"All of us sinful, all with need of grace,
All chary of our life,--the minute more
Or minute less of grace which saves a soul,--
Bound to make common cause with who craves time,
We yet protest against the exorbitance
Of sin in this one sinner, and demand
That his poor sole remaining piece of time
Be plucked from out his clutch: put him to death!
Punish him now! As for the weal or woe
Hereafter, God grant mercy! Man be just,
Nor let the felon boast he went scot-free!"
The sky was dull and leaden, and there was a fine rain falling--the
kind of rain that means to stay--when Faunce bent his footsteps from
Sloane Square to Selburne Street, Chelsea.
"The kind of atmosphere that slackens fiddle-strings and women's
nerves," thought Faunce. "I shall find her in the doldrums."
"Well, Betsy, how's your first floor to-day?" he asked, when the little
servant opened the door.
"Oh, she's in one of her nasty tempers--just because the sittin'-room
chimley smoked all the mornin'--and she's that low! But you'll cheer
'er hup, I dessay."
"I don't know about that, Betsy," said Mr. Faunce, who did not feel
himself the harbinger of joy.
"Come in, can't you?" Mrs. Randall said peevishly, when he knocked at
the door.
She was crouching over the fire, in a room that was grey with smoke,
and she was wearing a terrible garment of soiled and crumpled plush,
with a ragged bead trimming--a garment she called her tea-gown, but
which on her "low" days was breakfast, tea, and dinner gown, and
sometimes served also as bed-gown, when the morphia needle had been
freely used, and she flung herself upon her bed in a casual way, to
dream through the long night.
"Oh, it's you!" she said. "Come and sit down, if you can breathe in
this stifling hole. That beast of a chimney left off smoking an hour
ago, but I can't get the smoke out of the room, though I had the
winder open till I got the shivers. Well, what's your news?" she asked
carelessly, by way of starting the conversation.
"Bad," he answered, in a grave voice. "Very bad. I have just come from
Southampton."
It was nearly four o'clock, and the London light was waning, but it was
light enough for him to see the livid change in her customary pallor.
"Well, old chap, and what may you have been doing there?" she asked,
with an attempt at sprightliness. "Been to see your sweetheart, or to
offer yourself for M.P. at the next vacancy?"
"I have been looking for a murdered man," he said.
Her eyes fixed themselves on his face in wondering horror.
"That ain't a very lively sort of occupation," she said, after a pause,
still keeping up that assumption of gay indifference. "I hope the party
wasn't a near relation."
"No; he was not of my blood, nor of yours; but he was bound to you by
every link that should make a man's life sacred. He was bound to you
body and soul, and you helped to murder him."
"Oh, my God!" she cried; "oh, my God! Man alive, don't talk to me like
that. Take the poker and smash my head open; but don't talk like that!"
"I must. I pity you, but I can't spare you. It is my trade to drag
secret crimes into the light of day."
"You're a detective," she cried. "Oh, you paltry cad, you hypocrite,
you coward, to come hanging about me and pretending to be my friend."
"I'll be the best friend you ever had, if you'll give me the chance.
Come now, Mrs. Randall; your life's been a misery to you ever since
that night by Southampton Water."
Her terrified gaze widened as he spoke. She looked at him as if a
spirit of supernatural omniscience, a Nemesis in human form, were
before her.
"If this bad business had never come to light, if nobody had ever come
to know how Colonel Rannock was murdered, if Bolisco had never been
brought to book----"
She started at the name, but the Medusa face remained unchanged.
"How much would your life have been worth to you? Could you have ever
been a happy woman?"
"No, no, no," she wailed, "never again! I loved him! He was the only
man I ever loved. I used him badly enough, God knows; but he was the
only one, the only one. Poor old Tony was a good sort, and I made a
fool of him and helped him to ruin himself, and I was sorry when he
went off in a decline. Poor chap! He just chucked his life away. Too
much fizz, and too much card-playing and late hours. Poor old Tony. He
was only six and twenty when the doctors gave him over."
"But Rannock was the favourite," said Faunce.
"Yes, Dick was my one true love--the handsomest, the cleverest, the
bravest, and always the gentleman--always the gentleman," she repeated,
sobbing, "though I don't mean to say he was straight at cards. He had
to get his money somehow, poor fellow."
"You loved him, and you lured him to his death. You told Bolisco
where he was going, and that he was carrying his money with him, in
bank-notes."
"My God, yes! I told him. I was always a blabbing fool."
"You wrote the letter that took him to the shambles, and you stood by
and saw the blow struck."
"Great God! Do you think I knew what was coming? Do you think I'm a
fiend from hell dressed up like a woman?" she cried, with wildest
vehemence. "I wrote the letter--I was told to, and I had to obey. I
asked him to meet me at Southampton. Jim said if he could see Rannock
before he left England he could get a few pounds out of him for old
sake's sake; and Jim was as near beggary as a sporting man with a few
old friends left can be. I never thought he meant harm. Dick and he had
been friendly in the old days in the Abbey Road, and it seemed likely
enough that Dick would give him a helping hand. I didn't want to write
that letter, mind you, but I was bullied into doing it. You don't know
what Bolisco is."
"Yes, I do. I know he's a cold-blooded murderer, and that while you
and Rannock were walking by the water, Bolisco crept up behind you and
struck him on the back of his head with a life-preserver--a blow that
fractured his skull."
"Did any one see?" she gasped. "Oh, God, I've heard the dip of the oars
as the boat crept up to the wall--I've heard it all through the night
sometimes, in a dog's sleep--dip--dip--dip--and then a step on the
pavement behind us, and then a crash, and the dull thud when Rannock
fell. And I've sat by this fire in the half-light, as we're sitting
now, and I've seen him lying on the ground, and Bolisco kneeling by
his side emptying his pockets--note-case, watch, tie-pin, pulling
off his rings, tearing out his shirt-studs and links, as quick as
lightning--and then making me help to drag him to the boat. And I fancy
I am standing alone by the river, in the darkness, hearing the dip of
the oars fainter and fainter in the distance. It was like a horrible
dream then; and it has been a horrible dream to me ever since, a dream
that I dream over and over again, and shall go on dreaming till I die."
Her voice rose to a shriek. Faunce saw the fit of hysteria coming, and
snatched the morphia bottle and the morphia needle from the table where
his observant eye had marked them in his first survey of the room, the
practice of his profession having taught him that the first thing to do
on entering a room was to make a mental inventory of every object in it.
He held Mrs. Randall's wrist, and gave her a strong dose of her
favourite sedative.
"My poor friend, you have been hardly used," he said. "But your duty
lies straight before you. As an accessory after the fact, the law
will deal lightly with you, and you will have every one's pity. You
must turn Queen's evidence, and help us to punish Colonel Rannock's
murderer."
"That I'll never do!" she said emphatically.
"Oh, but surely, if you loved this man, you must want to avenge his
murder. Think what a cruel murder it was! A strong man struck down
in the prime of life. Think of that unburied corpse, lying hidden on
the solitary shore, the waters rolling over it as the tide rose and
fell--unknown, unhonoured. If you loved him, you must want to avenge
his murder."
"I ain't going to peach upon Jim Bolisco," she said doggedly. "And if I
was capable of it, my evidence would be no good."
"Why not?" asked Faunce, startled.
"Because he's my husband; and a wife can't give away her husband.
That's law, ain't it, Faunce?"
"Your husband? Is that true?"
"Gospel truth. We were married at Battersea Church when I was just
turned seventeen. I didn't care for him, and he's been a log round my
neck ever since. But he was in luck just then, and he used to give me
presents--bits of jewellery, and smart hats, and such-like--and he was
the first as ever took notice of me and told me I was handsome. And
he said he should take a cottage at Wandsworth, with a bit of garden,
and I was to be missus, and have a girl to wait upon me. But his luck
turned soon after our wedding--which was on the strict q.t.--and he
never took that cottage, and we never told father or anybody else. Jim
said our marriage was just a bit of a lark, and we'd best forget it;
but when I had a fine house and was flush of money, and might have
been Lady Withernsea for good and all, but for him, he didn't forget
it. I know what blackmail means, Mr. Faunce. I have been paying it
ever since I was eighteen. I had to find money for Bolisco when he
wanted it, for he swore he'd claim me as his wife if I didn't. I've had
what's-his-name's sword hanging over my head all these years, and I got
to hate the man worse every year; and now I hate him--I hate him,--I
hate him with every drop of blood in my veins! I turn cold when I hear
his step on the stair. I never look at him without remembering that
night, and my poor Dick lying on the ground, and Bolisco's wicked hands
tearing open his coat and searching his pockets, like a wild beast
mauling its prey."
"And you want to see him suffer for that brutal murder, don't you?"
"No; I want nothing but to have done with it all. Just to be out of it,
that's what I want. Do you think if they were to hang Bolisco, it would
set my mind at rest, or make me forget what a shrew I was to poor old
Dick, and how he forgave me, and came back to me after I'd treated him
so bad, and how I wrote the letter that lured him to his death? What do
I care what becomes of Bolisco? Let him murder somebody else, and get
nabbed for that. I don't care. Nothing will stop my bad dreams, till I
fall asleep for the last time: and then, who knows? There may be bad
dreams underground as well as above; or one long dream of hell-fire and
worms that gnaw."
"Come, come, Mrs. Randall, you mustn't despair," Faunce said kindly.
He was sorry for her, and yet what comfort could he offer? He looked
at her in her ruined beauty, and thought of her life, and the two men
whose lives she had spoilt. She had sown the wind, and she was reaping
the whirlwind, and he saw no hope for her in the black future.
What was he to do? He had come to her prepared to make his _coup
d'état_, having calculated that he could startle her into a revelation
of the murder, in which he believed her to have been an unwilling
accessory. He had succeeded, but his success was worth nothing if this
one all-important witness could not be heard.
He drove to Scotland Yard, put the facts of the case before the
assistant-commissioner, and Bolisco was arrested late that night at the
Game Cock, on suspicion of being concerned in the murder of Colonel
Richard Rannock. The evidence against him, excluding Kate Delmaine's
confession, was weak, but there was no time to lose, as she was likely
to warn him of his danger.
If the numbers of the notes he had changed could be identified with
Chater's list, there would be strong presumptive evidence against him,
and other facts might come to light on inquiry to strengthen the chain
of circumstance. Faunce relinquished the case to the Public Prosecutor.
It had passed beyond the region of private interests. A murder so
atrocious concerned the world at large, and the conviction of the
murderer was a matter of public importance.
One most painful duty Faunce had to perform, and he set about it with a
heavy heart. He had to tell Mrs. Rannock the story of her son's death.
Soften the details as he might, it was a terrible story to tell, and he
decided that it would be better for her son-in-law to be the bearer of
these dismal tidings.
He called on Major Towgood, whom he found in a small house nearer
Vauxhall Bridge than Eccleston Square, but by courtesy in Belgravia.
The Major received him in a little den darkened by a monster pile of
red brick flats, which he called the library.
"Well, Faunce, any news of the prodigal son?"
"Yes, sir."
"Bad news?"
"Very bad news, sir. I came to you in order that you might break it to
Mrs. Rannock."
"It will have to stand over, Faunce. Mrs. Rannock is very ill. I may
say she is dangerously ill."
"Indeed, sir? That's sudden, for it's only four days since I received
her instructions, and she then appeared in fair health, considering her
age."
"Yes, she was a wonder for her age, but always delicate--a bit of
porcelain that ought to have been behind glass in a cabinet. And she
was eaten up by anxiety about Rannock. She took a chill, coming round
here to see my wife, who is laid up, the evening after you saw her,
and it developed into influenza, or congestion of the lungs--God knows
what! The doctors only tell me she is old, and that her life hangs by a
thread; but I'm afraid we shall lose her, Faunce."
"If that sweet old lady dies without hearing what I have to tell her, I
think those who love her best will have cause to thank God, sir; for I
believe my story would kill her."
"Is it as bad as that?"
"It couldn't be worse, sir."
Faunce related his discoveries, and Major Towgood agreed that at all
cost the truth must be kept from the murdered man's mother. In her
intervals of consciousness she had repeatedly asked about Faunce and
the progress of his inquiry. And there had been hours of delirium in
which she thought the fondly-loved son was at her bedside. She had
taken a strange doctor for him, and had talked to him as to her son.
No, she must not know while the knowledge could possibly be kept from
her. But should she recover, and leave her room, the newspapers would
tell her of Bolisco's arrest, and the inquiry before the magistrate
at Southampton, where he was to be taken on the following day. And
it would not be possible to keep the newspapers from her. For her to
recover, and know her son's tragic fate, would mean a broken heart that
death alone could cure.
"Perhaps you're right, Faunce. Even my wife would hardly wish the dear
old lady to struggle back to life to suffer such a crushing blow. Poor
Dick! We always knew that woman would be his ruin. His sin has found
him out."
* * * * *
The Rannock murder was the _cause célèbre_ of the next few months.
The inquiry before the Southampton magistrate was adjourned from week
to week, and the case against James Bolisco gradually developed, till
the chain of evidence became as strong as circumstantial evidence well
can be. The numbers of the notes paid to the Wandsworth brewer by the
landlord of the Game Cock were traced, and proved identical with the
numbers in Chater's list. Bolisco was sworn to by the boatman as the
man who hired his boat on the date of Colonel Rannock's journey to
Southampton, and whom he never saw after the hiring. Bolisco was also
identified by the landlord of a humble little inn on the road between
Redbridge and Southampton, as having come to his house after midnight,
on that same date, in a strange condition, his boots and trousers
smothered in river mud, and one of his hands torn and bleeding. He had
hurt it with a hammer, he said. He ate a heavy supper, drank half a
bottle of brandy, paid his bill before he went to bed, and left next
morning before anybody in the house was astir.
Another link in the chain was a life-preserver which a Redbridge boy
had picked up in a lane leading from the river to the village street,
and on which were found minute splinters of bone, and tufts of human
hair, adhering to the heavy leaden knob. Chater pronounced the hair to
be of the colour and texture of his master's, while the surgeon, who
had given his evidence before the coroner, considered this formidable
weapon the kind of instrument calculated to cause the fracture he had
described at the inquest.
The victim's watch and tie pin, a valuable ruby, had been pawned by the
murderer late in the year, and a West-end pawnbroker swore to Bolisco
as the man from whom he received them. Watch and pin were identified by
Major Towgood.
Bolisco had carried out his design with a kind of brutal carelessness
of consequences which might have seemed more natural in one of Nero's
gladiators, a half-tamed savage from Dalmatian forests, than in a
son of the London streets. He had presumed upon the consciousness of
brute force, and when the inquest was over, and his victim's identity
unsuspected, he had considered himself safe for life. He stared at the
witnesses in a blank surprise, as one fact after another was marshalled
against him, and stood with bent brows, in a sullen apathy, at the end
of the proceedings, when he heard himself committed for trial at the
next assizes.
In the dock at Winchester, and in the condemned cell at Newgate, he had
time to reflect upon his mistakes, and to think how he might have done
the thing better.
That was James Bolisco's repentance.
* * * * *
Mrs. Rannock did not live to know of her son's ghastly fate. Her
frail life ended peacefully before Faunce's discovery was a week old.
Her last breath expired in words of love, her last movement was a
feeble motion of her hand towards the beloved figure which her fancy
had conjured out of thin air, the figure of her son, standing by her
bedside, as she had seen him again and again in delirious dreams.
* * * * *
Faunce did all that compassionate kindness could do for Bolisco's
wretched wife. The impression of her letter in the blotting-book had
been one of the links in the chain of circumstance, for, taken in
conjunction with Chater's evidence, it showed why Rannock had gone to
Southampton the day before the American steamer started. Her position
as Bolisco's wife made her impossible as a witness; but her letter was
evidence, and her relations with the murderer became as notorious as
every other detail in the story of the crime.
"It can't hurt me," she told Faunce, the night after the death sentence
at Winchester. "I'm past hurting. Bolisco's better out of the world,
for he'd never stop doing harm as long as he was in it--and the sooner
I follow him the better for me."
Faunce proved a kind friend to the unhappy woman whose days and nights
were haunted by the image of her murdered lover. Broken in spirits,
all the evil ways of her dissipated youth wreaking their revenge upon
health and beauty, the physician to whom Faunce took her pronounced her
doom. The hand of death was upon her. It was only a question of time.
"If she stays in London she will hardly last through the winter," he
told Faunce. "I should recommend Bournemouth or Ventnor--Ventnor for
choice. And she may rub along through next summer. But you must stop
the morphia habit."
"I'll do what I can," said Faunce; "but I am a busy man. She is not
of my kith and kin. Only I don't want her to die like a dog without a
friend near her."
"She has been a very beautiful woman," said the doctor pityingly. "One
must be sorry for such a life thrown away."
Faunce engaged Betsy, the good-natured lodging-house drudge, to take
care of Mrs. Randall, and took them to cottage lodgings at Ventnor, not
far from the Consumption Hospital; and in that lovely spot, facing the
blue water, Kate Delmaine lived through the summer and autumn after
Bolisco's execution. Faunce looking in at the cottage now and then--a
flying visitor from Portsmouth or Southampton--to see that she was
being properly cared for.
He had found her almost penniless in her Chelsea lodgings after the
trial at Winchester, her last five-pound note having been sent to the
lawyer who had undertaken Bolisco's defence. It was Lady Perivale's
generous gift upon which he was now drawing for Kate Delmaine's comfort.
"After all I owe it to her that I was able to pull the business through
so easily," he told himself, "and it's only fair that she should profit
by my client's liberality."
The end came when November mists were rolling up the Channel, and the
late roses were beginning to droop in the cottage garden. The end came
peacefully, and not without the consolations of religion, for Mrs.
Randall's landlady was a good Church-woman, and in touch with her
parish priest, who was kindly and sympathetic, and able to understand a
broken heart, even in a difficult subject, like this woman, whose life
had been a stranger to all good influences.
"You've been a fast friend to me, Faunce," she said, when she was
dying, and he had been summoned hastily for the last farewell; "and if
I'd known a hard-headed, kind-hearted chap like you ten years ago I
might have been a better woman. Well, I had my fling. There's not many
women have had more of their own way or been more looked up to than I
was in poor old Tony's time: there's not many women that ever had a
truer lover than Dick Rannock, with all his faults. He couldn't keep
straight with the cards," she murmured, beginning to wander; "but he
was every inch a gentleman. Christ have mercy on his soul!"
EPILOGUE.
Grace Haldane To Susan Rodney.
"Villa Rienzi, Rome, April 15.
"You ask me, dear Sue, when I am going back to Grosvenor Square. If I
were guided by my feelings at this present hour I should reply 'Never!'
But feelings and inclinations may change, and my present distaste for
London society and disgust at the thought of my London acquaintance
may give way to the whim of the moment, and a sudden fancy for art, or
music, or drama, which only London can give.
"I hope I am not a vindictive woman, but I own that I can never again
take pleasure in the society of the people who so cruelly wronged me,
the so-called friends who were willing to believe in misconduct that
should have seemed impossible to any one who knew me; and who were not
brave and honest enough to come to me and discover the truth from my
own lips.
"The tragedy of Colonel Rannock's death has impressed me deeply. It
is appalling to think of that energetic spirit, that soul of fire,
quenched in a moment by a murderer's hand--of the man once so admired
and beloved lying unknown and unwept in that solitary spot where the
waters rose and fell over his unhallowed grave.
"I can but remember his talents, his charm of manner, and the days when
I was perhaps nearer loving him than I suspected at the time. Thank God
for that better and truer lover who came to my rescue, and who had but
to enter the circle of my life to influence it for ever. Had I never
known Arthur Haldane I might have married Colonel Rannock, and my fate
might have been wretched, for I believe the only attraction I ever
had for him, over and above my fortune, was my likeness to that other
woman, his bad angel.
"No, Sue, I am not going to bury myself alive, as you suggest. We have
a host of friends in this enchanting cosmopolitan city--Italians,
Americans, English, French, Germans, Russians, choice spirits whose
love of art and beauty has brought them here, and whose pleasures take
a higher range than expensive dinners at newly-opened restaurants, and
occasional contact with Royal personages.
"Arthur and I are utterly happy here. The atmosphere suits his work,
and puts me in good spirits. We have found a delicious villa at Tivoli,
where we shall retire towards the end of May, and where our days and
nights will be spent in a garden of roses and lilies, with a fountain
that makes music all day long. In the mean time this city furnishes
inexhaustible pleasures and interests, and life is so vivid and joyous
that I feel as if I only began to live when I came here.
"Of my husband I need not write, for I think you know all that he is
to me; and in August, when we go to our place on the Scottish Border,
which I used not to like, but which Arthur says he shall adore, I hope
my dear old Sue will break away from troublesome suburban pupils and
come to us for a long visit. By that time Arthur's new novel will be in
the Press, and by that time, if all go well, there will be a young life
in our home which will give new joys to our lives.
"Ever your loving friend,
"Grace Haldane.
"P.S.--Pray never again address me as 'Lady Perivale.' I hate that
semi-detached style. I am Mrs. Arthur Haldane, and am proud to bear my
husband's name."
The Author's Autograph Edition.
_Cloth gilt, 2s. 6d._ _Picture Boards, 2s._
1. LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET.
2. HENRY DUNBAR.
3. ELEANOR'S VICTORY.
4. AURORA FLOYD.
5. JOHN MARCHMONT'S LEGACY.
6. THE DOCTOR'S WIFE.
7. ONLY A CLOD.
8. SIR JASPER'S TENANT.
9. TRAIL OF THE SERPENT.
10. THE LADY'S MILE.
11. LADY LISLE.
12. CAPTAIN OF THE VULTURE.
13. BIRDS OF PREY.
14. CHARLOTTE'S INHERITANCE.
15. RUPERT GODWIN.
16. RUN TO EARTH.
17. DEAD SEA FRUIT.
18. RALPH THE BAILIFF.
19. FENTON'S QUEST.
20. LOVELS OF ARDEN.
21. ROBERT AINSLEIGH.
22. TO THE BITTER END.
23. MILLY DARRELL.
24. STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS.
25. LUCIUS DAVOREN.
26. TAKEN AT THE FLOOD.
27. LOST FOR LOVE.
28. A STRANGE WORLD.
29. HOSTAGES TO FORTUNE.
30. DEAD MEN'S SHOES.
31. JOSHUA HAGGARD.
32. WEAVERS AND WEFT.
33. AN OPEN VERDICT.
34. VIXEN.
35. THE CLOVEN FOOT.
36. THE STORY OF BARBARA.
37. JUST AS I AM.
38. ASPHODEL.
39. MOUNT ROYAL.
40. THE GOLDEN CALF.
41. PHANTOM FORTUNE.
42. FLOWER AND WEED.
43. ISHMAEL.
44. WYLLARD'S WEIRD.
45. UNDER THE RED FLAG.
46. ONE THING NEEDFUL.
47. MOHAWKS.
48. LIKE AND UNLIKE.
49. THE FATAL THREE.
50. THE DAY WILL COME.
51. ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE.
52. GERARD.
53. THE VENETIANS.
54. ALL ALONG THE RIVER.
55. THOU ART THE MAN.
56. SONS OF FIRE.
AND
57. ROUGH JUSTICE (Just Issued).
THE WORLD says:--"'Rough Justice,' one of the best of Miss Braddon's
later novels, is now included in the publisher's small, pretty, and
cheap edition of her works. The book is admirably printed, easy to
hold, and very smart in its red and gold binding."
THE DAILY NEWS says:--"The book is an astonishing example of Miss
Braddon's sustained powers, of her inventiveness, her vigour of
style, and the humaneness of her character-drawing."
THE DAILY CHRONICLE says:--"This, perhaps, is the most daring thing
Miss Braddon has written."
ALSO READY, A CHEAP EDITION OF
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