"I dare say you have been much puzzled, Mr. Biddulph, to know why I, a
clergyman of the Church of England, have apparently been mixed up with
persons of shady character. But now that four of them are under
arrest, and a fifth, we hope, will shortly be apprehended, I will
explain. As you perhaps know, Sonia was the daughter of the Honourable
Philip Poland, who came to live at the Elms, which is close to the
rectory at Middleton. We became great friends, until one evening he
made a strange confession to me. He told me who he was--Louis Lessar,
who had been the leader of a dangerous band of international
thieves--and he asked my advice in my capacity of spiritual guide. He
had repented, and had gone into retirement there, believing that his
sins would not find him out. But they had done, and he knew he must
shortly be arrested. Well, I advised him to act the man, and put aside
the thoughts of suicide. What he had revealed to me had--I regret to
confess it--aroused my hatred against the man who had betrayed him--a
man named Du Cane. This man Du Cane I had only met once, at the Elms,
and then I did not realize the amazing truth--that this was the
selfsame man who had stolen from me, twenty years before, the woman I
had so dearly loved. He had betrayed her, and left her to starve and
die in a back street in Marseilles. I concealed my outburst of
feeling, yet the very next evening Poland was arrested, and Sonia,
ignorant of the truth, was, with a motive already explained by
Monsieur Guertin, taken under the guardianship of this man whom I had
such just cause to hate--the man who subsequently passed as her
father, Pennington. It was because of that I felt all along such a
tender interest in the unhappy young lady, and I was so delighted to
know when she had at last become your wife."
"You certainly concealed your feelings towards Pennington. I believed
you to be his friend," I said.
"I was Sonia's friend--not his, for what poor Poland had told me
revealed the truth that the fellow was an absolute scoundrel."
"And you, of course, know about the incident of a man closely
resembling the French detective Guertin being found dead outside the
door of the Elms?"
"Certainly," was his reply; "that is still a complete mystery which
can only be solved by Poland himself. He must know, or else have a
shrewd idea of what occurred."
As we chatted on for a long time, he told me frankly many things of
which I had not the least suspicion, at the same time assuring me of
Sonia's deep devotion towards me, and of his confidence that she had
left me because she believed being at her father's side would ensure
my own safety.
And now that I knew so much of the truth I longed hourly to meet her,
and to obtain from her--and perhaps from the lips of Philip Poland
himself--the remaining links in that remarkable chain of facts.