by his mistress, injudiciously
kind, or was it she who was the prime mover and Vicars only the
instrument? He puzzled about this insolvable question, turning it a long
time over and over in his brain, until at last he came back to the fact
that even were this matter solved to his full satisfaction it would
leave him as much in the dark as before. For who was the man? This,
after all, was the only thing that it was of any importance to know.
Meredith made a long excursion as he walked along into all the
connections of the Harwood family of whom he had ever heard. He was
something of a genealogist, and he had the excellent memory of a
country-bred individual for all the cousins, and brothers-in-law, and
connections generally of people near home. No; he could think of nobody
related to the family on either side who had been mad or who had
disappeared or failed to be accounted for. There was nobody. It could
not be a mere connection, a far-off friend, who was thus cared for. It
must be some one whose life was of importance, for whom secrecy was
necessary; whose madness was either to be concealed under a pretence of
absence, or who was so near in love that to retain his custody the law
was transgressed and defied.
But there was no such person, none. Everybody that had to do with the
Harwoods was respectable, known, above suspicion, except the scoundrel
of a husband who had died so many years ago. Could it be that the widow,
already in middle age when her husband died, had loved some other man,
and perhaps secretly married, or at least taken him into her house when
attacked by the dreadful malady?
Meredith was in a very silent bit of the way when he came to this
hypothesis, and its effect upon him was such that he stopped short and
laughed aloud. Mrs. Harwood, the most irreproachable of women and
mothers, more than middle-aged, never moving out of her wheeled chair!
That she should have a postscriptal romance--a love-affair in her
fifties: and that the man should go mad--of love probably--and be
guarded thus as the apple of her eye! She seemed to rise before him in
all her comfortable ease and motherliness--poor lady! not able to
walk--to rebuke the wild imagination. He laughed, but then all at once
became grave again: for that same easy-minded woman, the respectable
mother, the elderly mistress of so correct a household, must be in the
mystery one way or another. She it must be who had settled and arranged
the whole elaborate business. It could not be Vicars, who was a
man-servant in no way above the level of his class. He could not have
done it; could not have the means to do it, or the knowledge. The
mistress of the house must be involved. Her purse and her brain must be
in it, whoever the mysterious patient or prisoner was. Who was the man?
Beyond that question Meredith, with all his acuteness, could not go.
What a strange sight it was, looking in at him through the curtains!
Meredith said to himself that the man must have been drugged to lie in
such a deep stupor of sleep. Something must have been given to him to
keep him quiet, to make it possible to fill a house in which such an
inmate was, with music and the sound of the dancers’ feet and the hum of
a lively crowd. And the incredible rashness, temerity, of doing so--of
carrying on all the gayeties of life in a house occupied by such a
spectre, on the other side of the wall only from the unconscious
merrymakers! It was like a woman to do that, with a regardlessness of
all consequences, a want of natural logic which belonged only to women:
for everybody surely must see that one time or other such a thing must
be found out. Nothing in the whole matter was so certain as that--that
one time or other it was bound to be found out. It was like a woman to
do it: but even a woman, one would have thought, possessing such a
secret would shut her house up and keep society at least at arm’s
length. But no; on the contrary, all sorts of pleasant things went on in
the house. It was open to all the friends of the young people, who
visited it, stayed in it, came there as freely as to the most
commonplace of houses. And all the time that man shut up in the wing!
Any one of them might have pushed open the door at some careless moment
as Janet and he had done, and found his or her way upstairs. Any one of
them might have seen the spectre, so notable as he was in appearance;
not a face to forget. And what then?
But Mrs. Harwood, with the incredible inconsequence of a woman, had
ignored all that. No doubt Vicars, to spare himself trouble, had got
into a way of leaving the door unfastened, the spring uncaught, to save
himself trouble. And they thought they never would be found out. They
gave dinners and dances and asked all sorts of people to come and pass
within sound of the maniac. They might drug him, but they could not drug
the spectators, who, one time or other, as sure as Nemesis, must have
found out--as Charley had done.
But who was the man?