[Illustration: She had recoiled into the narrow hall, driven by an
uncontrollable revulsion.]
THE SHADOW OF THE ROPE
BY E.W. HORNUNG
ILLUSTRATED BY HARVEY T. DUNN
1906
TO MY FRIEND
EDWARD SHORTT
CONTENTS
Chapter
I. The End of Their Life
II. The Case for the Crown
III. Name and Nature
IV. The Man in the Train
V. The Man in the Street
VI. A Peripatetic Providence
VII. A Morning Call
VIII. The Dove and the Serpent
IX. A Change of Scene
X. A Slight Discrepancy
XI. Another New Friend
XII. Episode of the Invisible Visitor
XIII. The Australian Room
XIV. Battle Royal
XV. A Chance Encounter
XVI. A Match for Mrs. Venables
XVII. Friends in Need
XVIII. "They Which Were Bidden"
XIX. Rachel's Champion
XX. More Haste
XXI. Worse Speed
XXII. The Darkest Hour
XXIII. Dawn
XXIV. One Who Was Not Bidden
XXV. A Point to Langholm
XXVI. A Cardinal Point
XXVII. The Whole Truth
XXVIII. In the Matter of a Motive
ILLUSTRATIONS
She had recoiled into the narrow hall, driven by an uncontrollable
revulsion.
"I will!" she answered through her teeth--and she swept past him out of
the room.
"I'll tell you who I thought it was at first," said he, heartily.
The Shadow of the Rope
CHAPTER I
THE END OF THEIR LIFE
"It is finished," said the woman, speaking very quietly to herself. "Not
another day, nor a night, if I can be ready before morning!"
She stood alone in her own room, with none to mark the white-hot pallor
of the oval face, the scornful curve of quivering nostrils, the dry
lustre of flashing eyes. But while she stood a heavy step went
blustering down two flights of stairs, and double doors slammed upon the
ground floor.
It was a little London house, with five floors from basement to attic,
and a couple of rooms upon each, like most little houses in London; but
this one had latterly been the scene of an equally undistinguished drama
of real life, upon which the curtain was even now descending. Although a
third was whispered by the world, the persons of this drama were really
only two.
Rachel Minchin, before the disastrous step which gave her that surname,
was a young Australian lady whose apparent attractions were only
equalled by her absolute poverty; that is to say, she had been born at
Heidelberg, near Melbourne, of English parents more gentle than
practical, who soon left her to fight the world and the devil with no
other armory than a good face, a fine nature, and the pride of any
heiress. It is true that Rachel also had a voice; but there was never
enough of it to augur an income. At twenty, therefore, she was already a
governess in the wilds, where women are as scarce as water, but where
the man for Rachel did not breathe. A few years later she earned a berth
to England as companion to a lady; and her fate awaited her on board.
Mr. Minchin had reached his prime in the underworld, of which he also
was a native, without touching affluence, until his fortieth year.
Nevertheless, he was a travelled man, and no mere nomad of the bush. As
a mining expert he had seen much life in South Africa as well as in
Western Australia, but at last he was to see more in Europe as a
gentleman of means. A wife had no place in his European scheme; a
husband was the last thing Rachel wanted; but a long sea voyage, an
uncongenial employ, and the persistent chivalry of a handsome,
entertaining, self-confident man of the world, formed a combination as
fatal to her inexperience as that of so much poverty, pride, and beauty
proved to Alexander Minchin. They were married without ceremony on the
very day that they arrived in England, where they had not an actual
friend between them, nor a relative to whom either was personally known.
In the beginning this mattered nothing; they had to see Europe and enjoy
themselves; that they could do unaided; and the bride did it only the
more thoroughly, in a sort of desperation, as she realized that the
benefits of her marriage were to be wholly material after all.
In the larger life of cities, Alexander Minchin was no longer the idle
and good-humored cavalier to whom Rachel had learned to look for
unfailing consideration at sea. The illustrative incidents may be
omitted; but here he gambled, there he drank; and in his cups every
virtue dissolved. Rachel's pride did not mend matters; she was a thought
too ready with her resentment; of this, however, she was herself aware,
and would forgive the more freely because there was often some obvious
fault on her side before all was said. Quarrels of infinite bitterness
were thus patched up, and the end indefinitely delayed.
In the meantime, tired of travelling, and impoverished by the husband's
follies, the hapless couple returned to London, where a pure fluke with
some mining shares introduced Minchin to finer gambling than he had
found abroad. The man was bitten. There was a fortune waiting for
special knowledge and a little ready cash; and Alexander Minchin settled
down to make it, taking for the nonce a furnished house in a modest
neighborhood. And here it was that the quarrelling continued to its
culmination in the scene just ended.
"Not another day," said Rachel, "nor a night--if I can be ready before
morning!"
Being still a woman with some strength of purpose, Mrs. Minchin did not
stop at idle words. The interval between the slamming of doors below and
another noise at the top of the house was not one of many minutes. The
other noise was made by Rachel and her empty trunk upon the loftiest and
the narrowest flight of stairs; one of the maids opened their door an
inch.
"I am sorry if I disturbed you," their mistress said. "These stairs are
so very narrow. No, thank you, I can manage quite well." And they heard
her about until they slept.
It was no light task to which Rachel had set her hand; she was going
back to Australia by the first boat, and her packing must be done that
night. Her resolve only hardened as her spirit cooled. The sooner her
departure, the less his opposition; let her delay, and the callousness
of the passing brute might give place to the tyranny of the normal man.
But she was going, whether or no; not another day--though she would
doubtless see its dawn. It was the month of September. And she was not
going to fly empty-handed, nor fly at all; she was going deliberately
away, with a trunk containing all that she should want upon the voyage.
The selection was not too easily made. In his better moods the creature
had been lavish enough; and more than once did Rachel snatch from drawer
or wardrobe that which remained some moments in her hand, while the
incidents of purchase and the first joys of possession, to one who had
possessed so little in her life, came back to her with a certain
poignancy.
But her resolve remained unshaken. It might hurt her to take his
personal gifts, but that was all she had ever had from him; he had never
granted her a set allowance; for every penny she must needs ask and look
grateful. It would be no fault of hers if she had to strip her fingers
for passage-money. Yet the exigency troubled her; it touched her honor,
to say nothing of her pride; and, after an unforeseen fit of
irresolution, Rachel suddenly determined to tell her husband of her
difficulty, making direct appeal to the capricious generosity which had
been recalled to her mind as an undeniably redeeming point. It was true
that he had given her hearty leave to go to the uttermost ends of the
earth, and highly probable that he would bid her work her own way. She
felt an impulse to put it to him, however, and at once.
She looked at her watch--it at least had been her mother's--and the
final day was already an hour old. But Alexander Minchin was a late
sitter, as his young wife knew to her cost, and to-night he had told her
where he meant to sleep, but she had not heard him come up. The room
would have been the back drawing-room in the majority of such houses,
and Rachel peeped in on her way down. It was empty; moreover, the bed
was not made, nor the curtains drawn. Rachel repaired the first
omission, then hesitated, finally creeping upstairs again for clean
sheets. And as she made his bed, not out of any lingering love for him,
but from a sense of duty and some consideration for his comfort, there
was yet something touching in her instinctive care, that breathed the
wife she could have been.
He did not hear her, though the stairs creaked the smallness of the
hour--or if he heard he made no sign. This discouraged Rachel as she
stole down the lower flight; she would have preferred the angriest sign.
But there were few internal sounds which penetrated to the little study
at the back of the dining-room, for the permanent tenant was the widow
of an eminent professor lately deceased, and that student had protected
his quiet with double doors. The outer one, in dark red baize, made an
alarming noise as Rachel pulled it open; but, though she waited, no
sound came from within; nor was Minchin disturbed by the final entry of
his wife, whose first glance convinced her of the cause. In the
professor's armchair sat his unworthy successor, chin on waistcoat, a
newspaper across his knees, an empty decanter at one elbow. Something
remained in the glass beside the bottle; he had tumbled off before the
end. There were even signs of deliberate preparations for slumber, for
the shade was tilted over the electric light by which he had been
reading, as a hat is tilted over the eyes.
Rachel had a touch of pity at seeing him in a chair for the night; but
the testimony of the decanter forbade remorse. She had filled it herself
in the evening against her husband's return from an absence of
mysterious length. Now she understood that mystery, and her face
darkened as she recalled the inconceivable insult which his explanation
had embraced. No, indeed; not another minute that she could help! And he
would sleep there till all hours of the morning; he had done it before;
the longer the better, this time.
She had recoiled into the narrow hall, driven by an uncontrollable
revulsion; and there she stood, pale and quivering with a disgust that
only deepened as she looked her last upon the shaded face and the
inanimate frame in the chair. Rachel could not account for the intensity
of her feeling; it bordered upon nausea, and for a time prevented her
from retracing the single step which at length enabled her to shut both
doors as quietly as she had opened them, after switching off the light
from force of habit. There was another light still glowing in the hall,
and, again from habit, Rachel put it out also before setting foot upon
the stairs. A moment later she was standing terror-stricken in the dark.
It was no sound from the study, but the tiniest of metallic rattles from
the flap of the letter-box in the front door. The wind might have done
it, for the flap had lost its spring; and, though the noise was not
repeated, to the wind Rachel put it down, as she mounted the stairs at
last in a flutter that caused her both shame and apprehension. Her nerve
was going, and she needed it so! It should not go; it should not; and as
if to steady it, she opened the landing window, and spent some minutes
gazing out into the cool and starry night. Not that she could see very
far. The backs of houses hid half the stars in front and on either hand,
making, with the back of this house and its fellows, a kind of square
turned inside out. Miserable little gardens glimmered through an
irregular network of grimy walls, with here and there a fair tree in
autumnal tatters; but Rachel looked neither at these nor at the stars
that lit them dimly. In a single window of those right opposite a single
lamp had burnt all night. It was the only earthly light that Rachel
could see, the only one of earth or heaven upon which she looked; and
she discovered it with thanksgiving, and tore her eyes away from it with
a prayer.
In time the trunk was packed, and incontinently carried downstairs, by
an effort which left Rachel racked in every muscle and swaying giddily.
But she could not have made much noise, for still there was no sign from
the study. She scarcely paused to breathe. A latchkey closed the door
behind her very softly; she was in the crisp, clean air at last.
But it was no hour for finding cabs; it was the hour of the scavenger
and no other being; and Rachel walked into broad sunlight before she
spied a solitary hansom. It was then she did the strangest thing;
instead of driving straight back for her trunk, when near the house she
gave the cabman other directions, subsequently stopping him at one with
a card in the window.
A woman answered the bell with surprising celerity, and a face first
startled and then incensed at the sight of Mrs. Minchin.
"So you never came!" cried the woman, bitterly.
"I was prevented," Rachel replied coldly. "Well?"
And the monosyllable was a whisper.
"He is still alive," said the woman at the door.
"Is that all?" asked Rachel, a catch in her voice.
"It is all I'll say till the doctor has been."
"But he has got through the night," sighed Rachel, thankfully. "I could
see the light in his room from hour to hour, even though I could not
come. Did you sit up with him all night long?"
"Every minute of the night," said the other, with undisguised severity
in her fixed red eyes. "I never left him, and I never closed a lid."
"I am so sorry!" cried Rachel, too sorry even for renewed indignation at
the cause. "But I couldn't help it," she continued, "I really could not.
We--I am going abroad--very suddenly. Poor Mr. Severino! I do wish there
was anything I could do! But you must get a professional nurse. And when
he does recover--for something assures me that he will--you can tell
him--"
Rachel hesitated, the red eyes reading hers.
"Tell him I hope he will recover altogether," she said at length; "mind,
altogether! I have gone away for good, tell Mr. Severino; but, as I
wasn't able to do so after all, I would rather you didn't mention that I
ever thought of nursing him, or that I called last thing to ask how he
was."
And that was her farewell message to the very young man with whom a
hole-and-corner scandal had coupled Rachel Minchin's name; it was to be
a final utterance in yet another respect, and one of no slight or
private significance, as the sequel will show. Within a minute or two of
its delivery, Rachel was on her own doorstep for the last time, deftly
and gently turning the latchkey, while the birds sang to frenzy in a
neighboring garden, and the early sun glanced fierily from the brass
knocker and letter-box. Another moment and the door had been flung wide
open by a police officer, who seemed to fill the narrow hall, with a
comrade behind him and both servants on the stairs. And with little
further warning Mrs. Minchin was shown her husband, seated much as she
had left him in the professor's chair, but with his feet raised stiffly
upon another, and the hand of death over every inch of him in the broad
north light that filled the room.
The young widow stood gazing upon her dead, and four pairs of eyes gazed
yet more closely at her. But there was little to gather from the
strained profile with the white cheek and the unyielding lips. Not a cry
had left them; she had but crossed the threshold, and stopped that
instant in the middle of the worn carpet, the sharpest of silhouettes
against a background of grim tomes. There was no swaying of the lissome
figure, no snatching for support, no question spoken or unspoken. In
moments of acute surprise the most surprising feature is often the way
in which we ourselves receive the shock; a sudden and complete
detachment, not the least common of immediate results, makes us
sometimes even conscious of our failure to feel as we would or should;
and it was so with Rachel Minchin in the first moments of her tragic
freedom. So God had sundered whom God had joined together! And this was
the man whom she had married for love; and she could look upon his clay
unmoved! Her mind leapt to a minor consideration, that still made her
shudder, as eight eyes noted from the door; he must have been dead when
she came down and found him seated in shadow; she had misjudged the
dead, if not the living. The pose of the head was unaltered, the chin
upon the chest, the mouth closed in death as naturally as in sleep. No
wonder his wife had been deceived. And yet there was something
unfamiliar, something negligent and noble, and all unlike the living
man; so that Rachel could already marvel that she had not at once
detected this dignity and this distinction, only too foreign to her
husband as she had learnt to know him best, but unattainable in the
noblest save by death. And her eyes had risen to the slice of sky in the
upper half of the window, and at last the tears were rising in her eyes,
when they filled instead with sudden horror and enlightenment.
There was a jagged hole in the pane above the hasp; an upset of ink on
the desk beneath the window; and the ink was drying with the dead man's
blood, in which she now perceived him to be soaked, while the newspaper
on the floor beside him was crisp as toast from that which it had hidden
when she saw him last.
"Murdered!" whispered Rachel, breaking her long silence with a gasp.
"The work of thieves!"
The policemen exchanged a rapid glance.
"Looks like it," said the one who had opened the door, "I admit."
There was a superfluous dryness in his tone; but Rachel no more noticed
this than the further craning of heads in the doorway.
"But can you doubt it?" she cried, pointing from the broken window to
the spilled ink. "Did you think that he had shot himself?"
And her horror heightened at a thought more terrible to her than all the
rest. But the constable shook his head.
"We should have found the pistol--which we can't," said he. "But shot he
is, and through the heart."
"Then who could it be but thieves?"
"That's what we all want to know," said the officer; and still Rachel
had no time to think about his tone; for now she was bending over the
body, her white hands clenched, and agony enough in her white face.
"Look! look!" she cried, beckoning to them all. "He was wearing his
watch last night; that I can swear; and it has gone!"
"You are sure he was wearing it?" asked the same constable, approaching.
"Absolutely certain."
"Well, if that's so," said he, "and it can't be found, it will be a
point in your favor."
Rachel sprang upright, her wet eyes wide with pure astonishment.
"In my favor?" she cried. "Will you have the goodness to explain
yourself?"
The constables were standing on either side of her now.
"Well," replied the spokesman of the pair, "I don't like the way that
window's broken, for one thing, and if you look at it you'll see what I
mean. The broken glass is all outside on the sill. But that's not all,
ma'am; and, as you have a cab, we might do worse than drive to the
station before more people are about."