They remained in London that night, in order that they might tell Mr.
Liscomb how they had fared on their visit to the prison. They had a good
deal to discuss between themselves in the meantime. Upon one point they
were in complete agreement, and this was with regard to Major Crosbie’s
belief in the relationship existing between Marcus Blaydon and the woman
who had signed herself ‘Lucy.’ He had endeavoured to be very cautious in
all that he had said on this important point in their presence. He had
been extremely careful not to commit himself in any way, or to leave
them any chance of reproaching him afterwards for leading them to have
false hopes that the marriage of Blaydon with Priscilla was a bigamous
one. But in spite of his intelligent caution, the impression which he
had produced upon them was that he at least was a firm believer that
Blaydon and his Lucy were man and wife.
They tried to reconstruct the whole of Blaydon’s story so far as
Priscilla was concerned. It was quite plausible that, after marrying
his Lucy in Canada and living with her for some years, they had
quarrelled--had not Major Crosbie said that the letters betray a very
ill-balanced temperament--one page showing her going into an extreme
of affection and the next flying into an excess of abuse? This was
eminently the sort of woman with whom a husband would quarrel, and from
whom he would eventually fly.
And then fancying that he had escaped from her, and being led to commit
those frauds for which he was afterwards sentenced to imprisonment, was
not his wooing of Priscilla just what might be looked for from such an
unprincipled man? He had an idea, no doubt, that he would be able to
squeeze a fortune out of her father, and when he had made his position
secure, he would have cleared off, perhaps leaving Priscilla a message
that he was not her husband.
They had no trouble whatever in piecing together such a story of fraud
as was adapted, they felt sure, to the fraudulent tendencies of the
man and the ill-balanced passions of the woman on the other side of the
Atlantic--Priscilla could see her quite clearly--a tall, darkhaired and
dark-skinned creature--a termagant--the sort of woman that a sort of man
would love fiercely and desert with joy when the dust of the ashes of
his passion began to make his eyes smart and to irritate his nostrils.
And as she pictured her, this woman was not the one to let a man wrong
her and remain unpunished. She would not be such a fool as to allow a
man to approach her unless he meant marriage; and she would certainly be
able to hold him captive until he was ready to marry her.
But while Priscilla believed what she wanted to believe--namely, that
the man and the woman had been husband and wife before he had left her,
she would have been sorry to allow herself to be so carried away by that
impression as to believe that Marcus Blaydon might not have behaved
to that woman as the scoundrel he had shown himself to be in regard to
herself. She would have been sorry to think that he was not capable of
deceiving his Lucy and running away from her; and being so obsessed by
the certainty that the man was a villain, she could not feel so sure as
she would have liked that he had actually married the woman who had been
writing to him.
She and Jack agreed, however, that Major Crosbie, a man who had been
associated with greater villains, and a greater number of them, than
almost any living man, certainly believed that Blaydon and that woman
were man and wife, and against the belief of a man so well qualified to
judge, the impressions of ordinary people not moving in criminal circles
must be held of small account. And Priscilla, feeling this, was quite
satisfied to allow her belief in the persistent villainy of Marcus
Blaydon to yield to such _force majeure_.
But these beliefs and impressions and speculations were, after all,
of no importance in relation to the final issue of their visit to
the prison, compared with what they had achieved in learning in what
direction to begin their search for whatever Captain Lyman could tell
them. When they had set out upon their journey to the prison, the only
thing that they had before them was the discovery of the whereabouts of
Captain Lyman, who might possibly be able to give them some information
in regard to the woman whom Jack, with his acquaintance with the
wickedness of men, had asserted, when face to face with Marcus Blaydon,
that this same Blaydon had gone straight from gaol to meet. But from
this rather indefinite quest they had come with some very definite
information indeed, not respecting Captain Horace Lyman, but respecting
the woman herself. They had no need of the help of Captain Lyman or the
fulness of his knowledge just now. They were in a position to go direct
to the woman, and then...
“We are going ahead a bit too fast,” said Jack, when they had got so
far in their review of all that they had gained by their visit to the
prison. “We would do well not to go just yet beyond the point when we
set out for Canada.”
“_We?_” cried Priscilla. “Do you mean to say that you would take me with
you?”
“I told you a long time ago that I meant to run no risks where you
are concerned, and that’s my situation still,” replied Jack. “I do not
intend to let you out of my sight until this business is settled. It
is about time that you had a holiday, and there’s no better place for
holiday-making than Canada in the Fall.”
She could not speak to acknowledge her appreciation of his care for her.
She pulled his arm about her and nestled in its hollow.
“There is no such amazing sight--no such picture of colour in the whole
world as the Canadian backwoods in the Fall,” he continued. “It will
amaze you. The sight of those leaves...”
Off he went, and for the rest of the evening they threw aside every
consideration of the ostensible object of their trip to Canada and
devoted themselves to their itinerary of the St. Lawrence, with
excursions north and south, and a week at Niagara. Not another word did
they say about the man or the woman, or the possible effect of producing
the latter in the English courts to testify to the man’s perfidy. They
were going on a holiday together, and that was enough for them. They
exchanged plans until bed-time.
Even at breakfast the next morning Priscilla returned to the topic,
asking him what clothes she should take with her on her journey, and he
replied that she couldn’t do better than take the usual sort; an answer
that sent her into a little fit of laughter which lasted until he had
shaken his newspaper out of its folds and glanced at the first page.
Then her laughter was stopped by his familiar exclamation:
“Great Gloriana! What’s this?”
“What’s what?” she asked.
He did not answer her.. His eyes were staring at the paper. He was
reading something with an intensity that prevented his hearing her.
She waited patiently until he looked up in a puzzled way, and remarked
once more:
“Great Gloriana!”
“What is it, Jack? What have you been reading there?” she said.
He gave a little start, as if he had not expected to see her beside him.
“I beg your pardon,” he cried. “I was so--so--knocked--read it--the
letter--there--farther down.”
“Horace Lyman!” she cried. “What is this?”
The name that had been so much in their thoughts for all these weeks was
there--printed in small capitals at the foot of a letter addressed to
the editor: “Horace Lyman, master mariner.”
It did not take her long to read every word that appeared above that
signature.
The letter was headed “An Impostor,” and between that heading and the
signature she read the following:
“Sir,--A copy of your esteemed paper, dated the 2nd ult., having come
into my hand, I learn that a man named Marcus Blaydon has been giving an
account to your representatives of an incident which he describes as a
miraculous escape from drowning when endeavouring to carry a line ashore
from the wreck of the barque _Kingsdale_, off the coast of Nova Scotia,
on the night of April the 9th. Sir, I fear that you have been hoaxed by
an impostor in this matter; for it would be impossible to believe that
any man who, when he reached the shore, had the heartlessness to free
himself from the line, leaving his messmates to their fate--certain
death, as he had every reason to believe it would be--and then to hurry
away from the scene of the disaster, would have the effrontery to face
men and women--and _women_, I repeat--in a Christian land.
“Sir, I am prepared to prove every word that I say, and what I do say
and affirm solemnly and before my Maker, is that Marcus Blaydon cast off
the line which he had carried ashore, leaving us to our fate, and walked
away from the coast inland without making any enquiry and without making
any attempt to procure help for us in our extremity from some of the
fishing population of that coast. With his further movements ashore I
am also fully acquainted up to a certain point; but I still say that I
refuse to believe that even so inhuman a wretch would presume to have
the impudence to face Christian people in a Christian country.”
That was the letter, written by the hand of a sailor-man all
unaccustomed to that elegance of diction which marks the sentences of a
newspaper correspondent, but at the same time quite practised in the art
of striking out straight from the shoulder, regardless of pleonasms in
composition.
“That is Horace Lyman, and that is Marcus Blaydon,” said Priscilla
without emotion.
“Look for a leader,” cried Jack, turning over the pages of the
newspaper. “I shouldn’t wonder if there was a leader or something on
this letter. A man would need to convince the newspaper people pretty
completely of his rights in this matter before’ he could induce them to
print such a libel. By the nine gods, here it is!”
And there, sure enough, was a short editorial note calling attention to
Captain’s Lyman’s letter and stating that Captain Lyman had proved to
the satisfaction of the editor that he could, if given an opportunity,
substantiate every word of the serious charges which he had brought
against Marcus Blaydon, a man whose name the public had acclaimed as
that of a hero in the Spring, but who, it would now appear, so far
from being a hero, was a paltry adventurer, without any of those better
qualities which are occasionally found associated with adventurers.
The newspaper was one which had made a name for itself by reason of its
fearlessness in exposing fraud and for its persistence in following up a
clue to an imposition, no matter by whom attempted.
Jack read the editorial comment and laughed.
“I’m afraid there will be no trip to Canada, Priscilla,” he said.
“On our part, no,” she said.
He looked at her enquiringly.
“On our part? Do you suggest that--that--he----”
“I think that he will go to Canada--to London, Canada,” said she.
“Even though her brother has shown him to be such a skunk?”
“_Because_ her brother has done so.”
“Is that woman?”
“Yes, that is woman.”
“I’m learning. And she is married to him, you still think?”
“No; I don’t believe now that she is. However, we’ll soon learn the
truth. We shall have no difficulty in getting in touch with Captain
Lyman now. The newspaper people will be certain to have his address in
case of accidents. They would not care to be saddled with a libel action
unless they could lay a hand on Captain Lyman at a moment’s notice.”
“I’m certain of that; they’ll give us his address fast enough at
the newspaper office. We shall call for it when we have seen Reggie
Liscomb.”
They had agreed with Mr. Liscomb to call upon him on their return from
their visit to Major Crosbie, to acquaint him with the result of their
interview with that officer; and when they entered the private room of
the junior partner, they found him with a copy of the newspaper which
they had just been reading, on the desk in front of him.
“You have seen it?” said Jack. “Captain Lyman’s letter?”
“I have gone one better. I have seen Captain Lyman himself,” said Mr.
Liscomb.
“Then you know his present address and we need not send for it to the
paper?” said Priscilla.
“You certainly need not be at that trouble. His address just at this
present moment is ‘Waiting-room, 3, Bishop’s Place.’”
He touched a bell.
“Send in the gentleman who went last into the room,” he said to the
messenger, and before Jack or Priscilla had recovered from their
surprise, a black-bearded, well-built man, wearing a jacket and carrying
a tall hat of an obsolete pattern that had been called in several years
before, entered the room, and gave a fine quarterdeck bow all round.
“Captain Lyman,” said Mr. Liscomb, “this is the lady and gentleman about
whom we had our chat just now.”
“Proud, ma’am--proud, sir,” said Captain Lyman, bowing once more.
“Captain Lyman,” said Priscilla quickly. “Was your sister Lucy ever
married to Marcus Blaydon?”
“Never, ma’am, never; and never will be if I can help it,” was the
reply.