‘I will take your card in to Mr Sturgis, sir. I don’t know, I’m sure,
about his being well enough to see you; but perhaps you’ll please to
wait,’ said the tall, prim, grim parlour-maid who acted as janitress of
the front-door of a slack-baked villa at Putney, one of twin villas,
which were called—at the express desire of the inhabitant of the other
one, old Colonel Chutnee, H.E.I.C.S.—Bundelcund Mansions. They were
capacious villas these, as might be augured from the grandiloquent name
that had been fathered upon them; and they had pleasant gardens, with
shaven turf, weeping-willows, and azalea beds in the first style of
suburban gardening, sloping down to the river at the gentle curve of
Putney Reach.
No. 1 Bundelcund Mansions belonged, so far as lease and furniture went,
to Colonel Chutnee; No. 2 Bundelcund Mansions, to Ebenezer Sturgis,
Esq., retired from the practice of law. Lord Harrogate, who was the
visitor-expectant at the ex-lawyer’s outer portals, had often heard of
Mr Sturgis, as having been formerly solicitor to that young Baroness
Harrogate who had been so unfortunate as wife and mother, and to his
own father the Earl; but he had never seen Mr Sturgis.
The Aldershot Autumn Manœuvres were over, the troops dispersed, and
the victory of Lord Moffat over Sir David Roberts—hard won, and much
trumpeted by the newspapers, whose correspondents had accompanied the
respective staffs of the belligerent generals—was already as much
forgotten by the public as the shreds of cartridge-case that lay strewn
among the Wessex stubble-fields. Lord Harrogate had time now to attend
to the queer business broached by that respectable person, Mr Richard
Hold.
‘Master will see you, sir—my lord,’ said the grim, prim parlour-maid,
dropping a flurried courtesy, in acknowledgment of the rank of the
visitor, as she returned. ‘Only you must please walk into the garden.
He’s mostly there in the fine weather.’
Hard by the water’s edge, in a leafy arbour, overrun with American
creepers, with the morning newspapers neatly arranged upon a table
beside him, and a long slender fishing-rod lying on the turf within
reach, was Mr Sturgis, a little nervous-mannered, trimly attired old
gentleman, who shaded his eyes with one thin white hand, and then held
it out in salutation.
‘You’ve a De Vere face, my lord,’ he said, rising from his chair. ‘A
boy you were, a boy, when I saw you last. But I have known so many of
the name.’
Mr Sturgis was deaf; and it was through the serpentine tube of an
ear-trumpet that Lord Harrogate had to explain the object of his visit.
He wished, he said, that Mr Sturgis would so far oblige him as to
recall his recollections of the time when Clare, Baroness Harrogate,
lost that only child who would in due course have succeeded her in
the title that had now lapsed to the Wolverhampton line. Was it not
true—a proper explanation should be forthcoming as to the reason for
the inquiry—that Mr Sturgis had been at the late Lady Harrogate’s
cottage-residence, beside the Thames, on the very day of the child’s
drowning? Was it not also true that there were some suspicions of foul
play?
The little old lawyer fidgeted very much with his yellow silk
pocket-handkerchief, his gold-rimmed spectacles, and a tiny gold
snuff-box that lay on the table at his elbow, before he returned any
answer to these questions. ‘Poor young thing! poor young creature!’ he
said at last ‘Yes; I was there. I attended her ladyship in Berkshire,
there, at her request, to see to the proper execution of some legal
documents relating to the trifling property her late husband the
Colonel had left behind him; and within a few minutes of my reaching
Holly Cottage, the accident occurred. Ah, to be sure! It was sad, very
sad!’
‘You speak of it, I perceive, as an accident?’ said Lord Harrogate
interrogatively. ‘There were reports, I believe, to the contrary?’
‘Why, yes,’ replied Mr Sturgis, in a slow reluctant tone. ‘The vulgar,
your lordship knows, like a spice of the marvellous, especially when
a death is in question, and there were ugly rumours flying about—soon
hushed up and forgotten, though.’
‘Do you imagine that there was any substratum of solid truth underlying
these rumours?’ asked Lord Harrogate through the trumpet.
‘Now, my dear sir—my dear lord—that’s a leading question,’ said
the little lawyer argumentatively, and laying one weak hand on his
visitor’s coat-sleeve. ‘What we have to deal with, as men of business
and men of the world, are first facts, and then probabilities. The case
_primâ facie_ was a very simple one. Child, of tender years, left alone
on terrace overlooking river—scream heard—infant’s body vainly sought
for in the Thames—a very melancholy but commonplace concatenation of
circumstances. Nothing but the rank of the parties called attention to
the misfortune.’
‘And yet, Mr Sturgis, you do not believe that things passed in this
commonplace, everyday fashion?’ said Lord Harrogate.
‘_Argumentum ad hominem_, my lord—_argumentum ad_—— Ah! whisssh!’
exclaimed Mr Sturgis, tottering to his feet and flourishing his arms
like an insane semaphore—‘whisssh! you bloodthirsty animal!’
And as he spoke, he flung a short cudgel, that lay concealed among the
leafy walls of the arbour, into a clump of rose-bushes a few yards
distant. A large cat, scared by the hostile demonstration, scuttled
hastily towards the boundary-wall, leaped into a tree, and regaining
the neutral ground of the brickwork, turned, with arching back and
swollen tail, and glared at its human enemy.
‘One of old Chutnee’s cats—the Colonel’s cats; Persians, he calls them;
but they are neither deaf nor white, so that’s all nonsense—after my
pigeons!’ explained Mr Sturgis. ‘I saw the brindled monster, the same
that robbed me of two pretty fantails and a pouter, stealing like a
tigerkin through the bushes. Most encroaching, unprincipled, odious,
old fellow is that neighbour of mine. I wish he were back with his
sepoys. I wish he had stopped in that detestable Bundelcund, the
heathenish name of which he was pigheaded enough to get painted on this
house of mine, as if I, of all people, were a Qui Hi, like himself.’
‘Uncongenial tastes,’ said Lord Harrogate, smiling, ‘must detract a
great deal from the pleasures of good neighbourhood.’
‘Good neighbourhood indeed!’ cried Mr Sturgis irritably. ‘I might as
well be cheek-by-jowl with a Pindharee or a Dacoo, or any other of the
outlandish robbers that the Colonel spent such part of his life in
hunting as he could spare from billiards and bitter beer and brandy
pawnee. It’s not only his cats—it’s everything! His very hookah, in
which he smokes rascally eastern drugs, to which tobacco is harmless,
poisons the air. He trespasses on everything. He ground-baits for fish
until the dace in the river turn up their noses at paste or gentle. He
lets long lines, all over hooks, trail down the current, entangling the
tackle of other anglers. There’s nothing, really nothing, of which that
redfaced Half-pay is not capable, and until he dies of apoplexy, there
will be no comfort for me!’
It was evident that there was a standing feud between the man of war
and the man of peace. It cost Lord Harrogate some trouble to divert
the ex-lawyer’s mind from Colonel Chutnee and his misdoings to his own
reminiscences as to that sad little episode that had been enacted years
before at Holly Cottage. And it proved impossible to pin so slippery a
witness to the point as concerned his own impressions with respect to
the cause of the catastrophe. Mr Sturgis was one of those casuists who
have been blessed, or the reverse, with that peculiarly legal intellect
which takes delight in the niceties of mental straw-splitting,
and the edge of which is too fine for the practical work of this
rough-and-ready world. He was timid too, and nervously reluctant—having
the fear of the law of libel perpetually before his eyes, wherever
Colonel Chutnee was not the subject of discourse—to speak his mind.
Nevertheless, Lord Harrogate gathered from the ex-solicitor’s guarded
talk that the speaker’s delicately balanced opinion inclined towards
the hypothesis that there _had_ been something wrong. It was singular
that the poor little thing’s body had never been recovered. Men had
been dragging, dragging night and day; and not the river Thames alone,
but every creek, backwater, weir, and pool had been examined within
miles. That the infant had been murdered, was a supposition grossly
improbable. It was no one’s interest to make away with the heiress
of a barren title. Kidnapping was, under the circumstances, almost
as unlikely as murder. Gipsies, credited in popular belief with such
offences, had never been taxed with stealing a child too young to beg,
and who would therefore be useless to the strolling tribe. Nor would
the lithest Zingari be bold and deft enough to venture on a theft so
audacious, so difficult, and so unprofitable.
Yet, though Mr Sturgis glibly enumerated all the grounds on which a
verdict of ‘Accidental drowning’ might be returned by a coroner’s jury,
Lord Harrogate felt more and more convinced that the little lawyer in
his heart of hearts believed that something was amiss.
‘Rumours were afloat at the time,’ said Lord Harrogate; ‘and unless I
am greatly mistaken, inquiries were made?’
Mr Sturgis assented. ‘Idle tongues wagged,’ he said, ‘in various
circles of society; and we sifted, as was our duty—I speak of myself
and of my esteemed coadjutors, Messrs Pounce and Pontifex—much loose
gossip, and found a residuum of—nothing. There was much assertion, but
not an iota of proof.’
However, at the close of the interview, Mr Sturgis hospitably pressed
on his visitor a glass of old Madeira—‘Very rare, my lord, existing
only in a few private cellars; the present, forty years since, of a
ducal client of mine.’
After some further quiet conversation upon the mysterious subject in
hand, the lawyer put into the possession of Lord Harrogate the half of
a card torn in two, which had for two decades reposed peaceably in the
recesses of his own desk; and told him that this card, picked up on the
towing-path by one of the men employed in searching for the child’s
body, was the only fragment of mute evidence that was now in exigence.