being Hogarth's mother; and he said: “But you are quite the Jew in
dress: do you know now, then, that you are of the Chosen Race?”
“Singular notion! This is a mere disguise”.
“Ah. But you look quite radiant. You must have come into a fortune. When
I heard of your escape, I said to myself--”
“How did you hear?”
“Why, from Harris”.
“Harris is drowned”.
“Harris is now under that little roof down there--there”--the prelate
stabbed with his forefinger: “Harris is my shadow; Harris is my
master. He was picked up naked by the ship which ran down your vessel,
recognized me one day in Broadway, and threatened to give me in charge
if I did not adopt him 'as my well-beloved son'. Well, from him I heard
all, how you called fire from Heaven--it was gallant. But aren't you
afraid of capture down here in your own country?”
“I cannot be captured”.
Those stony eyeballs of O'Hara, bulging from out circular trenches
round their sockets, surveyed Hogarth, weighing, divining him, while his
bottom lip, massive as the mouth of Polynesian stone gods, trembled.
“How do you mean?”
“I can buy King on throne, Judge on bench, Governor and Warder, the
whole machinery. Even O'Hara I could buy”.
“I am for sale! Hogarth! I _smelled_ it about you, the myrrh of your
garments! And didn't I prophesy it to you years ago? What a development!
That beast, Harris, will dance for joy! Oh, there is something very
artistic to my fancy, Hogarth, in the metal gold--brittle, bright,
orpimented--”
“And diamonds?”
“Hogarth, have you diamonds?”
“Yes”, said Hogarth, smiling at the effect of ecstasy upon O'Hara.
“Prismic diamond!” cried the prelate: “but how--?”
“Do you want to enter my service?”
“Do I _want_?”
“Well, I want a tutor, O'Hara; and you shall be the man. Undertake,
then, to teach me all you know in two years, and I'll give you--how
much?--twenty thousand pounds a year”.
“My son”, whispered O'Hara, “what a development--!”
“Good-bye. In Thring Street there is a little paper-shop. Come there
to-night at seven”.
He ran down the hill: and as he went northward, pushing his barrow,
O'Hara had a lens at his eyes, saw the meteorite, and wondered.
XXVI
FRANKL AND O'HARA
Mrs. Sturgess, of the paper-shop, a clean, washed-out old lady, held up
both averting hands at her back door, as Hogarth threw back his kefie,
finger on lips; but soon, her alarm warming into welcome, she took him
to a room above, to listen to his story of escape.
“And to think”, said she, “there is the very box your sister, poor
thing, left with me to keep the day she went away, which never once have
I seen her dear good face from that day to this. Anyway, _there's_ the
box--” pointing to a trunk covered with grey goat's-hair, the trunk to
which the old Hogarth had referred in telling Richard the secret of his
birth, saying to deaf ears that it contained Richard's “papers”--a box
double-bottomed, on its top the letters “P. O.”, with a cross-of-Christ
under them.
“But, sir”, said Mrs. Sturgess, “you must be in great danger here. I
hope”--with a titter--“I shan't be implicated--”
“Don't be afraid, Mrs. Sturgess, it will be all right, and, for
yourself, don't trouble about the paper-shop any more, but buy a little
villa near Florence, where it is warm for the cough--don't think me
crazy if I tell you that I am a very rich man. Now give me a steak”.
Mrs. Sturgess served him well that day with a pang of expectancy at
her heart! Always, she remembered, Richard Hogarth had been
strange--uplifted and apart--a man incalculable, winged, unknown, though
walking the common ways. He _might_ be a “very rich man”...
His meal over, Hogarth threw himself upon a bed, to dream another
trouble of bubbles and burden of purples; woke at four; and, with a
procured cold-chisel, hammer, and a calico bag, went to the fowl-house
where he had left the meteorite, shut himself in.
Sitting in the dust there, he set to chisel out the gems from the porous
ore, and as the chisel won the luscious plums, held them up, glutting
his gaze, scratched his name on a fragment of window-pane, and was
enchanted that the adamant rim ripped the glass like rag: the whim,
meanwhile, working in him to purchase Colmoor, to turn the moor into a
paradise, the prison into a palace; where his old cell stood in Gallery
No. III to be the bedroom of Rebekah.
To see _her_ that very night was a necessity! and when it was dark he
set out.
But that plot failed: on presenting himself at the front of the mansion,
he was sent round to the back, where he received payment, and was
dismissed; and when he again started for the front, intending to force
his way in, he decided upon something else, and walked back to Thring.
He reached the Sturgess cottage soon after six, ate, with a candle
returned to the lean-to to resume his work, and was still intent upon it
at seven, when Mrs. Sturgess ran out to tell him that “the gentleman had
come”. He said: “Show him up to my room”.
The first thing which O'Hara noticed in that room was the goat-hair
trunk, with the initials and cross, the initials his own.
After some minutes he furtively turned the key, dived into a mass of
things, paused to remember the whereabouts of a spring, found it, and,
lifting the upper bottom, peered beneath; saw a bundle of papers;
and, without removing the band, ferreted among them, and was
satisfied---Hogarth's “birth-papers”.
He presently went to a back window, and saw ruddy streaks between the
boarding of the shanty, while sounds of the hammer reached him.
He would go and meet Hogarth: no harm in that; but it was stealthily
that he hurried down the stair and carried himself across the yard,
grinning a grimace of self-conscious caution, to peep through a cranny.
Hogarth's back was toward him, the iron leg lying near a box in which
was a sitting hen, on its top a candlestick, the calico bag, and a lot
of the gems: at which the priest's palm covered his awed mouth, and with
a fleet thievishness, like a cat on hot bricks, he trotted back to the
cottage.
Ten minutes later Hogarth entered, nodding: “Ah, O'Hara...”; and he
called down: “Mrs. Sturgess! pen, ink, and paper!”
When these came, he sat and wrote:
“I have escaped from prison, and come into great power. I summon you to
meet me at the elm in the beech-wood to-night at nine. I beseech you, I
entreat you. I burn to ashes. Rebekah! My flames of fire! I am dying.
“R. H.”
He enclosed, and handed it, without any address, to O'Hara.
“O'Hara”, said he, “I want you to take that for me. Come--I will show
you the place. You ask in the hall to see 'the young lady': her name
does not concern you; but you can't mistake her: she is so-pretty.
Give the note to no one else, of course: it mentions my escape, for one
thing. I know you will do it well”.
He conducted O'Hara, till the two towers of Westring were visible;
pointed them out; then went back, and in an hour had finished his work
on the diamonds.
O'Hara, meantime, going on his way alone, muttered: “You go fast,
Hogarth: prelates of the Church your errand boys? But there is a little
fellow called Alf Harris...if he had seen what I have seen to-night, you
would be a corpse now”.
In twenty minutes he was at Westring, which he knew well, for
twenty-five years before he had lived in the Vale: but he supposed that
Lord Westring de Broom was still the inmate.
He asked to see “the young lady”, persisted, and after a time Rebekah
came with eyebrows of inquiry.
The moment O'Hara saw her well, his visage acquired a ghastly ribbed
fixity. Even before this, _she_, by one flashed glance, had known him.
But she took the envelope with easy coolness. And, instead of then
returning upon her steps, went still beyond, and whispered to two men in
the hall: “Do not let that man pass out!”
As she again returned inward past O'Hara, she remarked: “You might wait
here a little”.
She travelled then, not hurrying, down the breadth of a great apartment
to a side room where her father sat, capped and writing; and she said:
“Papa, the man who assaulted me in the train is now in the hall. As his
sentence was three years, he must have escaped--” She was gone at once,
the unaddressed envelope, still unopened, shivering a little in her
hand.
Frankl leapt up, rather pale, thinking that if the man had come _here_,
he must mean mischief; but remembering that the man was a gentleman, a
priest, he took heart, and went out.
O'Hara, meantime, stood at bay, guessing his exit blocked, while
the terrors of death gat hold upon him, the flesh of his yellow jaw
shivering. But he was a man of stern mind--stern as the rocky aspect of
his face, and the moment he saw Frankl coming (he had seen him in the
Court), he started to meet him--stooped to the Jew's ear, who shrank
delicately from contact.
“There isn't any good in running me down, sir”, he whispered in
sycophant haste. “I pledge you my word I came here without knowing
to whom. O do, now! I have already suffered for my crime; and if you
attempt to capture me, I do assure you, I strangle you where you stand!
Do, now! I only brought a letter--”
Frankl, half inclined to tyrannize over misery, and half afraid, swept
his hand down the beard.
“Letter?” said he: “from whom?”
“From a friend”.
“Which friend?”
“A man named Hogarth”.
O'Hara said it in an awful whisper, though not aware of any relation
between Hogarth and Frankl.
Whereupon an agitation waved down Frankl's beard. The news that “a man
named Hogarth” had written to his daughter would hardly have suggested
_Richard_--safe elsewhere; but, one night at Yarmouth, he had seen
Richard Hogarth inexplicably kiss his daughter's hand.
“Hogarth?” said he: “what Christian name?”
“Richard”.
The agonized thought in Frankl's brain was this: “Well, what's the
good of prisons, then?”--he, too earnest a financier to read newspaper
gossip, having heard not a word of the three escapes from Colmoor.
He said: “Well, sir, generally speaking, I'm the last to encourage this
sort of thing; but, as yours is a special case, I tell you plain out
that, personally, I don't mean a bit of harm to you. Just step into a
room here, and let us talk the matter quietly over”.
He led O'Hara to his study; and there they two remained locked half an
hour, conferring head to head.
XXVII
THE BAG OF LIGHT
Rebekah, having excused herself from three ladies, her guests, alone in
her room opened her letter.
Glanced first at the “R. H.”, and was not surprised. He had “escaped”,
had “come into great power”: that seemed natural; but he “summoned” her
to meet him, and she saw no connection between his “great power” and his
right to summon her.
She held the paper to a fire, and, as it began to burn, in a panic
of flurry extinguished the edge, and hustled it into her bosom; then
perambulated; then fell to a chair-edge with staring gaze; then, rocking
her head which she had dropped upon a little table, moaned: “He is
mad....”
“My flames of fire! Rebekah! I am dying....”
He suffered; and a pussy's wail mewed from her; but with a gasp of anger
which said “Ho!” she sprang straight, and went ranging, with a stamping
gait, through the chamber, filling it with passion. “I _won't go_!” she
went with fixed lips, as something within her whispered: “You must”.
To escape herself, she went again to see what had happened with regard
to the convict, whose face would carry to the grave the scars of her
nails.
There were no signs of any disturbance; and she asked a footman: “Where
is the man who was here?”
“With your father in the study”.
That seemed a strange proceeding: she felt a touch of alarm for her
father, and, passing again by the study, peeped; could see nothing for
the key, but heard voices.
This messenger of Hogarth, she next thought, was a criminal: he might
betray...so she stole into an adjacent room, to peep by a side door of
the study, and though a key projecting toward her barred her vision, the
talkers were near this point, and she could hear.
“The diamond block”, O'Hara said, “is the same which he rolled across
the bridge this morning; to that I'll swear”.
“Then it must be the very same block he showed me”, Frankl said in a
whisper; “that thing was worth millions....!”
“Undoubtedly it was the same”.
“Oh, but Lord”, groaned the Jew in an anguish of self-deprecation,
“where were my _eyes_? where were my _wits_? I must have been
_dreaming_! No, that's hard!”
“Well--_nil desperandum_! Let us be acting, sir!”
“My own land--!”
“They are still safe enough: come--”
“He may have lost one or two--in his excitement. Thousands gone! He may
have hidden some!”
“Tut, he has hidden none”, said O'Hara; “we may have all. Let us make a
move”.
“But he is a strong man, this Hogarth. Why do you object to the
assistance of the police?”
“What have the police to do with such a matter? Hogarth would simply
bribe. And there are three of us--”
“Who is this Harris?”
“He is a Cockney--assassin”.
Frankl took snuff, with busy pats at alternate nostrils.
“What will you tell him is in the bag?”
“Anything--rings--something prized by you for sentimental reasons. We
offer him a thousand--two thousand pounds. And he will not fail. He
strikes like lightning”.
“And we share--how?”
“Come--let us not talk of that again, sir. What could be more generous
than my offer? You divide the diamonds into two heaps, and I choose
one; or I divide, you choose; and, before I leave you, you give me a
declaration that it was by your contrivance that I escaped prison, and
that the gems which I have, once yours, are duly made over to me”.
“And you collar half!” gibed the Jew with an ogle of guile; “that's
about as cool a stroke of business as I've come across. You don't
take into account that the whole is mine, if the concern fell, as you
confess, on my own land! And just ask yourself the question: what is to
prevent me handing you over this minute to the police, and grabbing the
lot? Only I'm not that sort of man--”
O'Hara drew a revolver.
“You talk to me as though I was a schoolboy, sir”, said he sternly. “Be
good enough to learn to respect me. I am not less a man of the world
than you are, and quite competent to safeguard my own interests.
Supposing I was weak enough to permit you to send for the police, the
moment they had me I should tell of Hogarth in hiding; they would go for
him, and he, after bribing, may be trusted to take wing with the stones,
leaving you whistling. Or perhaps you would care to tackle him
in person? He would wheel you by the beard round his arm like a
Catherine-wheel, I do assure you. All this you see well, and pretend not
to. Do let us be honest with each other!”
“Well, I don't want to be hard”, said Frankl, looking sideward and
downward, plotting behind an unwrinkled brow, intending to have every
one of the diamonds; so did O'Hara, who already had his plot.
“No, don't be hard”, said O'Hara: “_I_ am not. I give you an
incalculable fortune; I take the same. Live and let live! Why should two
shrewd old fellows like you and me be like the dog which, wanting two
bones, lost the one he had? Come, now--give me your hand on it”.
“Well, I'm hanged if you are not right!” cried Frankl, looking up with
discovery: “Share and share alike, and shame the devil! That's the kind
of little man I am, frank, bluff, and stalwart--Ha! ha! Give me your
hand on it, sir!”
“Ha! ha! you are very kind. That is the only way--absolute sincerity--”
and they shook hands, hob-nobbing and fraternizing, with laughs and
little nods, like cronies.
“Stop--I'll just ring for a drop of brandy--” said Frankl.
“No! no ringing!--thanks, thanks, no brandy--”
“Well, you are as cautious as they make them. Oh, perfectly right, you
know--perfectly right”--he touched O'Hara's chest--“not a word to say
against that. I am the same kind of man myself--”
“Come; are you for making a move?”
“Agreed. Where is my hat? I suppose a man may get his hat!--ha! ha!--I
can't very well go in this cap---”
“You use mine--with the greatest pleasure. I do not need--Ah? quite the
fit, quite the fit”.
“Why, so it is. Ha! ha! why, it's a curate's hat, and--_I'm a Jew_!”
“Excellent, excellent, ha! ha!”
So they made merry, and, with the bitter lip-corners of forced
merriment, went out, while Rebekah, who had caught a great deal of that
dialogue, crouched a long time there, agitated, uncertain what to do.
That her father should coolly look on at an assassination for a
fortune was no revelation to her: she had long despised, yet, with an
inconsistency due to the tenderness of Jewish family ties, still loved
him; the notion of appealing to the police, therefore, who might ruin
Hogarth, too, did not enter her head.
She ran and wrote: “Your life and bag of gems are _at this moment_ in
danger”; and sent it by a mounted messenger addressed to “The Guest at
the Paper Shop”.
But in twenty minutes the messenger returned to her with it, Hogarth
having gone to the _rendezvous_ at the elm--long before the appointed
time.
When, accordingly, Frankl, O'Hara, and Harris arrived at the paper-shop
back yard, and Harris had stolen up the back stairs, he presently, to
the alarm and delight of the others, sent a whisper from the window: “No
one 'ere as I can see!”
And the search for the diamonds was short: for Hogarth had actually left
the bag containing them on the trunk, and Frankl and O'Hara returned
with it to Westring, holding it out at arm's length, one with the right,
one with the left hand, like standard-bearers.
Hogarth, meantime, was striding about the elm, and once fell to his
knees, adoring a vision, and once, at a fancied step, his teeth-edges
chattered.
Rebekah! He called, groaned, hissed that name, while his to-and-fro
ranging quickened to a trot.
And now, fancying that he heard a call “_Come !_” he stood startled,
struck into a twisting enquiry to the four winds; but could not locate
the call, ran hither and thither, saw no one.
“Come to me, little sister”, he wailed tenderly, while to swallow was a
doubtful spasm for him, her name a mountain in his bosom.
When he was certain that it must be nearer ten than “nine”, he set out
in the sway of a turbulent impulse to spurt for the Hall: but as he
reached the point of proximity between path and park, just there where
her father had stood that morning he saw her patiently waiting--ever
since that “_Come!_”
He flew, and was about to skip up the bank, when, with forbidding arm,
she cried: “Don't you approach me!”--and he stood checked and abject,
one foot planted on the bank, looking up, ready to dart for her in her
Oriental dress, flimsy, baggy at the girdle, her arms bare, her fingers
clasped before her, making convex the two tassels of the girdle, from
her ears depending circles of gold large enough to hoop with, a saffron
headdress, stuck backward, showing her hair in front, falling upon a
shawl which sheltered her frank recumbent shoulders. She did not see
Hogarth at all, but stood averted, implacable, unapproachable, looking
across the park, while Hogarth occupied a long silence in gazing up to
where, like a show, she stood, illumined by the moon.
At last he sent to her the whisper, “Did you call just now? Did you say
'_Come_'?”
“What is it you want with me, Hogarth? You have '_summoned_' me: but be
very quick”.
“I told you: I am wealthier than all the princes--”
“Well, let me inform you that your life is in danger here; if you are a
wise man, you will not fail to leave this neighbourhood this night”.
“But no one knows--”
“It is known, Hogarth: your friends are false, and your enemies crafty.
You will have to walk with your eyes open, my friend. What will you do
with all the money?”
“I will buy the world, because _you_ are in it”.
Now she flashed upon him one glance, in which there was astonishment,
and judgment.
“You said that so like my father! Hogarth among the dealers? I thought
you would be more squeamish, and arduous, and complex”.
“But if a man is famished, he is not complex, he runs to the baker's.
You can have no conception how I perish! And I cannot be contradicted-I
claim you-I have the right-I am the lord of this lower world--”
“But you do not see the effect of your words: you disappoint me Richard.
How of what the poet sings:
...this is my favoured lot,
My exaltation to afflictions high?
That is more in your line, you know, but you are dazzled, Hogarth-fie.
To _buy me_! And how would you like me afterwards, having renounced my
obligations? And how would I like _you_-I whose name is Rebekah, who
will mate with none but a wrestler, a fellow of heroic muscle? I feel
certain that you are dazzled. It is natural, I suppose--But are all the
people in the world so happy, that _you_ too, can find nothing to occupy
you but the market-place, with its buying and selling? And to buy _me_?
I am _not_ for sale! How dare you, Hogarth?”
With this she walked off; but, having a creepy instinct in her back
that he was on the point to follow, catch, and snatch her away, she span
round again, crying: “Do not follow me! Mind you! If you like, be at
the elm-tree again at half-past ten-and I will communicate with you.
Goodbye--”
Now she did not once look back; and he had not heard that fainting
“Good-bye”, it had fainted so.
He found himself presently in his room at the paper-shop, and lay biting
the bed-clothes, spasm after spasm traversing his body.
Then, turning on his back, he lay with his face now toward the trunk,
and a little clock ticked ten more minutes before the fact stole into
his consciousness that the bag was not on the trunk.
For some time the disappearance was too stupendous to find room in his
brain. He got up and paced, stunned, just conscious of a feeling of
unease.
Now he was searching the room mechanically. It was not there....
And again he paced, tapping his top teeth with a finger-nail; and now he
called down the stair: “Have you seen, Mrs. Sturgess, the calico bag you
gave me to-day?”
“Why, no”.
“Has anyone been in my room?”
“Why, _no_, sir! Only myself”.
Again he began to pace, and suddenly the grand reality stabbed his brain
like a dagger: he was poor....
O'Hara! Where was he....?
His forehead dropped upon the mantel-board, and he leant staring
downward there, a miserable man.
But suddenly the man said quietly aloud, raising himself: “All right:
better so. O, I have not been myself--virtue has gone out of me--!”
Presently he noticed that it was near the hour of her unexpected
_rendezvous_ under the elm....
And nearly all the way he ran--wild to see her again--until he neared
the tree, when, descrying a female form, he came stooping with humility,
but soon saw that it was a girl, her head in a shawl, whom he did not
know.
And she, coming to meet him, said: “What is your name, sir?”
“Why?”
“I am Miss Frankl's messenger”.
“My name is Hogarth”.
“Will you turn this way that I may see your eyes?...All right: Miss
Frankl directs me to give you these”.
The girl, who had been weighted down toward the left, handed him an
envelope, and a steel box.
Never was he so bewildered! On the way home, he observed that the box
had three knobs of gold, surrounded by rays, and, inlaid in the top, the
letters “R. F.”; when he tore open the envelope in his room he found in
pencil on one half-sheet:
“Turn the 10 of the right knob to the ray 5; the 5 of the middle knob
to the ray 0; the 15 of the left knob to the ray 10: and the box will
open”.
No more. When he had set wildly to work, and the lid turned back, his
eyes beheld the calico bag.
Rebekah had, in fact, before setting out to the _rendezvous_ at nine,
seen her father and O'Hara return to the Hall, bearing the bag between
them; and, she, crouching at the side door, as before, had heard them
talk, arranging details. Her father had then said that before he could
write any document, he must either ring or go search for paper: and
suddenly she had heard an oath, a thud, a scuffle, had turned the
key, softly entered, seen the men struggling against the other door, a
revolver, held by the muzzle, in O'Hara's hand; and before she had been
sighted by the two desperate men, had had the bag, lying near on an
escritoire, and was gone. She had then sent some servants to the scene,
and hurried to her chamber.
Later she had heard that O'Hara had escaped through a window, and that
her father was raving below in a sort of fit: for Frankl supposed that
O'Hara had the jewels, as O'Hara that Frankl had them; and after tending
her father, she had dashed out to the _rendezvous_, the jewels then in
her room.