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SHADOW
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OF THE ROPE
E.W.HORNUNG


21486.47.17
В
HARVARD COLLEGE
LIBRARY

VERT
DEN
TAS
EN
OLA
NUN
BOUGHT FROM THE FUND
BEQUEATHED BY
ROLAND BURRAGE DIXON
CLASS OF 1897
PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY
1916–1935


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THE SHADOW OF
THE ROPE


BOOKS BY MR. HORNUNG
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THE SHADOW OF
THE ROPE
BY
E. W. HORNUNG
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK:::::::::::::::::1902


21486.47.17
Bu
HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY
BEQUEST OF
ROLAND BURRAGE DIXON
MAY 19, 1936
COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
All rights reserved
Published, September, 1902
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK


TO MY FRIEND
EDWARD SHORTT





CONTENTS
Page
·
·
·
.
.
.
.
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
·
Chapter
1. 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"
·
·
. I 20
·
·
·
·
.
.
.
.
.
.
•
.
.
.
.
.
.
· 151
. 159
. 168
. 178
. 191
. 199
vii


Contents
Page
. 211
Chapter
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
•
•
.
· 285
• 301
.
.
viii


THE SHADOW OF
THE ROPE





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


The Shadow of the Rope
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 armoury 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 under-
world, 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 inexpe-
rience 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 be-
tween them, nor a relative to whom either was per-


The Shadow of the Rope
“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 soon-
er 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


The End of Their Life
drawer or wardrobe that which remained some mo-
ments 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 honour, 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 utter-
most 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 draw-
ing-room in the majority of such houses, and Rachel
peeped in on her way down. It was empty; moreover,


The Shadow of the Rope
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 pro-
tected 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 un-
worthy 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.
6


The End of Their Life
Rachel had a touch of pity at seeing him in a chair
for the night; but the testimony of the decanter for-
bade remorse. She had filled it herself in the evening
against her husband's return from an absence of mys-
terious length. Now she understood that mystery,
and her face darkened as she recalled the inconceivable
insult which his explanation had embraced. No, in-
deed; 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


The Shadow of the Rope
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


The End of Their Life
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 celer-
ity, 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. Sev-
erino! 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 ”


The Shadow of the Rope
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 latch-
key, while the birds sang to frenzy in a neighbouring
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
IO


The End of Their Life
cry had left them; she had but crossed the threshold,
and stopped that instant in the middle of the worn car-
pet, 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 sur-
prising feature is often the way in which we ourselves
receive the shock; a sudden and complete detach-
ment, 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 liv-
ing man; so that Rachel could already marvel that
she had not at once detected this dignity and this dis-
tinction, 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


The Shadow of the Rope
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 news-
paper 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 ter-
rible 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;
12


The End of Their Life
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 favour."
Rachel sprang upright, her wet eyes wide with pure
astonishment.
“In my favour?” 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."
mo


The Case for the Crown
so entirely circumstantial, that the proceedings were
expected to occupy a week.
Sure enough, the case was accorded first place in the
November Sessions, with a fair start on a Monday
morning towards the latter end of the month. In the
purlieus of the mean, historic court, it was a morning
not to be forgotten, and only to be compared with
those which followed throughout the week. The
prisoner's sex, her youth, her high bearing, and the
peculiar isolation of her position, without a friend to
stand by her in her need, all appealed to the popular
imagination, and produced a fascination which was
only intensified by the equally general feeling that no
one else could have committed the crime. From the
judge downward, all connected with the case were
pestered for days beforehand with more or less un-
warrantable applications for admission. And when
the time came, the successful suppliant had to elbow
every yard of his way from Newgate Street or Lud-
gate Hill; to pass three separate barriers held by a
suspicious constabulary; to obtain the good offices of
the Under Sheriff, through those of his liveried
lacqueys; and finally to occupy the least space, on the
narrowest of seats, in a varnished stall filled with
curiously familiar faces, within a few feet of the heav-
ily veiled prisoner in the dock, and not many more
from the red-robed judge upon the bench.
The first to take all this trouble on the Monday
morning, and the last to escape from the foul air (shot
15


The Shadow of the Rope
by biting draughts) when the court adjourned, was a
white-headed gentleman of striking appearance and
stamina to match; for, undeterred by the experience,
he was in like manner first and last upon each subse-
quent day. Behind him came and went the well-
known faces, the authors and the actors with a semi-
professional interest in the case; but they were not
well-known to the gentleman with the white head.
He heard no more than he could help of their constant
whisperings, and, if he knew not at whom he more
than once had occasion to turn and frown, he certainly
did not look the man to care. He had a well-pre-
served reddish face, with a small mouth of extraor-
dinary strength, a canine jaw, and singularly noble
forehead; but his most obvious distinction was his full
head of snowy hair. The only hair upon his face, a
pair of bushy eyebrows, was so much darker as to sug-
gest a dye; but the eyes themselves were black as mid-
night, with a glint of midnight stars, and of such a
subtle inscrutability that a certain sweetness of expres-
sion came only as the last surprise in a face full of
contrast and contradiction.
No one in court had ever seen this man before; no
one but the Under Sheriff learnt his name during the
week; but by the third day his identity was a subject
of discussion, both by the professional students of the
human countenance, who sat behind him (balked of
their study by the prisoner's veil), and among the
various functionaries who had already found him as
16


The Shadow of the Rope
outside, instead of within ; that no other mark of foot
or hand had been made or left by the supposititious
burglars; whereas a brace of revolvers had been dis-
covered in the dead man's bureau, both loaded with
such bullets as the one which had caused his death,
while one of them had clearly been discharged since
the last cleaning. The discovery of the missing watch
and chain, in the very chimney of the same room, was
a piece of ideal evidence of the confirmatory kind.
But it was not the point that made an impression on
the man with the white hair; it did not increase his
attention, for that would have been impossible; he was
perhaps the one spectator who was not, if only for the
moment, perceptibly thrilled.
Thrilling also was the earlier evidence, furnished by
maid-servants and police constables in pairs; but here
there was no surprise. The maids were examined not
only as to what they had seen and heard on the night
of the murder-and they seemed to have heard every-
thing except the fatal shot—but upon the previous
relations of their master and mistress-of which they
showed an equally extensive knowledge. The con-
stables were perforce confined to their own discoveries
and observations when the maids had called them in.
But all four witnesses spoke to the prisoner's behaviour
when shown the dead body of her husband, and there
was the utmost unanimity in their several tales. The
prisoner had exhibited little or no surprise; it was sev-
eral minutes before she had uttered a syllable; and then
18


The Case for the Crown
her first words had been to point out that burglars
alone could have committed the murder.
In cross-examination the senior counsel for the de-
fence thus early showed his hand; and it was not a
strong one to those who knew the game. A Queen's
Counsel, like the leader for the Crown, this was an
altogether different type of lawyer; a younger man,
with a more engaging manner; a more brilliant man,
who sought with doubtful wisdom to blind the jury
with his brilliance. His method was no innovation at
the Old Bailey; it was to hold up every witness in
turn to the derision and contempt of the jury and the
court. So both the maids were reduced to tears, and
each policeman cleverly insulted as such. But the
testimony of all four remained unshaken; and the
judge himself soothed the young women's feelings
with a fatherly word, while wigs were shaken in the
well of the court. That was no road to the soft side of
a decent, conscientious, hard-headed jury, of much the
same class as these witnesses themselves; even the
actors and authors had a sound opinion on the point,
without waiting to hear one from the professional
gentlemen in the well. But the man in front with the
very white hair--the man who was always watching
the prisoner at the bar—there was about as much ex-
pression of opinion upon his firm bare face as might
be seen through the sable thickness of her widow's veil.
It was the same next day, when, for some five hours
out of a possible five and a half, the attention of the
19


The Shadow of the Rope
court was concentrated upon a point of obviously sec-
ondary significance. It was suggested by the defence
that the watch and chain found up the study chimney
were not those worn by the deceased at the time he
met his death. The contention was supported by
photographs of Alexander Minchin wearing a watch-
chain that might or might not be of another pattern
altogether; expert opinions were divided on the point;
and experts in chains as well as in photography were
eventually called by both sides. Interesting in the be-
ginning, the point was raised and raised again, and on
subsequent days, until all were weary of the sight of
the huge photographic enlargements, which were hand-
ed about the court upon each occasion. Even the
prisoner would droop in her chair when the “chain
photograph” was demanded for the twentieth time by
her own unflagging counsel; even the judge became
all but inattentive on the point, before it was finally
dropped on an intimation from the jury that they had
made up their minds about the chains; but no trace
of boredom had crossed the keen alert face of the un-
known gentleman with the snowy hair.
So the case was fought for Mrs. Minchin, tooth and
nail indeed, yet perhaps with more asperity than con-
viction, and certainly at times upon points which were
hardly worth the fighting. Yet, on the Friday after-
noon, when her counsel at last played his masterstroke,
and, taking advantage of the then new Act, put the
prisoner herself in the witness-box, it was done with
20


The Case for the Crown
the air of a man who is throwing up his case. The
truth could be seen at a glance at the clean-cut, hand-
some, but too expressive profile of the crushing cross-
examiner of female witnesses and insolent foe to the
police. As it had been possible to predict, from the
mere look with which he had risen to his feet, the
kind of cross-examination in store for each witness
called by the prosecution, so it was obvious now
that his own witness had come forward from her
own wilful perversity and in direct defiance of his
advice.
It was a dismal afternoon, and the witness-box at
the Old Bailey is so situated that evidence is given
with the back to the light; thus, though her heavy veil
was raised at last, and it could be seen that she was
very pale, it was not yet that Rachel Minchin afforded
a chance to the lightning artists of the half-penny
press, or even to the students of physiognomy behind
the man with the white hair. This listener did not
lean forward an inch; the questions were answered in
so clear a voice as to render it unnecessary. Yet it
was one of these questions, put by her own counsel,
which caused the white-headed man to clap a sudden
hand to his ear, and to incline that ear as though the
answer could not come without some momentary hesi-
tation or some change of tone. Rachel had told sadly
but firmly of her final quarrel with her husband, inci-
dentally, but without embarrassment, revealing its
cause. A neighbour was dangerously ill, whom
21
'


The Case for the Crown
accents and with the reassuring face that he could as-
sume without an effort at his will.
"It was,” said Rachel, after yet another moment's
thought.
It was then that the white-headed man dropped his
eyes for once; and for once the thin hard lines of his
mouth relaxed in a smile that seemed to epitomise all
the evil that was in his face, and to give it forth in one
sudden sour quintessence.
23


CHAPTER III
NAME AND NATURE
The prisoner's evidence concluded with a perfectly
simple if somewhat hesitating account of her own
doings during the remainder of the night of her hus-
band's murder. That story has already been told in
greater detail than could be extracted even by the
urbane but deadly cross-examiner who led for the
Crown. A change had come over the manner in
which Rachel was giving her evidence; it was as
though her strength and nerve were failing her to-
gether, and henceforth the words had to be put into
her mouth. Curiously enough, the change in Mrs.
Minchin's demeanour was almost coincident with the
single and rather sinister display of feeling upon the
part of the white-haired gentleman who had followed
every word of the case. On the whole, however, her
story bore the stamp of truth; and a half-apologetic
but none the less persistent cross-examination left it
scarcely less convincing than before.
There was one independent witness for the defence,
in addition to the experts in photography and chains.
The landlady of the house at which Rachel called, in
the early morning, on her way home with the cab, was
24


Name and Nature
about five minutes in the witness-box, but in those five
minutes she supplied the defence with one of its
strongest arguments. It was at least conceivable that
a woman who had killed her husband might coolly
proceed to pack her trunk, and thereafter fetch the
cab which was to remove herself and her effects from
the scene of the tragedy. But was it credible that a
woman of so much presence of mind, to whom every
minute might make the difference between life and
death, would, having found her cab, actually drive out
of her way to inquire after a sick friend, or even a
dying lover, before going home to pick up her luggage
and to ascertain whether her crime was still unde-
tected ? Suppose it were a lover, and inquire one
must: would one not still leave those inquiries to the
last? And having made them, last or first; and know-
ing the grim necessity of fight; would one woman go
out of her way to tell another that she “had to go
abroad very suddenly, and was going for good ?”.
" Inconceivable!” cried the prisoner's counsel, deal-
ing with the point; and the word was much upon his
lips during the course of a long and very strenuous
speech, in which the case for the Crown was flouted
from beginning to end, without, perhaps, enough of
concentration on its more obvious weaknesses, or of
respect for its undoubted strength. For the prisoner's
proceedings on the night of the murder, however, sup-
posing she had committed it, and still more on the
morning after, it would have been difficult to find a
25


The Shadow of the Rope
better epithet; the only drawback was that this one
had seen service in the cause of almost every murderer
who ever went to the gallows—as counsel for the
prosecution remarked in his reply, with deadly defer-
ence to his learned friend.
“On the other hand,” he went on, wagging his eye-
glasses with leisurely deliberation, and picking his
words with a care that enhanced their effect, after the
unbridled rhetoric of the defence" on the other hand,
gentlemen, if criminals never made mistakes, incon-
ceivable or not as we may choose to consider them-
if they never made those mistakes, they would never
stand in that dock.”
It was late on the Saturday afternoon when the
judge summed up; but a pleasant surprise was in
store for those who felt that his lordship must speak
at greater length than either of the counsel between
whom he was to hold the scales. The address from
the bench was much the shortest of the three. Less
exhaustive than the conventional review of a compli-
cated case, it was a disquisition of conspicuous clear-
ness and impartiality. Only the salient points were
laid before the jury, for the last time, and in a nutshell,
but with hardly a hint of the judge's own opinion upon
any one of them. The expression of that opinion was
reserved for a point of even greater import than the
value of any separate piece of evidence. If, said the
judge, the inferences and theory of the prosecution
were correct; if this unhappy woman, driven to des-
26


Name and Nature
peration by her husband, and knowing where he kept
his pistols, had taken his life with one of them, and
afterwards manufactured the traces of a supposititious
burglary; then there was no circumstance connected
with the crime which could by any possibility reduce
it from murder to manslaughter. The solemnity of
this pronouncement was felt in the farthest corner of
the crowded court. So they were to find her guilty
of wilful murder, or not guilty at all! Every eye sped
involuntarily to the slim black figure in the dock; and,
under the gaze of all, the figure made the least little
bow—a movement so slight and so spontaneous as to
suggest unconsciousness, but all the more eloquent on
that account.
Yet to many in court, more especially to the theatri-
cal folk behind the man with the white hair, the ges-
ture was but one more subtle touch in an exhibition of
consummate art and nerve.
“If they do acquit her," whispered one of these
wiseacres to another, “she will make her fortune on
the stage!”
Meanwhile the judge was dealing at the last with
the prisoner's evidence in her own behalf, and that
mercifully enough, though with less reticence than had
characterised the earlier portions of his address. He
did not think it possible or even desirable to forget
that this was the evidence of a woman upon trial for
her life. It must not be discredited on that account.
But it was for the jury to bear in mind that the story
27


The Shadow of the Rope
was one which admitted of no corroboration, save in
unimportant details. More than that he would not
say. It was for them to judge of that story as they
had heard it for themselves, on its own merits, but
also in relation to the other evidence. If the jury be-
lieved it, there was an end of the case. If they had
any reasonable doubt at all, the prisoner was entitled
to the full benefit of that doubt, and they must acquit
her. If, on the other hand, the facts taken together
before and after the murder brought the jury to the
conclusion that it was none other than the prisoner
who had committed the murder—though, of course, no
one was present to see the act committed—they must,
in duty to their oaths, find her guilty.
During the judge's address the short November day
had turned from afternoon to night, and a great change
had come over the aspect of the dim and dingy court.
Opaque globes turned into flaring suns; incandescent
burners revealed unsuspected brackets; the place was
warmed and lighted for the first time during the week.
And the effect of the light and warmth was on all the
faces that rose as one while the judge sidled from the
bench, and the jury filed out of their box, and the
prisoner disappeared down the dock stairs for the last
time in ignorance of her fate. Next moment there
was the buzz of talk that you expect in a theatre be-
tween the acts, rather than in a court of justice at the
solemn crisis of a solemn trial. It was like a class-
room with the master called away. Hats were put on
28


Name and Nature
again in the bulging galleries; hardly a tongue was
still. On the bench a red-robed magnate and another
in knee-breeches exchanged views upon the enlarged
photographs which had played so prominent a part in
the case; in the well the barristers' wigs nodded or
shook over their pink blotters and their quill pens;
gentlemen of the Press sharpened their pencils and
indulged in prophecy; and on their right, between the
reporters and the bench, the privileged few, the literary
and theatrical elect, discussed the situation with ab-
normal callousness, masking emotion with a childlike
cynicism of sentiment and phrase.
And for once the stranger in their midst, the man
with more outward distinction than any one of them,
the unknown man with the snowy hair, could afford to
listen to what they had to say.
“No chance, my dear man. Not an earthly!”
“ I'm not so sure of that.”
“Will you bet?”
“No, hang it! What a beast you are! But I
thought the woman was speaking the truth.”
“You heard what the judge said. Where's your
corroboration ? No, they ought never to have let her
go into the box. I hear she insisted. But it hasn't
saved anybody yet.”
“The new law? Then it shows her pluck!”
“But not necessarily her innocence, dear boy."
Thus one shaven couple. Others had already ex-
hausted the subject.
29


The Shadow of the Rope
“Yes, I finished it down at Westgate last week.”
“ Satisfied ?”
“In a way. It depends so much on the cast."
“ These actor-managers—what?”
“ More or less. I must be off. Dining out.”
“What! Not going to wait for the end of the
fourth act?”
“No, I'm late as it is. Ta-ta!"
The white-haired man was amused. He did not
turn round, nor, if he had, would he have known the
retreating gentleman for the most eminent of living
playwrights; but he knew the reason for his sudden
retreat. A hush had fallen, and some one had whis-
pered, “ They're coming!” The light-hearted chatter
had died away on the word; perhaps it was not so
light-hearted after all. But the alarm was false, there
was no sign of the jury, and the talk rose again, as the
wind will in a storm.
“We shall want a glass when this is over," whis-
pered one of the pair who had argued about the case.
“And we'll have it, too, old man!” rejoined his
friend.
The white-haired man was grimly interested. So
this was the way men talked while waiting to hear
a fellow-creature sentenced to death! It was worth
knowing. And this was what the newspaper men
would call a low buzzman expectant hush—this ani-
mated babble! Yet the air was charged with emotion,
suppressed perhaps, but none the less distinguishable
30


Name and Nature
in every voice. Within earshot a perspiring young
pressman was informing his friends that to come there
comfortably you should commit the murder yourself,
then they gave you the Royal Box; but his teeth could
be heard chattering through the feeble felicity. The
white-headed listener curled a contemptuous nostril.
They could joke, and yet they could feel! He himself
betrayed neither weakness, but sat waiting patiently
and idly listening, with the same grim jaw and the
same inscrutable eye with which he had watched the
prisoner and the jury alternately throughout the week.
And when the latter at last returned, and then the
former, it was the same subtle stare that he again bent
upon them both in turn.
The jury had been absent but forty minutes after
all; and their expedition seemed as ill an omen as their
nervous and responsible faces. There was a moment's
hush, another moment of prophetic murmurs, and then
a stillness worthy of its subsequent description in every
newspaper. The prisoner was standing in the front
of the dock, a female warder upon either hand. The
lightning pencil of the new journalist had its will of
her at last. For Mrs. Minchin had dispensed not only
with the chair which she had occupied all the week,
but also with the heavy veil which she had but partially
lifted during her brief sojourn in the witness-box, and
never once in the dock. The veil was now flung back
over the widow's bonnet, peaking and falling like a
sable cowl, against which the unearthly pallor of her
31


The Shadow of the Rope
face was whiter far than that of the merely dead, just
as mere death was the least part of the fate confront-
ing her. Yet she had raised her veil to look it fairly
in the face, and the packed assembly marvelled as it
gazed.
Was that the face that had been hidden from them
all these days? It was not what they had pictured
beneath the proud, defiant carriage of its concealing
veil. Was that the face of a determined murderess?
Beautiful it was not as they saw it then, but the
elements of beauty lay unmistakable beneath a white
mist of horror and of pain, as a lovely landscape is still
lovely at its worst. The face was a thin but perfect
oval, lengthened a little by depth of chin and height
of forehead, as now also by unnatural emaciation and
distress. The mouth was at once bloodless, sweet, and
firm; the eyes of a warm and lustrous brown, brilliant,
eloquent, brave—and hopeless!
Yes, she had no hope herself! It was plain enough
at the first glimpse of the deadly white, uncovered face,
in the cruel glare of gas. But it became plainer still
as, with sad, unflinching eyes, she watched and listened
while, for the last time, the jurymen answered to their
names.
Now they were done. The foreman shifted nervous-
ly in his place. In the overstrain of the last dread
pause, the crowded court felt hotter and lighter than
ever. It seemed to unite the glare of a gin palace with
the temperature of a Turkish bath.
32


Name and Nature
“Gentlemen, are you agreed upon your verdict?”
“We are.”
“Do you find the prisoner guilty or not guilty ? ”
“Not guilty.”
There was a simultaneous gasp from a hundred
throats—a distinct cry from some. Then the Clerk
of Arraigns was seen to be leaning forward, a hand to
his ear, for the foreman's voice had broken with
excitement. And every soul in court leant forward
too.
But this time his feelings had a different effect upon
the excited foreman.
“Not guilty !” he almost bawled.
Dead silence then, while the clock ticked thrice.
“ And that is the verdict of you all? ”
“Of every one of us!”
The judge leant back in his place, his eyes upon the
desk before him, without a movement or a gesture to
strike the personal note which had been suppressed
with such admirable impartiality throughout the trial.
But it was several moments before his eyes were lifted
with his voice.
"Let her be discharged,” was all he said even then;
but he would seem to have said it at once gruffly, an-
grily, thankfully, disgustedly, with emotion, and with-
out any emotion at all. You read the papers, and you
take your choice.
So Rachel Minchin was supported from the court,
before the round eyes of a hundred or two of her fel-
33


The Shadow of the Rope
low-creatures, in the pitiable state of one who has been
condemned to die, and not set free to live. It was as
though she still misunderstood a verdict which had
filled most faces with incredulity, but none with an
astonishment to equal her own. Her white face had
leapt alight, but not with gladness. The pent-up emo-
tion of the week had broken forth in an agony of tears;
and so they half led, half carried her from the court.
She had entered it for the last time with courage
enough; but it was the wrong kind of courage; and,
for the one supreme moment, sentence of life was
harder to bear than sentence of death.
In a few minutes the court was empty—a singular
little theatre of pale varnish and tawdry hangings, still
rather snug and homely in the heat and light of its
obsolete gas, and with as little to remind one of the
play as any other theatre when the curtain is down
and the house empty. But there was clamour in the
corridors, and hooting already in the street. Nor was
the house really empty after all. One white-haired
gentleman had not left his place when an attendant
returned to put out the lights. The attendant pointed
him out to a constable at the door; both watched him
a few moments. Then the attendant stepped down
and touched him on the shoulder.
The gentleman turned slowly without a start. “Ah,
you're the man I want to see," said he. “Was that
the Chief Warder in the dock?”
“ Him with the beard," said the attendant, nodding.
34


Name and Nature
“Well, give him this, and give it him quick. I'll
wait up there till he can see me."
And he pressed his card into the attendant's palm,
with a couple of sovereigns underneath.
“Wants to see the Chief Warder,” explained the
attendant to the constable at the door.
“He's been here all the week,” mused the constable
aloud. “I wonder who he is? ”
“ Name of Steel,” whispered the other, consulting
the card, as the gentleman advanced up the steps tow-
ards them, the gaslight gleaming in his silver hair, and
throwing his firm features into strong relief.
“And not a bad name for him," said the constable
at the door.


CHAPTER IV
THE MAN IN THE TRAIN
RACHEL fought her weakness with closed eyes, and
was complete mistress of herself when those about her
thought that consciousness alone was returning. She
recognised the chamber at a glance; it was the one in
which generations of metropolitan malefactors, and a
few innocent persons like herself, had waited for the
verdict of life or death. For her it was life, life, life!
And she wondered whether any other of the few had
ever come back to life with so little joy.
The female warders were supporting her in a chair;
the prison doctor stood over her with a medicine-glass.
“ Drink this,” said he, kindly.
“But I have been conscious all the time."
“Never mind. You need it.”
And Rachel took the restorative without more
words.
It did its work. The colour came back to her face.
The blood ran hot in her veins. In a minute she was
standing up without assistance.
“And now," said Rachel, “ I shall not trespass fur-
ther on your kindness, and I am sure that you will not
wish to detain me.”
36


The Man in the Train
“We cannot," said the doctor, with a broad smile
and a bow; "you are as free as air, and will perhaps
allow me to be the first to congratulate you. At the
same time, my dear madam, and quite apart from your
condition—which is wonderful to me after what you've
been through—at the same time, and even with your
fortitude, I think it would be advisable to-to wait a
little while.”
The doctor raised his eyes, and all at once Rachel
heard. Overhead-outside—in the world—there was
the brutal hooting of a thoughtless mob.
“So that is for me!”
Rachel set her teeth.
“On the contrary,” said the kindly doctor, “it may
be for the witnesses; but crowds are fickle things; and
I should strongly urge you not to court a demonstra-
tion of one sort or the other. You are best where you
are for the time being, or at all events somewhere with-
in the precincts. And meanwhile your solicitor is
waiting to add his congratulations to mine."
"Is he, indeed!” cried Rachel, in a voice as hard as
her eye.
“Why, to be sure," rejoined the other, taken some-
what aback. “There must be many matters for dis-
cussion between you, and he at least seems very
anxious to discuss them. In fact, I may say that he
is only awaiting my permission for an immediate in-
terview."
“ Then let him await mine!” exclaimed Rachel, in
37


The Shadow of the Rope
a vindictive voice for which she was apologising in the
next breath. “I owe you much,” she added, “if only
for your kindness and sympathy during these few min-
utes. But to him I owe nothing that I cannot pay in
cash. He tried to keep me from telling my own story
in the box—they all did—but he was the worst of all.
So I certainly do not owe him my life. He came to
me and he said what he liked; he may have forgotten
what he said, but I never shall.”
“He would be the first to admit his error now.”
“Perhaps; but he believed me guilty to the very end;
and I utterly refuse to see him to-night.”
" Then I shall tell him so."
And the good doctor disappeared for the nonce, but
was back in a couple of minutes, full of the lawyer's
expostulations. What did Mrs. Minchin intend to do?
Where did she propose to go? There were a hundred
matters for explanation and arrangement. Her solici-
tor said she had no friends, and seemed himself most
anxious to act in that capacity. Rachel's lips curled
at the thought.
“At least,” said she, “ I have the friends who guar-
anteed his bill, if that has anything to say to his anxi-
ety! But what I mean to do, and where I may go, are
entirely my own affair. And as for the hundred mat-
ters he mentions, he might have spoken of them during
the week. Perhaps he thought it would be waste of
breath, but I should have appreciated the risk.”
So her solicitor was beaten off, with all the spirit
38


The Man in the Train
which was one of Rachel's qualities, but also with the
rashness which was that quality's defect. The man
was indeed no ornament to his profession, but a police-
court practitioner of the pushing order, who had se-
cured the case for notoriety and nothing else. Rachel's
soul sickened when she thought of her interviews, and
especially her most recent interviews, with one whom
she had never seen before her trouble, and whom she
devoutly hoped never to see again. She did not per-
ceive that the time had come when the lawyer might
have been really useful to her. Yet his messages left
her more alive to the difficulties that lay before her as
a free woman, and to the immediate necessity of acting
for herself once more.
After all there had been a silver lining to the cloud
under which she had lain so long. Others had acted
for her. It had been a rest. But, conscious of her
innocence, and serene in that consciousness, she had
prepared herself rather for another life than for a new
lease of this one; and, while seeking to steel her soul
to the awful sequel of a conviction, in the other direc-
tion she had seldom looked beyond the consummate
incident of an acquittal. Life seems a royal road when
it is death that stares one in the face; but already
Rachel saw the hills and the pitfalls; for indeed they
began under her nose.
She had no plans, nor a single soul to help her to
make any. In all the world she had no real friend.
And yet, with the very independence to which this iso-
39


The Shadow of the Rope
lation was largely due, she must pick and choose, and
reject, in the hour when any friend would have been
better than none !
In the first ten minutes of the new life which Rachel
Minchin began with her acquittal, she had refused to
see her own solicitor, and an unknown gentleman
whose card was brought to her by the Chief Warder
himself. With the card was a message which might
have inspired confidence, and the same might be said
of the address. But it was enough for Rachel that she
knew no one of the name. The Chief Warder, one of
the kindliest mortals, displayed no little irritation un-
der her repeated refusals; but it was the agent, and
not the principal, who was so importunate; and the
message was not repeated once the former could be
induced to bear Mrs. Minchin's answer. The Chief
Warder did indeed return, but it was not to make any
further reference to the mysterious Mr. Steel who had
craved an interview with Mrs. Minchin. And now
the good fellow was all smiles.
“Feeling more yourself?” said he; and, when
Rachel said she was, he asked her to listen now; and
there was nothing to listen to. “The coast's as clear
as the Criminal Court,” explained this pleasant official.
“A closed cab did it, with an officer on the box; and
I'll call you another as soon as you like.”
Rachel rose at once.
“It was kind of you to let me stay so long," she
said. “But I don't think I will take a cab, thank you,
40


The Man in the Train
if there's an underground station within reach, and you
will kindly tell me the way.”
“There's Blackfriars Bridge within five minutes.
But you will have more than you can carry- "
“I have nothing worth taking away with me,” said
Rachel, “except the things I stand up in; but you may
give what I leave to any poor woman who cares to
have them. And I hope you will accept this trifle for
yourself, with my deep gratitude for all your kind-
ness.”
Indeed, the man had been kind, and his kindness
would have continued to the last had the trial ended
differently. Nevertheless, Rachel's trifle was a piece
of gold, and one of her last. Nor was this pure gener-
osity. There was an untold joy in being able to give
again. It was the first real taste of freedom; and in
another minute Rachel was free.
Oh, but what a miracle to hear her feet on the now
deserted pavement, to see her breath in the raw No-
vember night, and the lights of Ludgate Hill beyond !
Rachel raised her veil to see them better. Who would
look for her afoot so near the scene of her late ordeal?
And what did it matter who saw her and who knew
her now? She was innocent; she could look the whole
world in the face once more. Oh, to rub shoulders
with the world again!
A cab came tinkling up behind her, and Rachel half
thought of hailing it, and driving through the lighted
town after all; but the hansom was occupied, and the
41


The Shadow of the Rope
impulse passed. She put down her veil and turned
into the stream without catching a suspicious eye.
Why should they suspect her? And again, what did
it matter if they did ?
“ Trial an’ verdic'! Trial an’ verdic'! Acquittal o'
Mrs. Minchin! Trial an' verdic'!”.
Everybody was buying the damp, pink sheets.
Rachel actually bought one herself; and overheard the
opinion of the man in the street without a pang. So
she might think herself lucky! But she did, she did;
in the reaction that had come upon her with the first
mouthful of raw air, in the intoxication of treading
the outer world again, she thought herself the luckiest
woman in London, and revelled rather than otherwise
in the very considerations which had appalled her in
the precincts of the court. How good, after all, to be
independent as well as free! How great to drift with
the tide of innocent women and law-abiding men, once
more one of themselves, and not even a magnet for
morbid curiosity! That would come soon enough;
the present was all the more to be enjoyed; and even
the vagueness of the immediate future, even the lack
of definite plans, had a glamour of their own in eyes
that were yet to have their fill of street-lamps and
shop-windows and omnibuses and hansom cabs.
The policeman under the bridge was a joy in him-
self; he refreshed Rachel's memory as to the way,
without giving her an unnecessary look; and he called
her“ madam " into the bargain! After all, it was not
42


The Man in the Train
every policeman who had been on duty at the Old
Bailey, nor one in many thousands of the population
who had gained admission to the court.
Yet if Rachel had relieved the tedium of her trial by
using her eyes a little more; if, for example, she had
condescended to look twice at the handful of mere spec-
tators beyond the reporters on her right; she could
scarcely have failed to recognise the good-looking
elderly man who was at her heels when she took her
ticket at Blackfriars Bridge. His white hair was cov-
ered by his hat, but the face itself was not one to be
forgotten, with its fresh colour, its small grim mouth,
and the deep-set glitter beneath the bushy eyebrows.
Rachel, however, neither recognised nor looked
again.
In a few minutes she had a better chance, when, hav-
ing entered an empty compartment in the first class,
she was joined by this gentleman as the train began
to move.
Rachel hid herself behind the newspaper which she
had bought, not that she had looked twice at her com-
panion, but because at such close quarters, and in the
comparatively fierce light of the first-class compart-
ment, she was terribly afraid that he might look once
too often at her. But this fear passed from her in the
matchless fascination of reading and re-reading five
words in the stop-press column :-“MINCHIN CASE
-Verdict, Not guilty.”
Not guilty! Not guilty! And to see it in print!
43


The Shadow of the Rope
Her eyes filled at the sight, and she dried them to gloat
again. There were columns and columns about the
case, embellished with not unskilful sketches of coun-
sel addressing the jury, and of the judge in the act of
summing up. But Rachel had listened to every word
from all three; and the professional report was less
full and less accurate than the one which she carried
in her brain and would carry to her grave. Not that
the speeches mattered now. It was no speech that had
saved her; it was her own story, from her own lips,
that the lawyers would have closed! Rachel forgave
them now; she was almost grateful to them for having
left it to her to save herself in spite of them all: so
should her perfect innocence be impressed upon the
whole country as on those twelve fair minds. And
once more she pored upon the hurriedly added and ill-
printed line which gave their verdict to the world,
while the train stopped and started, only to stop and
start again.
“And what do you think of it, madam?”
The voice came from the opposite corner of the com-
partment, and Rachel knew it for that of the gentleman
who had jumped in at the last moment at Blackfriars
Bridge. It was Charing Cross that they were leaving
now, and the door had not opened at that station or
the last. Rachel sat breathless behind her evening
paper. Not to answer might be to fasten suspicion
upon her widow's weeds; and, for all her right to look
mankind in the face, she shrank instinctively from im-
44


The Man in the Train
mediate recognition. Then in a clap came the tempta-
tion to discuss her own case with the owner of a voice
at once confident and courtly, and subtly reminiscent
of her native colony, where it is no affront for stran-
ger to speak to stranger without introduction or ex-
cuse.
Rachel's hesitation lasted perhaps a couple of sec-
onds, and then her paper lay across her lap.
"Of what ? ” she asked, with some presence of mind,
for she had never an instant's doubt that the question
referred to the topic of the hour.
“We were reading the same paper,” replied the
questioner, with perfect courtesy; “it only struck me
that we might both be reading the same thing, and
feeling equally amazed at the verdict.”
“You mean in the Minchin case,” said Rachel
steadily, and without the least interrogation in her
tone. “Yes, I was reading it, as I suppose everybody
is. But I disagree with you about the verdict.”
The young widow's manner was as downright as
her words. There was a sudden raising of the bushy
eyebrows in the opposite corner, a brief opening of the
black eyes underneath.
“Pardon me,” said the gentleman, breaking into a
smile;“ I was not aware that I had expressed an opin-
ion on that point.”
“I understood you were amazed,” said Rachel,
dryly.
“ And are not you?” cried the other point-blank.
45


The Shadow of the Rope
“Do you mean to tell me that you were prepared for
an acquittal ?”
“I was prepared for anything,” replied Rachel, re-
turning a peculiarly penetrating stare with one at least
as steady, and yet holding her breath for very fear lest
this stranger had found her out, until his next words
allayed the suspicion.
“Madam, have you followed the case ?”
"Indeed I have,” sighed honest Rachel.
“And as a woman you believe this woman inno-
cent?”
“I do."
It was hard enough to say no more than that; but
Rachel was very fresh from her great lesson in self-
control.
"It is easy to see that you do not,” she merely per-
mitted herself to add.
“On the contrary,” said he, with great precision;
“on the contrary, my dear madam, I believe this poor
lady to be as innocent as yourself.”
Again their eyes were locked; again Rachel drew
the only inference from so pointed a pronouncement,
and yet again was the impression shaken by her com-
panion's next words.
"But I really have no right to an opinion,” said he;
“since, unlike you, I cannot claim to have read the
case. Nor is that the interesting thing now.” The
stations had come and gone, until now they were at
Victoria. The speaker looked out of the window until
46


The Man in the Train
they were off again, and off by themselves as before.
“The interesting thing, to me, is not what this poor
lady has or has not done, but what on earth she is
going to do now!”
He looked at her again, and now Rachel was sure.
But there was a kindness in his look that did away
both with resentment and regret.
“They say she has literally no friends in England,"
he went on, with unconcealed concern. “That is in-
credible; and yet, if there be any truth in it, what a
terrible position! I fear that everybody will not share
your conviction, and, I may add, my own. If one can
judge thus early, by what one has heard and seen for
oneself, this verdict is a personal disappointment to
the always bloodthirsty man in the street. Then God
help the poor lady if he spots her! I only hope she
will not give him a chance."
And now Rachel not only knew that he knew, but
that he wished to apprise her of his knowledge without
confessing it in so many words. So he would spare
her that embarrassment, and would help her if he
could, this utter stranger! Yet she saw it in his face,
she heard it in his voice; and becoming gradually alive
to his will to help, as she instinctively was to his power,
she had herself the will to consult one whose good
intention and better tact were alike obvious. Mystery
there was in her meeting with this man; something
told her that it was no accident on his side; she began
to wonder whether she had not seen him before; and
47


The Shadow of the Rope
while she wondered he came and sat opposite to her,
and went on speaking in a lower voice, his dark eyes
fixed on hers.
“If Mrs. Minchin wants a friend-and to-night I
think she must—if ever she did or will! Well, if she
does, I for one would be her friend-if she would trust
me!”
The last words were the lowest of all; and in the
tone of them there was a timbre which thrilled Rachel
as the dark eyes fascinated her. She began to feel a
strange repugnance-a yet more strange attraction.
But to the latter her independence gave instant battle
-a battle the easier to fight since the next station was
Rachel's destination.
"Do you think she would trust me?” he almost
whispered, leaning towards her. “As a woman-
don't you think she might?"
As Rachel hesitated the carriages began to groan
beneath the brake; and her hesitation was at an end.
So also was her limited capacity. for pretence. She
sat more upright in her corner, her shoulders fell in
angles, and beneath the veil, which she had raised to
read her paper, her eyes carried the war of interroga-
tion into the enemy's country.
“I seem to have seen you before," said Rachel, cool
of tongue but hot at heart.
"I think it very possible that you have.”
“ Were you at the trial?”
“From first to last !”
48


The Man in the Train
The pause that followed was really broken by the
lights of Sloane Square station.
“You know me,” said Rachel hurriedly; "I have
seen that for some time. May I ask if you are Mr.
Steel?”
“I am."
“The Mr. Steel who sent me his card after the
trial?”
Steel bowed.
“As a perfect stranger?”
“ As a perfect stranger who had watched you for a
whole long week in court.”
Rachel ignored the relative clause.
“And because I would not see you, Mr. Steel, you
have followed me, and forced yourself upon me!”
The train stopped, and Rachel rose.
“ You will gather my motives when you recall our
conversation," observed Steel; and he opened the door
for her. But Rachel turned to him before alighting.
“Mr. Steel,” said she, “I am quite sure that you
mean kindly and well, and that I above all women
should feel supremely grateful; but I cannot help
thinking that you are unjust to the man in the street !”
“Better give him a trial,” said Steel, coldly enough
in his turn.
“I should prefer to," rejoined Rachel, getting out;
and there was no little sting in the intonation of the
verb; but Mr. Steel was left smiling and nodding very
confidently to himself.


CHAPTER V
THE MAN IN THE STREET
RACHEL's perturbation was only the greater from her
success in concealing, or at least suppressing it, during
the actual process of this singular interview. You
may hold your breath without moving a muscle, but
the muscles will make up for it when their turn comes,
and it was so with Rachel and her nerves; they rose
upon her even on the platform, and she climbed the
many stairs in a tremor from head to foot. And at
the top, in the open night, and at all the many corners
of a square that is nothing of the kind, from hoarse
throat and on fluttering placard, it was “ Trial and
Verdict,” or “Sensational Verdict at the Old Bailey,”
here as at the other end of the town.
But now all Rachel's thoughts were of this mys-
terious Mr. Steel; of his inexplicable behaviour tow-
ards her, and of her own attitude towards him. Yet,
when all was said, or when all that had been said could
be remembered, would his behaviour be found so very
inexplicable ? Rachel was not devoid of a proper van-
ity, albeit that night she had probably less than most
women with a tithe of her personal attractions; and
50


The Man in the Street
yet upon reflection she could conceive but one explana-
tion of such conduct in an elderly man.
“There is no fool like an old fool,” quoted Rachel
to herself; and it was remarkable that until this mo-
ment she had never thought of Mr. Steel as either
elderly or old. His eyes were young; his voice was
young; she could hear him and see him still, so the
strong impression was not all on one side. No more,
it would seem, was the fascination. Rachel, indeed,
owned to no such feeling, even in her inmost heart.
But she did begin to blame herself, alike for her re-
ception of advances which might well have been dic-
tated by mere eccentric benevolence, and for her readi-
ness now to put another construction upon them. And
all this time she was threading the streets of Chelsea
at a pace suggestive of a destination and a purpose,
while in her mind she did nothing but look back.
Impulsive by nature, Rachel had also the courage
of each impulse while it lasted; on the other hand, if
quick to act, she was only too ready to regret. Like
many another whose self-reliance is largely on the sur-
face, an achievement of the will and not the gift of
a temperament, she usually paid for a display of spirit
with the most dispiriting reaction; and this was pre-
cisely the case in point. Rachel was ashamed alike of
her rudeness and her vanity; the latter she traced to
its source. It was inspired by vague memories of
other women who had been through the same ordeal
as herself. One had been handed a bouquet in the
51


The Shadow of the Rope
dock; another had been overwhelmed by proposals of
marriage. Rachel herself had received letters of which
the first line was enough. But there had been no let-
ter from Mr. Steel. Ah! but he had attended her
trial; she remembered him now, his continual presence
had impressed itself very subtly upon her mind, with-
out the definite memory of a single glance; and after
the trial he sent her his card, he dogged her in the
train! What was she to think? There was the voice
in which he had offered her his aid; there was the look
in his eyes; there was the delicate indirectness of that
offer.
A year or two ago, with all her independence, Rachel
would not have been so ready to repel one whose ad-
vances, however unwarrantable in themselves, were yet
marked by so many evidences of sympathy and con-
sideration. She had not always been suspicious and
repellent; and she sighed to think how sadly she must
have changed, even before the nightmare of the last
few weeks.
But a more poignant reminder of her married life
was now in store for Rachel Minchin. She had come
to Chelsea because it was the only portion of the town
in which she had the semblance of a friend ; but there
did live in Tite Street a young couple with whom the
Minchins had at one time been on friendly terms.
That was in the day of plenty and extravagance; and
the acquaintance, formed at an hotel in the Trossachs,
had not ripened in town as the two wives could have
52


The Man in the Street
wished. It was Mrs. Carrington, however, who had
found the Minchins their furnished house, while her
husband certainly interested himself in Rachel's de-
fence. Carrington was a barrister, who never himself
touched criminal work, but he had spoken to a friend
who did, to wit the brilliant terror of female witnesses,
and caustic critic of the police, to whom Rachel owed
so little. But to Carrington himself she owed much-
more indeed than she cared to calculate-for he was
not a man whom she liked. She wished to thank him
for his kindness, to give certain undertakings and to
ask his advice, but it was Mrs. Carrington whom she
really hoped to see. There was a good heart, or Rachel
was much mistaken. They would have seen more of
each other if Mrs. Carrington had had her way.
Rachel remembered her on the occasion of the solitary
visit she had received at Holloway-for Mrs. Carring-
ton had been the visitor.
"Don't tell Jim," she had said, "when you get off
and come to see us."
And she had kissed her captive sister in a way that
made poor Rachel sometimes think she had a friend in
England after all; but that was before her committal;
and thereafter from that quarter not a word. It was
not Mrs. Carrington whom Rachel blamed, however,
and those last words of hers implied an invitation which
had never been withdrawn. But invitation or no in-
vitation, friend or no friend, Mrs. Carrington she would
have to see. And even he would be different now that
53


The Shadow of the Rope
he knew she was innocent; and if it was easy to see
what he had believed of her before, well, so much the
more credit to him for what he had done.
So Rachel had decided before quitting the precincts
of the Old Bailey; but her subsequent experiences in
street and train so absorbed her that she was full of
the interview that was over when she ought to have
been preparing for the one still before her. And, in
her absence of mind, the force of habit had taken ad-
vantage of her; instead of going on to Tite Street, she
turned too soon, and turned again, and was now ap-
palled to find herself in the very street in which her
husband had met his death.
The little street was as quiet as ever; Rachel stood
quite still, and for the moment she was the only person
in it. She stole up to the house. The blinds were
down, and it was in darkness, otherwise all was as she
remembered it only too well. Her breath came quickly.
It was a strange trick her feet had played her, bringing
her here against her will! Yet she had thought of
coming as a last resort. The furnished house should
be hers for some months yet; it had been taken for six
months from July, and this was only the end of
November. At the worst—if no one would take her
in-
She shuddered at the unfinished thought; and yet
there was something in it that appealed to Rachel.
To go back there, if only for the shortest time to
show her face openly where it was known-not to slink
54


The Man in the Street
and hide as though she were really guilty! That
might give her back her self-respect; that might make
others respect her too. But could she do it, even if
she would ? Could she bring herself to set foot inside
that house again?
Rachel felt tremulously in her pocket; there had
been more keys than one, and that which had been in
her possession when she was arrested was in it still.
Nobody had asked her for it; she had kept it for this;
dare she use it after all? The street was still empty;
it is the quietest little street in Chelsea. There would
never be a better chance.
Rachel crept up the steps. If she should be seen!
She was not; but a footstep rang somewhere in the
night, and on that the key was fitted and the door
opened without another moment's hesitation. Rachel
entered, the door shut noisily behind her, and then her
own step rang in turn upon the floor. It was bare
boards; and as Rachel felt her way to the electric
switches, beyond the dining-room door, her fingers
missed the pictures on the walls. This prepared her
for what she found when the white light sprang out
above her head. The house had been dismantled; not
a stick in the rooms, not so much as a stair-rod on the
stairs, nor a blind to the window at their head.
The furniture removed while the use of it belonged
legally to her! Had they made so sure of her convic-
tion as all that? Rachel's blood came straight from
zero to the boil; this was monstrous, this was illegal and
55


The Shadow of the Rope
wicked. The house was hers for other two months;
and there were things of hers in it, she had left every-
thing behind her. If they had been removed, then this
outrage was little short of felony, and she would invoke
the law from whose clutches she herself had escaped.
Rachel had expected to be terrified in the house; she
was filled instead with anger and indignation.
It was as she expected; not a trunk had been left;
and the removal had taken place that very week. This
would account for the electric light being still intact.
Rachel discovered it by picking up a crumpled news-
paper, which seemed to have contained bread and
cheese; it did contain a report of the first day of the
trial. They might have waited till her trial was over;
they should suffer for their impatience, it was their
turn. So angry was Rachel that her own room
wounded her with no memories of the past. It was
an empty room, and nothing more; and only on her
return to the lower floor did that last dread night come
back to her in all its horror and all its pitifulness.
The double doors of the late professor! Rachel for-
got her grudge against his widow; she pulled the outer
door, and pushed the inner one, just as she had done
in the small hours of that fatal morning, but this time
all was darkness within. She had to put on the electric
light for herself. The necessity she could not have
explained, but it existed in her mind; she must see the
room again. And the first thing she saw was that the
window was broken still.
56


The Man in the Street
Rachel looked at it more closely than she had done
on the morning when she had given her incriminating
opinion to the police, and the longer she looked the
less reason did she see to alter that opinion. The
broken glass might have been placed upon the sill in
order to promote the very theory which had been so
gullibly adopted by the police, and the watch and chain
hidden in the chimney for the same purpose. They
might have hanged the man who kept them; and surely
this was not the first thief who had slunk away empty-
handed after the committal of a crime infinitely greater
than the one contemplated.
Rachel had never wavered in these ideas, but neither
had she dwelt on them to any extent, and now they
came one instant only to go the next. Her husband
was dead—that was once more the paramount thought
—and she his widow had been acquitted on a charge of
murdering him. But for the moment she was thinking
only of him, and her eyes hung over the spot where she
had seen him sitting dead-once without dreaming it
and soon they filled. Perhaps she was remembering all
that had been good in him, perhaps all that had been
evil in herself; her lips quivered, and her eyes filled.
But it was hard to pity one who was at rest, hard for
her with the world to face afresh that night, without a
single friend. The Carringtons? Well, she would see;
and now she had a very definite point upon which to
consult Mr. Carrington. That helped her, and she
went, quietly and unseen as she had come.
57


The Shadow of the Rope
There was still a light in the ground-floor windows
of the Tite Street house, strong lights and voices; it
was the dining-room, for the Minchins had dined there
once; and the voices did not include a feminine one that
Rachel could perceive. If there were people dining
with them, the ladies must have gone upstairs, and
Mrs. Carrington was the woman to see Rachel for five
minutes, and the one woman in England to whom she
could turn. It was an opportunity not to miss—she
had not the courage to let it pass—and yet it required
almost as much to ring the bell. And even as she rang
--but not until that moment—did Rachel recognise and
admit to herself the motive which had brought her to
that door. It was not to obtain the advice of a clever
man; it was the sympathy of another woman that she
needed that night more than anything else in all the
world.
She was shown at once into the study behind the
dining-room, and immediately the voices in the latter
ceased. This was ominous; it was for Mrs. Carrington
that Rachel had asked; and the omen was instantly
fulfilled. It was Mr. Carrington who came into the
room, dark, dapper, and duskily flushed with his own
hospitality, but without the genial front which Rachel
had liked best in him. His voice also, when he had
carefully shut the door behind him, was unnaturally
stiff.
"I congratulate you,” he said, with a bow but noth-
ing more; and Rachel saw there and then how it was
58


The Man in the Street
to be; for with her at least this man had never been
stiff before, having indeed offended her with his famil-
iarity at the time when her husband and he were best
friends.
“I owe it very largely to you,” faltered Rachel.
“How can I thank you?”
Carrington said it was not necessary.
“Then I only hope,” said Rachel, on one of her
impulses, “ that you don't disagree with the verdict ? ”
"I didn't read the case,” replied Carrington, glibly,
and with neither more nor less of the contemptuous
superiority with which he would have referred to any
other Old Bailey trial; but the man himself was quick
to see the brutality of such a statement, and quicker
yet to tone it down.
" It wasn't necessary,” he added, with a touch of the
early manner which she had never liked; “you see, I
knew you.”
The insincerity was so obvious that Rachel could
scarcely bring herself to confess that she had come to
ask his advice. “What was the point?” he said to
that, so crisply that the only point which Rachel could
think of was the fresh, raw grievance of the empty
house.
“Didn't your solicitor tell you?” asked Carrington.
“He came to me about it; but I suppose- "
Rachel knew well what he supposed.
“He should have told you to-night,” added Car-
rington, “ at any rate. The rent was only paid for half
59


The Shadow of the Rope
the term-quite right—the usual way. The permanent
tenant wanted to be done with the house altogether,
and that entitled her to take her things out. No, I'm
afraid you have no grievance there, Mrs. Minchin."
“And pray," demanded Rachel, “where are my
things?”
"Ah, your solicitor will tell you that—when you
give him the chance! He very properly would not
care to bother you about trifles until the case against
you was satisfactorily disposed of. By the way, I hope
you don't mind my cigar? We were smoking in the
next room.”
“I have taken you from your guests,” said Rachel,
miserably. “I know I ought not to have come at
such an hour.”
Carrington did not contradict her.
“But there seemed so much to speak about,” she
went desperately on. “ There are the money matters
and—and "
“If you will come to my chambers,” said Carrington,
“I shall be delighted to go into things with you, and
to advise you to the best of my ability. If you could
manage to come at half-past nine on Monday morning,
I would be there early and could give you twenty
minutes.”
He wrote down the address, and, handing it to
Rachel, rang the bell. This drove her to despair; evi-
dently it never occurred to him that she was faint with
weariness and hunger, that she had nowhere to go for
60


The Man in the Street
the night, and not the price of a decent meal, much
less a bed, in her purse. And even now her pride
prevented her from telling the truth; but it would not
silence her supreme desire.
“Oh!” she cried; “oh, may I not speak to your
wife?"
“Not to-night, if you don't mind,” replied Carring-
ton, with his bow and smile. “We can't both desert
our guests."
“Only for a minute!” pleaded Rachel. “I wouldn't
keep her more! ”
“Not to-night,” he repeated, with a broader smile,
a clearer enunciation, and a decision so obviously irrev-
ocable that Rachel said no more. But she would not
see the hand that he could afford to hold out to her
now; and as for going near his chambers, never, never,
though she starved!
“No, I wouldn't have kept her,” she sobbed in the
street; “ but she would have kept me! I know her!
I know her! She would have had pity on me, in spite
of him; but now I can never go near either of them
again!”
Then where was she to go? God knew! No re-
spectable hotel would take her in without luggage or
a deposit. What was she to do?
But while she wondered her feet were carrying her
once more in the old direction, and as she walked an
idea came. She was very near the fatal little street at
the time. She turned about, and then to the left. In


The Shadow of the Rope
a few moments she was timorously knocking at the
door of a house with a card in the window.
“It's you!” cried the woman who came, almost
shutting the door in Rachel's face, leaving just space
enough for her own.
“You have a room to let,” said Rachel, steadily.
"But not to you,” said the woman, quickly; and
Rachel was not surprised, the other was so pale, so
strangely agitated.
“But why?" she asked. “I have been acquitted-
thanks partly to your own evidence and yet you of all
women will not take me in! Do you mean to tell me
that you actually think I did it still?”
Rachel fully expected an affirmative. She was pre-
pared for that opinion now from all the world; but
for once a surprise was in store for her. The pale
woman shifted her eyes, then raised them doggedly,
and the look in them brought a sudden glow to Rachel's
heart.
“No, I don't think that, and never did," said the
one independent witness for the defence. “ But others
do, and I am too near where it happened; it might
empty my house and keep it empty.”
Rachel seized her hand.
“Never mind, never mind,” she whispered. “It is
better, ten thousand times, that you should believe in
me, that any woman should! Thank you, and God
bless you, for that!”
She was turning away, when she faced about upon
62


The Man in the Street
the steps, gazing past the woman who believed in her,
along the passage beyond, an unspoken question be-
neath the tears in her eyes.
“He is not here," said the landlady, quickly.
“But he did get over it?”
“So we hope ; but he was at death's door that morn-
ing, and for days and weeks. Now he's abroad again
-I'm sure I don't know where.”
Rachel said good-night, and this time the door not
only shut before she had time to change her mind
again, but she heard the bolts shot as she reached the
pavement. The fact did not strike her. She was
thinking for a moment of the innocent young foreigner
who had brought matters to a crisis between her hus-
band and herself. On the whole she was glad that he
was not in England—yet there would have been one
friend.
And now her own case was really desperate; it was
late at night; she was famished and worn out in body
and mind, nor could she see the slightest prospect of a
lodging for the night.
And that she would have had in the condemned cell,
with food and warmth and rest, and the blessed cer-
tainty of a speedy issue out of all her afflictions.
It was a bitter irony, after all, this acquittal!
There was but one place for her now. She would
perish there of cold and horror; but she might buy
something to eat, and take it with her; and at least
she could rest, and would be alone, in the empty house,
63


The Shadow of the Rope
the house of misery and murder, that was yet the one
shelter that she knew of in all London.
She crept to the King's Road, and returned with a
few sandwiches, walking better in her eagerness to
break a fast which she had only felt since excitement
had given place to despair. But now it was making
her faint and ill. And she hurried, weary though she
was.
But in the little street itself she stood aghast. A
crowd filled it; the crowd stood before the empty
house of sorrow and of crime; and in a moment
Rachel saw the cause.
It was her own fault. She had left the light burn-
ing in the upper room, the bedroom on the second
floor.
Rachel joined the skirts of the crowd-drawn by an
irresistible fascination—and listened to what was being
said. All eyes were upon the lighted window of the
bedroom-watching for herself, as she soon discovered
—and this made her doubly safe where she stood be-
hind the press.
“She's up there, I tell yer,” said one.
“Not her! It's a ghost.”
“Her 'usband's ghost, then.”
“But vere's a chap 'ere wot sore 'er fice to fice in
the next street; an' followed 'er and 'eard the door go;
an’ w’en 'e come back wiv 'is pals, vere was vat light."
“Let's 'ave 'er aht of it.”
“Yuss, she ain't no right there."
64


The Man in the Street
“No; the condemned cell's the plice for 'er!”
“Give us a stone afore the copper comes !”
And Rachel saw the first stone flung, and heard the
first glass break; and within a very few minutes there
was not a whole pane left in the front of the house;
but that was all the damage which Rachel herself saw
done.
A hand touched her lightly on the shoulder.
“Do you still pin your faith to the man in the
street ? ” said a voice.
And, though she had heard it for the first time that
very evening, it was a voice that Rachel seemed to have
known all her life.


CHAPTER VI
A PERIPATETIC PROVIDENCE
“Do you still pin your faith to the man in the street ? "
It was Mr. Steel who stood at Rachel's elbow, re-
peating his question word for word; but he did not
repeat it in the same tone. There was an earnest note
in the lowered voice, an unspoken appeal to her to
admit the truth and be done with proud pretence. And
indeed the pride had gone out of Rachel at sight of
him; a delicious sense of safety filled her heart instead.
She was as one drowning, and here was a strong
swimmer come to her rescue in the nick of time. What
did it matter who or what he was? She felt that he
was strong to save. Yet, as the nearly drowned do
struggle with their saviours, so Rachel must fence in-
stinctively with hers.
“I never did pin my faith to him," said she.
“ Yet see the risk that you are running! If he turns
round—if any one of them turns round and recognises
you—listen to that!”
It was only the second window, but a third and a
fourth followed like shots from the same revolver.
Rachel winced.
“For God's sake, come away!” he whispered,
sternly.
66


A Peripatetic Providence
And Rachel did come a few yards before a flicker
of her spirit called a halt.
“Why should I run away?” she demanded, in sud-
den tears of mortification and of weakness combined.
“I am innocent—so why should I?”.
“Because they don't like innocent people; and there
appear to be no police in these parts; and if you fall
into their hands-well, it would be better for you if
you had been found guilty and were safe and sound in
Newgate now!”
That was exactly what Rachel had felt herself; she
took a few steps more, but still with reluctance and
irresolution; and once round the nearest corner, and
out of that hateful street for ever, she turned to her
companion in unconcealed despair.
" But what am I to do?" she cried. “But where
am I to turn?”
" Mrs. Minchin,” said Steel, “can you not really
trust me yet?”
He stood before her under a street lamp, handsome
still, upright for all his years, strong as fate itself, and
surely kinder than any fate which Rachel Minchin had
yet met with in the course of her short but chequered
life. And yet-and yet—she trusted and distrusted
him too!
“I can and I cannot,” she sighed; and even with the
words one reason occurred to her. “You have fol-
lowed me, you see, after all!”
“I admit it,” he replied, “and without a particle
67


The Shadow of the Rope
of shame. My dear lady, I was not going to lose sight
of you to-night!”
“And why not?”
“Because I foresaw what might happen, and may
happen still! Nay, madam, it will, if you continue to
let your pride sit upon your common sense. Do you
hear them now? That means the police, and when
they're dispersed they'll come this way to King's Road.
Any moment they may be upon us. And there's a
hansom dropped from heaven!”
He raised his umbrella, the bell tinkled, the two red
eyes dilated and widened in the night, then with a
clatter the horse was pulled up beside the curb, and
Steel spread his hand before the muddy wheel.
"Be sensible," he whispered, “and jump in! In a
hansom you can see where you are going; in a hansom
you can speak to the driver or attract the attention of
any decent person on the sidewalk. Ah! you will trust
me so far at last-I thank you from my heart!”
“Where to, sir?” asked the cabman through the
roof.
And Rachel listened with languid curiosity; but that
was all. She had put herself in this man's hands;
resistance was at an end, and a reckless indifference
to her fate the new attitude of a soul as utterly over-
taxed and exhausted as its tired tenement of clay.
“Brook Street,” said Steel, after a moment's pause
“and double-quick for a double fare. We shall be
there in a quarter of an hour,” he added reassuringly
68


A Peripatetic Providence
as the trap-door slammed, “and you will find every-
thing ready for you, beginning with something to eat.
I, at all events, anticipated the verdict; if you don't
believe me, you will when we get there, for they have
been ready for you all day. Do you know Claridge's
Hotel, by the way?”
“Only by name,” said Rachel, wearily.
" I'm glad to hear it,” pursued Mr. Steel, " for I
think you will be pleased. It is not like the ordinary
run of hotels. Your rooms are your castle—a regular
self-contained flat-and you needn't see another soul
if you don't like. I am staying in the hotel myself,
for example, but you shall not set eyes on me for a
week, unless you wish to.”
“But I don't understand," began Rachel, roused a
little from her apathy. She was not suffered to pro-
ceed.
"Nor are you to attempt to do so," said her com-
panion, “ until to-morrow morning. If you feel equal
to it then, I shall crave an audience, and you shall hear
what I have got to say. But first, let me beg of you,
an adequate supper and a good night's rest!”
“One thing is certain,” said Rachel, half to herself:
“they can't know who I am, or they never would have
taken me in. And no luggage!"
“ That they are prepared for,” returned Steel ; " and
in your rooms you will find a maid who is also pre-
pared and equipped for your emergency. As to their
not knowing who you are at the hotel, there you are
69


The Shadow of the Rope
right; they do not know; it would have been inexpe-
dient to tell them.”
“ Then at least,” said Rachel, “I ought to know
who I am supposed to be.”
And she smiled, for interest and curiosity were
awakened within her, with the momentary effect of
stimulants; but Mr. Steel sat silent at her side. The
cab was tinkling up Park Lane. The great park on
the left, the great houses on the right, the darkness
on the one hand, the lights on the other, had all the
fascination of sharp contrasts—that very fascination
which was Mr. Steel's. Rachel already discovered it
in his face, and divined it in his character, without
admitting to herself that there was any fascination at
all. Yet otherwise she would have dropped rather than
have done what she was doing now. The man had
cast a spell upon her; and for the present she did feel
safe in his hands. But with that unmistakable sense
of immediate security there mingled a subtler premoni-
tion of ultimate danger, to which Rachel had felt alive
from the first. And this was the keenest stimulus
of all.
What was his intention, and what his object? To
draw back was to find out neither; and to say the truth,
even if she had not been friendless and forlorn, Rachel
would have been very sorry to draw back now.
The raw air in her face had greatly revived her; the
sights and lights of the town were still new and dear
to her; she had come back to the world with a ven-
70


A Peripatetic Providence
geance, to a world of incident and interest, with an
adventure ready waiting to take her out of her past
self!
But it was only her companion's silence which en-
abled Rachel to realise her strange fortune at this stage,
and she had to put her question point-blank before
she obtained any answer at all.
"If you insist upon hearing all the little details to-
night,” said Steel, with a good-humoured shrug, “ well,
I suppose you must hear them; but I hope you will not
insist. I have had to make provisions which you may
very possibly resent, but I thought it would be time
enough for us to quarrel about them in the morning.
To-night you need rest and sustenance, but no excite-
ment; of that God knows you have had enough! No
one will come near you but the maid of whom I spoke;
no questions will be put to you; everything is arranged.
But to-morrow, if you feel equal to it, you shall hear
all about me, and form your own cool judgment of my
behaviour towards you. Meanwhile won't you trust
me—implicitly—until then?”
“I do,” said Rachel, “ and I will—until to-morrow."
" Then there are one or two things that I can prom-
ise you,” said Steel, with the heartiness of a man who
has gained his point. “You will not be compromised
in any sort or kind of way; your self-respect shall not
suffer; nothing shall vex or trouble you, if I can help
it, while you remain at this hotel. And this I guar-
antee—whether you like it or not-unless you tell
71


The Shadow of the Rope
them, not a single soul in the place shall have the
faintest inkling as to who you are. Now, only keep
your why and wherefore till to-morrow,” he concluded
cheerily, “and I can promise you almost every satis-
faction. But here we are at the hotel.”
He thrust his umbrella outside, pointing to a portico
and courtyard on the right; and in another moment
Rachel was receiving the bows of powdered footmen in
crimson plush, while Steel, hat in hand, his white hair
gleaming in the electric light, led the way to the lift.
Rachel's recollection of that night was ever after-
wards disjointed and involved as that of any dream;
but there were certain features that she never forgot.
There was the beautiful suite of rooms, filled with
flowers that must have cost a small fortune at that
time of year, and in one of them a table tastefully laid.
Rachel remembered the dazzle of silver and the glare
of napery, the hot plates, the sparkling wine, the hot-
house fruit, and the deep embarrassment of sitting
down to all this in solitary state. Mr. Steel had but
peeped in to see that all was in accordance with his
orders; thereafter not even a waiter was allowed to
enter, but only Rachel's attendant, to whose charge
she had been committed; a gentle and assiduous creat-
ure, quiet of foot and quick of hand, who spoke seldom
but in a soothing voice, and with the delicate and pretty
accent of the French-Swiss.
Rachel used to wonder whether she had shocked this
mannerly young woman by eating very ravenously;
72


A Peripatetic Providence
she remembered a nervous desire to be done with that
solitary repast, and to get to bed. Yet when she was
there, in the sweetest and whitest of fine linen, with
a hot bottle at her feet, and a fire burning so brightly
in the room that the brass bed-stead seemed here and
there red-hot, then the sound sleep that she sorely
needed seemed further off than ever, for always she
dreamt she was in prison and condemned to die, till
at length she feared to close her eyes. But nothing
had been forgotten; and Rachel's last memory of that
eventful day, and not less eventful night, was of a
mild, foreign face bending over her with a medicine-
glass and a gentle word.
And the same good face and the same soft voice
were waiting for her when she awoke after many
hours; the fire still burned brightly, also the electric-
light, though the blind was up and the window filled
with a dull November sky. It was a delicious awak-
ening, recollection was so slow to come. Rachel might
have been ill for days. She experienced the peace that
is left by illness of sufficient gravity. But all she ailed
was a slight headache, quickly removed by an inim-
itable cup of tea, that fortified her against the perplex-
ing memories which now came swarming to her mind.
This morning, however, enlightenment was due, and
meanwhile Rachel received a hint, though a puzzling
one, from the Swiss maid, as to the new identity which
had been thrust upon her for the time being in lieu of
her own.
73


The Shadow of the Rope
" It was very sad for madame to lose all her things,"
cooed the girl, as she busied herself about the room.
“It was irritating,” Rachel owned, beginning to
wonder how much the other knew.
“But it was better than losing your life, madame!”
the girl added with a smile.
And now Rachel lay silent. Could this amiable
young woman know all? In one way Rachel rather
hoped it was the case; it would be something to have
received so much kindness and attention, even though
bought and paid for, from one of her own sex who
knew all there was to know, and yet did not shrink
from her. But the young woman's next words dis-
missed this idea.
“When so many poor people were drowned!” said
she. And the mystification increased.
Presently there was a knock at the outer door, which
the maid answered, returning with Mr. Steel's card.
“Is he there?” asked Rachel, hastily.
“No, madame, but one of the servants is waiting for
an answer. I think there is something written on the
back, madame.”
Rachel read the harmless request on the back of the
card; nothing could have been better calculated to turn
away suspicion of one sort or another, and there was
obvious design in the absence of an envelope. But
Rachel was not yet in the secret, and she was deter-
mined not to wait an hour longer than she need.
“What is the time, please?”
74


A Peripatetic Providence
“I will see, madame."
The girl glided out and in.
“Well?”
“A quarter to ten, madame."
" Then order my breakfast for a quarter past, and
let Mr. Steel be told that I shall be delighted to see him
at eleven o'clock.”
75


CHAPTER VII
A MORNING CALL
“The way to conceal one's identity," observed Mr.
Steel, “is to assume another as distinctive as one's
own.”
This oracular utterance was confidentially delivered
from the leathern chair at the writing-table, in an inner
recess of Rachel's sumptuous sitting-room. The chair
had been wheeled aloof from the table, on which were
Steel's hat and gloves, and such a sheaf of book-stall
literature as suggested his immediate departure upon
no short journey, unless, indeed, the magazines and
the Sunday newspapers turned out to be another offer-
ing to Mrs. Minchin, like the nosegay of hothouse
flowers which she still held in her hand. Rachel her-
self had inadvertently taken the very easy-chair which
was a further feature of the recess; in its cushioned
depths she already felt at a needless disadvantage, with
Mr. Steel bending over her, his strong face bearing
down, as it were, upon hers, and his black eyes riddling
her with penetrating glances. But to have risen now
would have been to show him what she felt. So she
trifled with his flowers without looking up, though her
eyebrows rose a little on their own account.
76


A Morning Call
“I know what you are thinking," resumed Steel;
" that you had no desire to assume any new identity,
or for a single moment to conceal your own, and that
I have taken a great deal upon myself. That I most
freely admit. And I think you will forgive me when
you see the papers!”.
“Is there so much about me, then?” asked Rachel,
with a sigh of apprehension.
“A leading article in every one of them. But they
will keep. Indeed, I would much rather you never saw
them at all."
“Was that why you brought them in, Mr. Steel?”
The question was irresistible, its satire unconcealed;
but Steel's disregard of it steered admirably clear of
contempt.
“That was why I bought them, certainly," he ad-
mitted. “But I brought them with me for quite a
different purpose, for which one would indeed have
been enough. I was saying, however, that the best
way to sink one's identity is to assume another, pro-
vided that the second be as distinctive as the first.
We will leave for a moment the question of my offi-
ciousness in the matter, and we'll suppose, for the sake
of argument, that I was authorised by you to do what
in fact I have done. All last week the papers were
literally full of your trial, but on Saturday there was
a second sensation as well, and this morning it is hard
to say which is first and which second; they both
occupy so many columns. You may not know it, but
77


The Shadow of the Rope
the Cape liner due on Saturday was lost with scores
of lives, off Finisterre, on Friday morning last."
Rachel failed to see the connection, and yet she felt
vaguely that there was one, if she could but recall it;
meanwhile she said nothing, but listened with as much
attention as a mental search would permit.
“I heard of it first,” continued Steel,“ late on Fri-
day afternoon, as I came away from the Old Bailey.
Now, it was on Friday afternoon, if you recollect, that
you gave evidence yourself in your own defence.
When you left the witness-box, Mrs. Minchin, and
even before you left it, I knew that you were saved ! ”
Rachel remembered the Swiss maid's remark about
the loss of her clothes and the number of persons who
had fared so much worse and lost their lives. But
Steel's last words dismissed every thought but that of
their own import. And in an instant she was trem-
bling upright in the easy-chair.
“You believed me!” she whispered. “You believed
me at the time!”
And for nothing had he earned such gratitude yet;
her moist eyes saw the old-fashioned courtesy of his
bow in answer, but not the subtlety of the smile that
bore it company in the depths of the dark eyes: it was
a smile that did not extend to the short tight mouth.
“What is more to the point, my dear lady," he went
on in words, “ the jury believed you, and I saw that
they did. You made a tremendous impression upon
them. The lawyer against you was too humane to
78


A Morning Call
try very hard to remove it, and the judge too just
though your own man did his best. But I saw at once
that it would never be removed. It was between you
and the jury-human being to human beings—and no
third legal party intervening. That was where you
scored; you went straight as a die to those twelve
simple hearts. And I saw what you had done-what
the lawyers between them could not undo—and took
immediate measures."
Rachel looked up with parted lips, only to shut them
firmly without a word.
“And who was I to take measures on your behalf? ”
queried Steel, putting the question for her. “What
right or excuse had I to mix myself up in your affairs?
I will tell you, for this morning is not last night, and
at least you have one good night's rest between you
and the past. My dear Mrs. Minchin, I had absolutely
no right at all; but I had the excuse which every man
has who sees a woman left to stand alone against the
world, and who thrusts himself, no matter how offi-
ciously, into the breach beside her. And then for a
week I had seen you all day and every day, upon
your trial!”
At last there was something with a ring of definite
insincerity, something that Rachel could take up; and
she gazed upon her self-appointed champion with can-
did eyes.
“Do you mean to say that you never saw me before
-my trouble, Mr. Steel?”
79


The Shadow of the Rope
“ Never in my life, my dear lady."
“ Then you knew something about me or mine!”
“What one read in the newspapers-neither more
nor less—upon my most solemn word—if that will
satisfy you.”
And it did; for if there had been palpable insincerity
in his previous protestations, there was sincerity of a
still more obvious order in Mr. Steel's downright as-
surances on these two points. He had never even seen
her before. He knew nothing whatever about her up
to the period of notoriety; he had no special and no
previous knowledge of his own. It might not be true,
of course; but there was that in the deep-set eyes
which convinced Rachel once and for all. There was
a sudden light in them, a light as candid as that which
happened to be shining in her own, but a not too kindly
one, rather a glint of genuine resentment. It was his
smooth protestations that Rachel distrusted and dis-
liked. If she could ruffle him, she might get at the
real man; and with her questions she appeared to have
done so already.
"I am more than satisfied, in one way,” replied
Rachel, “ and less in another. I rather wish you had
known something about me; it would have made it
more natural for you to come to my assistance. But
never mind. What were these immediate measures ? ”
“I took these rooms; I had spoken of taking them
earlier in the week.”
“For me?"
80


A Morning Call
“Yes, on the chance of your getting off.”
“But you did not say they were for me!”
“No; and I was vague in what I had said until then.
I had a daughter-a widow—whom I rather expected
to arrive from abroad towards the end of the week.
But I was quite vague.”
“Because you thought I had no chance ! ”
“I had not heard your evidence. The very after-
noon I did hear it, and had no longer any doubt about
the issue in my own mind, I also heard of this wreck.
The very thing! I waited till next morning for the list
of the saved ; luckily there were plenty of them; and
I picked out the name of a married woman travelling
alone, and therefore very possibly a widow, from the
number. Then I went to the manager. The daughter
whom I expected had been wrecked, but she was saved,
and would arrive that night. As a matter of fact, the
survivors were picked up by a passing North German
Lloyd, and they did reach London on Saturday night.
Meanwhile I had impressed it upon the manager to
keep the matter as quiet as possible, for many excellent
reasons, which I need not go into now.”
“But the reason for so elaborate a pretence?”
And the keen dark face was searched with a scrutiny
worthy of itself. Steel set his mouth in another visible
resolution to tell the truth.
"I thought you might not be sorry to cease being
Mrs. Minchin—the Mrs. Minchin who had become so
cruelly notorious through no fault of her own—if only
81


The Shadow of the Rope
for a day or two, or a single night. That was most
easily to be effected by your arriving here minus
possessions, and plus a very definite story of your
own.”
“You made very sure of me!” said Rachel, dryly.
“I trusted to my own powers of persuasion, and it
was said you had no friends. I will confess," added
Steel, “ that I hoped the report was true.”
“Did it follow that I could have no pride? "
“By no means; on the contrary, I knew that you
were full of pride; it is, if I may venture to say so,
one of your most salient characteristics. Nothing was
more noticeable at your trial; nothing finer have I ever
seen! But,” added Steel, suppressing a burst of en-
thusiasm that gained by the suppression,“ but, madam,
I hoped and prayed that you would have the sense to
put your pride in the second place for once.”
“Well,” said Rachel, “and so far I have done so,
Heaven knows ! ”
“And that is something,” rejoined Steel, impress-
ively. “Even if it ends at this—even if you won't
hear me out—it is something that you have had one
night and one morning free from insult, discomfort,
and annoyance.”
Rachel felt half frightened and half indignant. Steel
was standing up, looking very earnestly down upon
her. And something that she had dimly divined in the
very beginning-only to chide herself for the mere
thought—that thing was in his face and in his voice.
82


A Morning Call
Rachel made a desperate attempt to change the subject,
but, as will be seen, an unlucky one.
“So I am supposed to be your daughter!” she ex-
claimed nervously. “May I ask my new name?”
“If you like; but I am going to suggest to you a
still newer name, Mrs. Minchin.”
Rachel tried to laugh, though his quietly determined
and serious face made it more than difficult.
“Do you mean that I am not to be your daughter
any longer, Mr. Steel?”
“Not if I can help it. But it will depend upon your-
self.”
“And what do you want to make me now?"
“My wife!”


CHAPTER VIII
THE DOVE AND THE SERPENT
RACHEL was bereft of speech; and yet a certain sense
of relief underlay the natural embarrassment caused by
a proposal so premature and so abrupt. Nor was the
deeper emotion very difficult to analyse. Here at last
was a logical explanation of the whole behaviour of
this man; it was the first that had occurred to her, and,
after all, it was the only possible one.
"I want you to be my wife," repeated Mr. Steel,
with enough of respect in his tone, yet none the less
with the air of a man who is accustomed to obtain
what he wants.
And Rachel, looking at the wiry, well-knit, upright
figure, and at the fresh, elderly, but virile face, with its
sombre eyes and its snowy hair, thought once again of
the ancient saw which she had quoted to herself the
night before, only to dismiss it finally from her mind.
This man was no fool, nor was he old. He might be
eccentric, but he was eminently sane; he might be
elderly, in the arbitrary matter of mere years; but an
old man he was not, and never would be with those
eyes.
She tried to tell him it was absurd, but before the
84


The Dove and the Serpent
word would come she saw that it was the last one to
apply; he was so confident, so quiet, so sure of himself,
if not of Rachel. At last she told him she could not
think of it, he had seen nothing of her, and could
not possibly care for her, even supposing that she cared
for him.
“By 'caring,'” said he,“ do you mean being 'in
love, as they say, and all that?”
“Naturally,” said Rachel, with great ease and irony,
but with a new misgiving every moment.
"And have I said I was in love with you?" inquired
Mr. Steel, with a smile as indulgent as his tone. “ It
might, perhaps, be no more than the truth; but have
I had the insolence to tell you so ?”
"It is a greater insult if you are not,” returned
Rachel, speaking hotly and quickly, but with lowered
eyes.
“What! To offer to marry a person whom one does
not-as yet,pretend to love?”
Rachel vouchsafed no reply.
“Whom one only—but tremendously-admires ?”
Rachel felt bound to answer him, for at least there
was no insult in his tone. She raised her candid eyes,
a sweet brown blush upon her face.
“Yes,” she said, “I think there is absolutely no ex-
cuse for a proposal of marriage, if it is not founded
upon love and nothing else!”
“Or its pretence and nothing else,” amended Steel,
with a bow and a smile of some severity. “That is
85


The Shadow of the Rope
a hard saying,” he went on, resuming his chair, and
wheeling it even nearer to Rachel's than it had been
before; “moreover,” he added, "since I have already
insulted you, let me tell you that it is an exceedingly
commonplace saying, into the bargain. It depends,
you must admit, upon the commonplace conception
of marriage; and before we go any further I should
like to give you my own conception, not of the insti-
tution, but of the particular marriage which I have
in view."
So he had it in view! It was not an aspiration, but
already quite a prospect! Rachel made an acid little
note of this; but there was no acidity in her permission
to him to proceed; her turn was coming last.
“ The marriage that I propose to you,” continued
Steel, “ is simply the most convenient form of friend-
ship of which I can think. I want to be your friend;
indeed, that much I mean to be, if necessary, in spite
of you. I was interested in your case, so I came up to
hear your trial. I was more interested in your trial,
but most interested of all in you yourself. There, in-
deed, the word is too weak; but I will not vex your
spirit with a stronger. My attraction you know; my
determination you know; even the low wiles to which
your pride reduced me, even my dodging and dogging,
have been quite openly admitted to you on the first
reasonable opportunity. All this business of the ship-
wrecked daughter was of course a crude device
enough; but I had very little time to think, and my
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The Dove and the Serpent
first care was that you should not be recognised here
or elsewhere in my society. That was essential, if
there was the slightest chance of your even listening
to my proposition, as indeed you are doing now. Last
night I told you nothing, because that's always easier
than telling only a little; moreover, you were so dis-
traught that you would possibly have gone right away
without benefiting even to the slight extent of the com-
fortable night's rest you so badly needed; but this
morning I am prepared to put it to the touch. And
let me begin by saying, that if circumstances would
permit me to continue the paternal imposture, that
would be quite enough for me; unluckily, I am known
in my own country as an old bachelor; so that I cannot
suddenly produce a widowed daughter, without con-
siderable unpleasantness for us both. What I can do,
however," and Steel bent further forward, with eyes
that held Rachel's in their spell ; " what I can do, and
will, is to go back with a lady who shall be my wife
in name, my daughter in effect. We should, I trust,
be the best of friends; but I will give you my word,
and not only my word but my bond, that we never need
be anything more.”
He had spoken rapidly; the pause that followed
lasted longer than this lengthy speech. And through
it all they sat with eyes still locked, until he spoke
again.
“You believe, at least, in the bona fides of my
offer?”


The Shadow of the Rope
And Rachel, still looking in his eyes, murmured that
she did.
“You will bear in mind how essentially it differs
from the ordinary offer of the kind; also, that I have
never for a moment pretended to be in love with you?”
“I will."
Steel had risen as if to go; the keen scrutiny was
withdrawn, a distinct spell as distinctly broken; and
yet he lingered, with a smile.
“That;” said he, “was a poor compliment to pay
twice over! But it is human to err, and in my anxiety
not to do so on the side of sentiment I own myself
in danger of flying to the other extreme. Well, you
know which is the common extreme in such cases; and
at all events we shall avoid the usual pitfall. I am
going to give you a few minutes to think it over; then,
if you care to go into it further, I shall be most happy;
if not, the matter is at an end.”
A few minutes ! Rachel felt very angry, without
knowing that she was most angry with herself for not
feeling angrier still. She had heard quite enough; it
were weakness to listen to another word; and yet—and
yet-
"Don't go,” said Rachel, with some petulance;
" that is quite unnecessary. Anything more extraor-
dinary—but I owe you too much already to be your
critic. Still, I do think I am entitled to go a little
further into the matter, as you said, without commit-
ing myself.”
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The Dove and the Serpent
“To be sure you are."
But this time he remained standing; and for once
he kept those mesmeric eyes to himself. Obviously,
Rachel was to have a chance.
“You spoke of your own country,” she began. “Do
you live abroad?”
There was the least suspicion of eagerness in the
question. Rachel herself was unaware of it; not so
Mr. Steel, and he sighed.
"A mere figure,” he said ; " what I meant was my
own country-side.”
“And where is that?”
" In the north,” he replied vaguely. “Did you look
twice at my card? Well, here is another, if you will
do me that honour now. The initials J. B. stand for
no very interesting names-- John Buchanan. A certain
interest in the Buchanan, perhaps ; it comes out in the
flesh, I fancy, though not on the tongue. As for the
address, Normanthorpe House is the rather historic
old seat of the family of that name; but they have so
many vastly superior and more modern places, and
the last fifty years have so ruined the surroundings,
that I was able to induce the Duke to take a price for
it a year or two ago. He had hardly slept a night there
in his life, and I got it lock-stock-and-barrel for a song.
The Northborough which, you will observe, it is ' near'
-a good four miles, as a matter of fact—is the well-
known centre of the Delverton iron-trade. But you
may very well have spent a year in this country with-
89


The Shadow of the Rope
out having heard of it; they would be shocked at North-
borough, but nowhere else."
Rachel had dropped the card into her lap; she was
looking straight at Mr. John Buchanan Steel himself.
“You are very rich," she said gravely.
“I am nothing of the kind,” he protested. “The
Duke is rich, if you like, but I had to scrape together
to pay him what would replenish his racing-stud, or
stand him in a new yacht.”
But Rachel was not deceived.
“I might have known you were very rich,” she mur-
mured, as much to herself as to him; and there was a
strange finality in her tone, as though all was over
between them; a still more strange regret, involuntary,
unconscious, and yet distinct.
“Granting your hypothesis, for the sake of argu-
ment,” he went on, with his simplest smile; “is it as
difficult as ever for the poor rich man to get to
heaven?”
Rachel spent some moments in serious thought. He
was wonderfully honest with her; of his central motive
alone was she uncertain, unconvinced. In all else she
felt instinctively that he was telling her the truth, tell-
ing her even more than he need. His generous candour
was a challenge to her own.
" It may be very small of me," she said at length,
"but-somehow—if you had been comparatively poor
-I should have been less—ashamed ! ”
And candour begot candour, as it generally will.
90


The Dove and the Serpent
“Upon my word,” he cried, “ you make me sigh for
the suburbs and six hundred a year! But you shall
know the worst. I meant you to know it when I came
in; then I changed my mind; but in for a penny, in
for the lot!”
He caught up the magazine which he had brought
in with the sheaf of newspapers, and he handed it to
Rachel, open at an article quite excellently illustrated,
for an English magazine.
“There,” he cried, “there's a long screed about the
wretched place, before it came into my hands. But it's
no use pretending it isn't quite the place it was. I took
over the whole thing—every stick outside and in-and
I've put in new drainage and the electric light.”
His tone of regret was intentionally ludicrous. Had
Rachel been listening, she would once more have sus-
pected a pose. But already she was deep in the article
in the two-year-old magazine, or rather in its not in-
artistic illustrations.
“The House from the Tennis Lawn,” “In the
Kitchen Garden,” “The Drawing-room Door," "A
Drawing-room Chimney-piece," "A Corner of the
Chinese Room,” “A Portion of the Grand Stair-
case "-of such were the titles underneath the process
pictures. And (in all but their production) each of
these was more beautiful than the last.
“That,” observed Steel, "happens to be the very
article from which I first got wind of the place, when
I was looking about for one. And now," he added, “I
91


The Shadow of the Rope
suppose I have cut my own throat! Like the devil,
I have taken you up to a high place "
It was no word from Rachel that cut him short, but
his own taste, with which she at least had very little
fault to find. And Rachel was critical enough; but
her experience was still unripe, and she liked his view
of his possessions, without perceiving how it disarmed
her own.
Presently she looked up.
“Now I see how much I should have to gain. But
what would you gain?”.
The question was no sooner asked than Rachel fore-
saw the pretty speech which was its obvious answer.
Mr. Steel, however, refrained from making it.
“I am an oldish man,” he said, “and—yes, there is
no use in denying that I am comfortably off. I want a
wife; or rather, my neighbours seem bent upon finding
me one; and, if the worst has to come to the worst,
I prefer to choose for myself. Matrimony, however,
is about the very last state of life that I desire, and I
take it to be the same with you. Therefore-to put
the cart before the horse—you would suit me ideally.
One's own life would be unaltered, but the Delverton
mothers would cease from troubling, and at the head
of my establishment there would be a lady of whom
I should be most justly proud. And even in my own
life I should, I hope, be the more than occasional gainer
by her society; may I also add, by her sympathy, by her
advice? Mrs. Minchin,” cried Steel, with sudden feel-
92


The Dove and the Serpent
ing, “the conditions shall be very rigid; my lawyer
shall see to that; nor shall I allow myself a loophole
for any weakness or nonsense whatsoever in the future.
Old fellows like myself have made fools of themselves
before to-day, but you shall be safeguarded from the
beginning. Let there be no talk or thought of love
between us from first to last! But as for admiration,
I don't mind telling you that I admire you as I never
admired any woman in the world before; and I hope,
in spite of that, we shall be friends."
Still the indicative mood, still not for a moment the
conditional! Rachel did not fail to make another note;
but now there was nothing bitter even in her thoughts.
She believed in this man, and in his promises; more-
over, she began to focus the one thing about him in
which she disbelieved. It was his feeling towards her
-nothing more and nothing else. There he was in-
sincere; but it was a pardonable insincerity, after all.
Of his admiration she was convinced; it had been
open and honest all along; but there was something
deeper than admiration. He could say what he liked.
The woman knew. And what could it be but love?
The woman knew; and though the tragedy of her
life was so close behind her; nay, though mystery and
suspicion encompassed her still, as they might until her
death, the woman thrilled.
It was a thrill of excitement chiefly, but excitement
was not the only element. There was the personal
factor, too; there was the fascination which this man
93


The Shadow of the Rope
had for her, which he could exert at will, and which
he was undoubtedly exerting now.
To escape from his eyes, to think but once more for
herself, and by herself, Rachel rose at last, and looked
from the window which lit this recess.
It was the usual November day in London; no sun;
a mist, but not a fog; cabmen in capes, horses sliding
on the muddy street, well-dressed women picking their
way home from church-shabby women hurrying in
shawls-hurrying as Rachel herself had done the night
before—as she might again to-night. And whither?
And whither, in all the world?
Rachel turned from the window with a shudder; she
caught up the first newspaper of the sheaf upon the
writing-table. Steel had moved into the body of the
room; she could not even see him through the alcove.
So much the better; she would discover for herself
what they said.
Leading articles are easily found, and in a Sunday
paper they are seldom long. Rachel was soon through
the first, her blood boiling; the second she could not
finish for her tears; the third dried her eyes with the
fires of fierce resentment. It was not so much what
they said; it was what they were obviously afraid to
say. It was their circumlocution, their innuendo, their
mild surprise, their perfunctory congratulations, their
assumption of chivalry and their lack of its essence,
that wounded and stung the subject of these effusions.
As she raised her Aushed face from the last of them,
94


The Dove and the Serpent
Mr. Steel stood before her once more, the incarnation
of all grave sympathy and consideration.
“ You must not think,” said he, “ that my proposal
admits of no alternative but the miserable one of mak-
ing your own way in a suspicious and uncharitable
world. On the contrary, if I am not to be your nominal
and legal husband, I still intend to be your actual
friend. On the first point you are to be consulted, but
on the second not even you shall stand in my way.
Nor in that event would I attempt to rob you of the
independence which you value so highly; on the other
hand, I would point the way to an independence worth
having. I am glad you have seen those papers, though
to-morrow they may be worse. Well, you may be
shocked, but, if you won't have me, the worse the bet-
ter, say I! Your case was most iniquitously com-
mented upon before ever it came for trial; there is sure
to be a fresh crop of iniquities now; but I shall be
much mistaken if you cannot mulct the more flagrant
offenders in heavy damages for libel.”
Rachel shivered at the thought. She was done with
her case for ever and for ever. People could think her
guilty if they liked, but that the case should breed other
cases, and thus drag on and on, and, above all, that
she should make money out of all that past horror,
what an unbearable idea!
On second thoughts, Mr. Steel agreed.
“ Then you must let me send you back to Australia.”
No, no, no; she could never show her face there
95


The Shadow of the Rope
again, or anywhere else where she was known. She
must begin life afresh, that was evident.
“ It was evident to me,” said Steel, quietly,“ though
not more so than the injustice of it, from the very be-
ginning. Hence the plans and proposals that I have
put before you."
Rachel regarded him wildly; the Sunday papers had
driven her to desperation, as, perhaps, it was intended
that they should
“ Are you sure," she cried, “ that they would not
know me-up north?”.
"Not from Eve," he answered airily. “I should
see to that; and, besides, we should first travel, say
until the summer.”
“If only I could begin my life again!” said Rachel
to herself, but aloud, in a way that made no secret of
her last, most desperate inclination.
“That is exactly what I wish you to do,” Steel re-
joined quietly, even gently, his hand lying lightly but
kindly upon her quivering shoulder. How strong his
touch, how firm, how reassuring! It was her first con-
tact with his hand.
“I wish it so much," he went on, “ that I would
have your past life utterly buried, even between our-
selves; nay, if it were possible, even in your own mind
also! I, for my part, would undertake never to ask
you one solitary question about that life—on one small
and only fair condition. Supposing we make a com-
pact now?”


The Dove and the Serpent
"Anything to bury my own past,” owned Rachel;
"yes, I would do anything-anything!”
“Then you must help me to bury mine, too,” he
said. “I was never married, but a past I have.”
“I would do my best,” said Rachel, “if I married
you.”
“You will do your best,” added Steel, correcting
her; "and there is my compact cut and dried. I ask
you nothing; you ask me nothing; and there is to be
no question of love between us, first or last. But we
help each other to forget-from this day forth!”
Rachel could not speak; his eyes were upon her,
black, inscrutable, arrestive of her very faculties, to say
nothing of her will. She could only answer him when
he had turned away and was moving towards the door.
“Where are you going?” she cried.
“To send to my solicitor,” replied Steel, “ as I
warned him that I might. It has all to be drawn up;
and there is the question of a settlement; and other
questions, perhaps, which you may like to put to him
yourself without delay.”


CHAPTER IX
A CHANGE OF SCENE
The Reverend Hugh Woodgate, Vicar of Marley-in-
Delverton—a benefice for generations in the gift of the
Dukes of Normanthorpe, but latterly in that of one
John Buchanan Steel—was writing his sermon on a
Friday afternoon just six months after the foregoing
events. The month was therefore May, and, at either
end of the long, low room in which Mr. Woodgate sat
at work, the windows were filled with a flutter of sum-
mer curtains against a brilliant background of waving
greenery. But a fire burnt in one of the two fireplaces
in the old-fashioned funnel of a room, for a treacherous
east wind skimmed the sunlit earth outside, and whis-
tled and sang through one window as the birds did
through the other.
Mr. Woodgate was a tall, broad-shouldered, mild-
eyed man, with a blot of whisker under each ear, and
the cleanest of clerical collars encompassing his throat.
It was a kindly face that pored over the unpretentious
periods, as they grew by degrees upon the blue-lined
paper, in the peculiar but not uncommon hand which
is the hall-mark of a certain sort of education upon a
certain order of mind. The present specimen was per-
98


A Change of Scene
haps more methodical than most; therein it was char-
acteristic of the man. From May to September, Mr.
Woodgate never failed to finish his sermon on the Fri-
day, that on the Saturday he might be free to play
cricket with his men and lads. He was a poor preach-
er, and no cricketer at all; but in both branches he did
his best, with the simple zeal and the unconscious sin-
cerity which redeemed not a few of his deficiencies.
So intent was the vicar upon his task, so engrossed
in the expression of that which had already been ex-
pressed many a million times, that he did not hear
wheels in his drive, on the side where the wind sang
loudest; he heard nothing until the door opened, and
a girl in her twenties, trim, slim, and brown with
health, came hurriedly in.
“I'm sorry to disturb you, dear, but who do you
think is here?"
Hugh Woodgate turned round in his chair, and his
honest ox-eyes filled with open admiration of the wife
who was so many years younger than himself, and who
had seen in him Heaven knew what! He never could
look at her without that look first; and only now, after
some years of marriage, was he beginning sometimes
to do so without this thought next. But he had not
the gift of expression, even in the perpetual matter of
his devotion; and perhaps its perpetuity owed some-
thing to that very want; at least there was none of the
verbal evaporation which comes of too much lovers'
talk.
99


The Shadow of the Rope
“Who is it?” he asked.
“Mrs. Venables !”
Woodgate groaned. Was he obliged to appear?
His jaw fell, and his wife's eyes sparkled.
“Dear, I wouldn't even have let you know she was
here—you shouldn't have been interrupted for a single
instant-if Mrs. Venables wasn't clamouring to see
you. And really I begin to clamour too; for she is
full of some mysterious news, which she won't tell me
till you are there to hear it also. Be an angel, for five
minutes !"
Woodgate wiped his pen in his deliberate way.
“Probably one of the girls is engaged,” said he;" if
so I hope it's Sybil.”
“No, Sybil is here too; she doesn't look a bit en
gaged, but rather bored, as though she had heard the
story several times already, whatever it may be. They
have certainly paid several calls. Now you look quite
nice, so in you come.”
Mrs. Venables, a stout but comely lady, with a
bright brown eye, and a face full of character and
ability, opened fire upon the vicar as soon as they had
shaken hands, while her daughter looked wistfully at
the nearest books.
“He is married !” cried Mrs. Venables, beginning
in the middle like a modern novelist.
“Indeed?” returned the matter-of-fact clergyman,
with equal directness—“and who is he?”
“Your neighbour and your patron-Mr. Steel!”
100


A Change of Scene
“Married?” repeated Mrs. Woodgate, with tremen-
dous emphasis. “Mr. Steel ? ”
“ This is news!” declared her husband, as though
he had expected none worthy of the name. And they
both demanded further particulars, at which Mrs.
Venables shook her expensive bonnet with great
relish.
“Do you know Mr. Steel so well—so much better
than we do—and can you ask for particulars about
anything he ever does ? His marriage,” continued
Mrs. Venables, “ like everything else about him, is
'wrop in mystery,' as one of those vulgar creatures
says in Dickens, but I really forget which. It was
never announced in the Times; for that I can vouch
myself. Was ever anything more like him, or less
like anybody else? To disappear for six months, and
then turn up with a wife!”
“But has he turned up?” cried the vicar's young
wife, forgetting for a moment a certain preoccupation
caused by the arrival of the tea-tray, and by a rapid
resignation to the thickness of the bread and butter
and the distressing absence of such hot things as would
have been in readiness if Mrs. Venables had been ex-
pected for a single moment. It showed the youth of
Morna Woodgate that she should harbour a wish to
compete with the wealthiest woman in the neighbour-
hood, even in the matter of afternoon tea, and her
breeding that no such thought was legible in her clear-
cut open-air face.
IOI


The Shadow of the Rope
"I have heard nothing about it,” said the vicar, in
a tone indicative of much honest doubt in the matter.
“Nor is it the case, to my knowledge,” rejoined
Mrs. Venables; “ but from all we hear it may become
the case any moment. They were married in Italy
last autumn—so he says—and are on their way home
at this minute.”
“If he says so,” observed the vicar, with mild hu-
mour, “it is probably true. He ought to know.”
“And who was she?” his young wife asked with
immense interest, the cups having gone round, and
the bread and butter been accepted in spite of its pro-
portions.
"My dear Mrs. Woodgate,” said Mrs. Venables,
cordially, “ you may well ask! Who was she, indeed !
It was the first question I asked my own informant,
who, by the way, was your friend, Mr. Langholm; but
he knew no more than the man in the moon.”
“And who told Mr. Langholm, of all people?” pur-
sued Morna Woodgate. “It is not often that we get
news of the real world from him!”
“ Birds of a feather,” remarked her caller: “it was
Mr. Steel himself who wrote to your other eccentric
friend, and told him neither more nor less than I have
told you. He was married in Italy last autumn; not
even the town—not even the month-let alone the
lady's name—if, indeed— ”.
And Mrs. Venables concluded with a sufficiently elo-
quent hiatus.
I02


A Change of Scene
"I imagine she is a lady," said the vicar to his tea.
“You are so charitable, dear Mr. Woodgate!”
“I hope I am,” he said simply. '"In this case I see
no reason to be anything else.”
“What—when you know really nothing about Mr.
Steel himself? ”
And the bright brown eyes of Mrs. Venables grew
smaller and harder as they pinned Hugh Woodgate to
his chair.
"I beg your pardon,” said that downright person;
“I know a great deal about Mr. Steel. He has done
an immense amount for the parish; there are our new
schoolrooms to speak for themselves. There are very
few who would do the half of what Mr. Steel has done
for us during the short time he has been at Norman-
thorpe.”
“That may be,” said the lady, with the ample smile
of conscious condescension; “ for he has certainly not
omitted to let his light shine before men. But that is
not telling us who or what he was before he came here,
or how he made his money."
Then Hugh Woodgate gave the half boyish, half
bashful laugh with which he was wont to preface his
most candid sayings.
“And I don't think it's any business of ours,” he
said.
Morna went a trifle browner than she naturally was;
her husband said so little that what he did say was
often almost painfully to the point; and now Mrs. Ven-
103


The Shadow of the Rope
manners
IS
Moment 1
ables had turned from him to her, with a smile which
the young wife disliked, for it called attention to the
vicar's discourtesy while it appealed to herself for pret-
tier manners and better sense. It was a moment re-
quiring some little tact, but Mrs. Woodgate was just
equal to it.
“Hugh, how rude of you!” she exclaimed, with
only the suspicion of a smile. “ You forget that it's
your duty to be friendly with everybody; there's no
such obligation on anybody else.”
“I should be friendly with Mr. Steel,” said Hugh,
“ duty or no duty, after what he has done for the par-
ish.”
And his pleasant honest face and smile did away
with the necessity for a set apology.
"I must say,” added his wife to her visitor, “ that
it's the same with me, you know.”
There was a pause.
“ Then you intend to call upon her?” said Mrs.
Venables, coming with directness to an obviously pre-
meditated point.
"I do—I must-it is so different with us,” said the
vicar's young wife, with her pretty brown blush.
“ Certainly,” added the vicar himself, with dogmatic
emphasis.
Mrs. Venables did not look at him, but she looked
the harder at Morna instead.
“Well,” said she, “I suppose you are right. In
your position-yes-your position is quite different ! ”
104


| A Change of Scene
And the sudden, half accidental turn of her sentence
put Mrs. Venables on good terms with herself once
more; and so she rose all smiles and velvet. “No,
not even half a cup; but it was really quite delicious;
and I hope you'll come and see me soon, and tell me
all about her. At his age!” she whispered as she
went. “At sixty-five—if he's a day!”
A stranger would have imagined that this lady had
quite decided not to call upon the newcomer herself;
even Mrs. Woodgate was uncertain of her neighbour's
intention as the latter's wheels ground the Vicarage
drive once more, and she and her husband were left
alone.
" It will depend upon the county,” said she; “and
Mrs. Venables is not the county pure and simple, she's
half Northborough still, and she'll take her cue from
the Invernesses and the Uniackes. But I do believe
she's been round the whole country-side, getting peo-
ple to say they won't call; as if it mattered to a man
like Mr. Steel, or any woman he is likely to have
chosen. Still, it is mysterious, isn't it? But what
business of ours, as you say? Only, dear, you needn't
have said it quite so pointedly. Of course I'll call as
soon as I can in decency; she may let me be of use
to her. Oh, bother Mrs. Venables! If she doesn't
call, no doubt many others won't; you must remember
that he has never entertained as yet. Oh, what a dance
they could give! And did you hear what she said
about his age? He is sixty-five, now!”
105


The Shadow of the Rope
The vicar laughed. It was his habit to let his young
wife rattle on when they were alone, and even lay
down the law for him to her heart's content; but,
though fifteen years her senior, and never a vivacious
man himself, there was much in their life that he saw
in the same light as she did, though never quite so
soon.
“Sixty-five!” he suddenly repeated, with a fresh
chuckle; "and last year, when Sybil was thought to
be in the running-poor Sybil, how well she took it!
-last year her mother told me she knew for a fact
he was not a day more than five-and-forty! Poor
Steel, too! He has done for them both in that quar-
ter, I am afraid. And now," added Hugh, in his
matter-of-fact way, as though they had been discuss-
ing theology all this time, “ I must go back to my ser-
mon if I am to get it done to-night.”
106


CHAPTER X
A SLIGHT DISCREPANCY
MRS. WOODGATE paid the promised call a few days
later, walking briskly by herself along the woodland
path that made it no distance from Marley Vicarage
to Normanthorpe House, and cutting a very attractive
figure among the shimmering lights and shadows of
the trees. She was rather tall, and very straight, with
the pale brown skin and the dark brown eye, which,
more especially when associated with hair as light as
Morna Woodgate's, go to make up one of the most
charming and distinctive types of English womanhood.
Morna, moreover, took a healthy interest in her own
appearance, and had not only the good taste to dress
well, but the good sense not to dress too well. Her
new coat and skirt had just come home, and, fawn-
coloured like herself, they fitted and suited her to
equal perfection. Morna thought that she might even
go to church in the coat and skirt, now and again
during the summer, and she had a brown straw hat
with fine feathers of the lighter shade which she made
peculiarly her own; but this she had discarded as too
grand for an informal call, for Hugh had been sum-
moned to a sick-bed at the last moment, and might
107


The Shadow of the Rope
be detained too late to follow. But the Steels had
been back two days, and Morna could not wait another
hour.
She was certainly consumed with curiosity; but that
was not the only feeling which Mrs. Woodgate enter-
tained towards the lady who was to be a nearer neigh-
bour of her own sex and class than any she could
count as yet. On the class question Morna had no mis-
givings; nevertheless, she was prepared for a surprise.
Both she and her husband had seen a good deal of
Mr. Steel. Morna had perhaps seen the best of him,
since she was at once young and charming, and not
even an unwilling and personally innocent candidate
for his hand, like honest Sybil Venables. Yet Morna
herself was not more attracted than repelled by the
inscrutable personality of this rich man dropped from
the clouds, who had never a word to say about his
former life, never an anecdote to tell, never an ad-
venture to record, and of whom even Mrs. Venables
had not the courage to ask questions. What sort of
woman would such a man marry, and what sort of
woman would marry such a man? Morna asked her-
self the one question after the other, almost as often
as she set her right foot in front of her left; but she
was not merely inquisitive in the matter, she had a
secret and instinctive compassion for the woman who
had done this thing.
“She will not have a soul to call her own, poor
thing!” thought Morna, as indignantly as though the
108


A Slight Discrepancy
imaginary evil was one of the worst that could befall;
for the vicar's wife had her little weaknesses, not by
any means regarded as such by herself; and this was
one of the last things that could have been said about
her, or that she would have cared to hear.
The woodland path led at last into the long avenue,
and there was Normanthorpe House at the end of the
vista; an Italian palace transplanted into the north of
England, radiantly white between the green trees and
blue sky, with golden cupola burning in the sun; per-
haps the best specimen extant to mark a passing fash-
ion in Georgian architecture, but as ill-suited to the
Delverton district as an umbrella-tent to the North
Pole. A cool grotto on a really hot day, the house
was an ice-pit on any other; or so Mrs. Woodgate
fancied, fresh from the cosy Vicarage, and warm from
her rapid walk, as she stepped into another tempera-
ture, across polished marble that struck a chill through
the soles of her natty brown shoes, and so into the lofty
drawing-room with pilasters and elaborate architraves
to the doors. What a place for a sane man to build
in bleak old Delverton, even before there was any
Northborough to blacken and foul the north-east wind
on its way from the sea! What a place for a sane man
to buy; and yet, in its cool white smoothness, its glar-
ing individuality, its alien air-how like the buyer!
Though it was May, and warm enough for the
month and place, Morna got up when the footman had
left her, and thrust one brown shoe after the other as
109


The Shadow of the Rope
near as she could to the wood fire that glimmered un-
derneath the great, ornate, marble mantelpiece. Then
she sat down again, and wondered what to say; for Mor-
na was at once above and below the conversational av-
erage of her kind. Soon she was framing a self-con-
scious apology for premature intrusion-Mrs. Steel
was so long in coming. But at last there was a rustle
in the conservatory, and a slender figure in a big hat
stood for an instant on the threshold.
That was Morna's first impression of the new mis-
tress of Normanthorpe, and it was never erased from
her mind: a slender silhouette in an enormous hat, the
light all behind her, the pilastered doorway for a frame,
a gay background of hothouse flowers, and in the fig-
ure itself a nervous hesitancy which struck an imme-
diate chord of sympathy in Morna. She also was shy;
the touch of imperfect nature was mutually discernible
and discerned; and the two were kin from the meeting
of their hands.
Morna began her apology, nevertheless; but Rachel
cut it very short. “My dear Mrs. Woodgate, I think
it is so kind of you!” she exclaimed, her low voice
full of the frankest gratitude; and Morna was sur-
prised at the time; it was as though she were the rich
man's wife, and Mrs. Steel the vicar's.
They sat a little, talking of the time of year; and
it was some minutes before Morna really saw her new
neighbour's face, what with her great hat and the
position of the chair which Mrs. Steel selected. And
I10


The Shadow of the Rope
land, were as yet barely budding in the kindless wind;
the blaze of early bulbs was over; but there were the
curious alien trees, and the ornamental waters haunted
by outlandish wildfowl, bred there on the same prin-
ciple of acclimatisation.
"I expect you know the way quite well,” said Ra-
chel, as they followed a winding path over a bank of
rhododendrons near the lake; “to me every stroll is
still a voyage of exploration, and I shall be rather
sorry when I begin to know exactly what I am going
to see next. Now, I have never been this way before,
and have no idea what is coming, so you must tell me,
if you know. What a funny scent! I seem to know
it, too. Why, what have they got here?”.
On the further side of the bank of rhododendrons
the path had descended into a sheltered hollow,
screened altogether from the colder winds, and, even
in this temperate month of May, a very trap for the
afternoon sun. And in this hollow was a clump of
attenuated trees, with drooping leaves of a lacklustre
hue, and a white bark peeling from the trunk; a pun-
gent aroma, more medicinal than sylvan, hung rather
heavily over the sequestered spot.
Rachel stood a moment with wide nostrils and round
eyes; the look hardly lasted longer, and she said no
more, but she was aware that Morna had made some
answer to her question.
“What did you say?” inquired Rachel, turning
politely to her visitor.
II2


The Shadow of the Rope
sweet colours, to Morna's surprise and real delight.
The vicar's wife was one of those healthy-hearted
young women who are the first to admire their own
sex; she had very many friends among women, for
whom marriage had not damped an enthusiasm which
she hid from no one but themselves; and she was to
be sufficiently enthusiastic about the thin but perfect
oval of Rachel's face, the soft, sweet hazel of her eyes,
the impetuous upper lip and the brave lower one, as
she saw them now for an instant in the afternoon sun.
Moreover, she was already interested in Rachel on
her own account, and not only as the wife of the mys-
terious Mr. Steel. There was an undoubted air of
mystery about her also; but that might only be de-
rived from him, and with all her reserve she could not
conceal a sweet and sympathetic self from one as like
her in that essential as they were different in all others.
Not that the reserve was all on one side. Morna
Woodgate had her own secrets too. One of them,
however, was extracted during their stroll.
“May I make a personal remark?” asked Rachel,
who had been admiring the pale brown face of Morna
in her turn, as they came slowly back to the house
across the lawns.
“You frighten me," said Morna, laughing. “But
let me hear the worst.”.
"It's the ribbon on your hat,” went on Rachel.
“What pretty colours! Are they your husband's
school or college?”
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A Slight Discrepancy
“No," said Morna, blushing as she laughed again.
“No, they're my own college colours.”
Rachel stood still on the grass.
“ Have you really been at college?” said she; but
her tone was so obviously one of envy that Morna,
who was delightfully sensitive about her learning, did
not even think of the short answer which she some-
times returned to the astonished queries of the intel-
lectually vulgar, but admitted the impeachment with
another laugh.
“Now, don't say you wouldn't have thought it of
me,” she added, “and don't say you would!”
“I am far too jealous to say anything at all,”
Rachel answered with a flattering stare. “And do you
mean to tell me that you took a degree?”
"Of sorts,” admitted Morna, whose spoken English
was by no means undefiled. But it turned out to have
been a mathematical degree; and when, under sympa-
thetic pressure, Morna vouchsafed particulars, even
Rachel knew enough to appreciate the honours which
the vicar's wife had won. What was more difficult
to understand was how so young a woman of such dis-
tinguished attainments could be content to hide her
light under the bushel of a country vicarage; and
Rachel could not resist some expression of her wonder-
ment on that point.
“Did you do nothing with it all,” she asked, “be-
fore you married?”
“No,” said Morna; “you see, I got engaged in the
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A Slight Discrepancy
“ I should enjoy it, I know. But— ".
The sentence was abandoned—as was often the case
in the subsequent intercourse between Rachel Steel and
Morna Woodgate. From the beginning, Rachel was
apt to be more off her guard with Morna than with
any one whom she had met during the last six months;
and, from the beginning, she was continually remem-
bering and stopping herself in a manner that would
have irritated Morna in anybody else. But then-yet
again, from the beginning—these two were natural and
immediate friends.
“You must learn," urged Morna, when she had
waited some time for the sentence which had but be-
gun. “There are people who scorn it—or pretend to-
but I am sure you are not one. It may not be the
finest form of exercise, but wait till you fly down these
hills with your feet on the rests! And then you are
so independent; no horses to consider, no coachman
to consult; only your own' bones and your own self!
The independence alone
“May be the very thing for you, Mrs. Woodgate,
but it wouldn't do for my wife!”
Mr. Steel had stolen a silent march upon them, on
the soft, smooth grass; and now he was taking off his
straw hat to Morna, and smiling with all urbanity as
he held out his hand. But Morna had seen how his
wife started at the sound of his voice, and her greeting
was a little cool.
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The Shadow of the Rope
“I meant the bicycling," he was quick enough to
add; “not the independence, of course!”
But there was something sinister in his smile, some-
thing quite sinister and yet not unkindly, that vexed
and puzzled Morna during the remainder of her visit,
which she cut somewhat short on perceiving that Mr.
Steel had apparently no intention of leaving them to
their own devices after tea. Morna, however, would
have been still more puzzled, and her spirit not less
vexed, had she heard the first words between the newly
married couple after she had gone.
“What's that you have got?” asked Steel, as they
turned back up the drive, after seeing Morna to her
woodland path. Rachel was still carrying her spray of
gum-leaves; he must have noticed it before, but this
was the first sign that he had done so. She said at once
what it was, and why she had pulled it from the tree.
" It took me back to Victoria; and, you know, I
was born there."
Steel looked narrowly at his wife, a hard gleam in
his inscrutable eyes, and yet a lurking sympathy too,
nor was there anything but the latter in the tone and
tenor of his reply.
“I don't forget,” he said, “and I think I can under-
stand; but neither must you forget that I offered to
take you back there. So that's a sprig of gum-tree,
is it?”
Rachel gave him a sudden glance, which for once he
118


A Slight Discrepancy
missed, being absorbed in a curious examination of the
leaves.
“Did you never see one before?” she asked.
"A gum-tree?” said Steel, without looking up, as
he sniffed and scrutinised. “Never in all my life-to
my knowledge!”
119


CHAPTER XI
ANOTHER NEW FRIEND
The county folk did call upon the Steels, as, indeed,
they could scarcely fail to do, having called on him
already as a bachelor the year before. Nor were the
Uniackes and the Invernesses the bell-wethers of the
flock. Those august families had returned to London
for the season; but the taboo half-suggested by Mrs.
Venables had begun and ended in her own mind.
Indeed, that potent and diplomatic dame, who was the
undoubted leader of society within a four-mile radius
of Northborough town hall, was the first to recognise
the mistake that she had made, and to behave as though
she had never made it. Quite early in June, the Steels
were bidden to a dinner-party in their honour at Up-
thorpe Hall.
“Mrs. Venables!” cried Rachel, in dismay. “Is
that the gushing woman with the quiet daughters who
called last Thursday?”
“ That is the lady,” said Steel, a gleam of humour
in his grim eyes. He never expressed an opinion to
his wife about any one of their neighbours, but when
she let fall an impression of her own, he would look
at her in this way, as though it was the very one that
he had formed for himself a year ago.
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Another New Friend
“But need we go?” asked Rachel, with open
apprehension.
“I think so,” he said. “Why not?”
“A dinner-party, of all things! There is no cover
at the dinner-table; you can't even wear a hat; you
must sit there in a glare for hours and hours!” And
Rachel shuddered. “Oh, don't let us go!” she urged;
but her tone was neither pathetic nor despairing;
though free from the faintest accent of affection, it
was, nevertheless, the tone of a woman who has not
always been denied.
“I am afraid we must go,” he said firmly, but not
unkindly. “You see, it is in our honour—as I happen
to know; for Venables gave me a hint when I met him
in the town the other day. He will take you in
himself.”
“And what is he like?”
“Fond of his dinner; he won't worry you,” said
Steel, reassuringly. “Nor need you really bother your
head about all that any more. Nobody has recognised
you yet; nobody is in the least likely to do so down
here. Don't you see how delightfully provincial they
are? There's a local lawyer, a pillar of all the virtues,
who has misappropriated his own daughter-in-law's
marriage portion and fled the country with the prin-
cipal boy in their last pantomime; there are a lot of
smart young fellows who are making a sporting thou-
sand every other day out of iron warrants; the district's
looking up after thirty years' bad times; and this is the
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The Shadow of the Rope
sort of thing it's talking about. These are its heroes
and its villains. All you hear from London is what
the last man spent when he was up, and where he
dined; and from all I can gather, the Tichborne trial
made less impression down here than that of a Del-
verton parson who got into trouble about the same
time.”
“They must have heard of my trial,” said Rachel,
in a low voice. They were walking in the grounds
after breakfast, but she looked round before speaking
at all.
“They would glance at it,” said Steel, with a
shrug; "an occasional schoolboy might read it
through; but even if you were guilty, and were here
on view, you would command much less attention than
the local malefactor in an infinitely smaller way. I am
sorry I put it quite like that,” added Steel, as Rachel
winced, “but I feel convinced about it, and only wish I
could convince you."
And he did so, more or less; but the fear of recog-
nition had increased in Rachel, instead of abating, as
time went on. It had increased especially since the
rapid ripening of her acquaintance with Morna Wood-
gate into the intimacy which already subsisted between
the two young wives. Rachel had told her husband
that she would not have Morna know for anything; and
he had appeared in his own dark way to sympathise
with a solicitude which was more actual than necessary;
but that was perhaps because he approved of Mrs.
I22


Another New Friend
Woodgate on his own account. And so rare was that
approval, as a positive and known quantity, yet so
marked in this case, that he usually contrived to share
Morna's society with his wife.
“You shall not monopolise Mrs. Woodgate," he
would say with all urbanity as he joined them when
least expected. “I was first in the field, you know!”
And in the field he would remain. There were no
commands, no wishes to obey in the matter, no em-
bargo upon the comings and goings between the two
new friends. But Mr. Steel invariably appeared upon
the scene as well. The good vicar attributed it to the
elderly bridegroom's jealous infatuation for his beauti-
ful young bride; but Morna knew better from the first.
“Are you going?” asked Rachel, eagerly, when she
and Morna met again; indeed, she had gone expressly
to the vicarage to ask the question; and not until she
had seen the Woodgate's invitation could Steel himself
induce her to answer theirs.
The Woodgates were going. Morna was already
in alternate fits of despair and of ideas about her
dress.
“I wish I might dress you!” said Rachel, knowing
her well enough already to say that. “I have ward-
robes full of them, and yet my husband insists upon
taking me up to London to get something fit to
wear!”
“But not necessarily on your back!”cried Steel him-
self, appearing at that moment in his usual way, warm,
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The Shadow of the Rope
breathless, but only playfully put out. “My dear
Mrs. Woodgate, I must have a special wire between
your house and ours. One thing, however, I always
know where to find her! Did she tell you we go by
the 12.55 from Northborough?”.
It was something to wear upon her neck-a diamond
necklet of superb stones, gradually swelling to one of
the first water at the throat; and Rachel duly wore it
at the dinner-party, with a rich gown of bridal white,
whose dazzling purity had perhaps the effect of can-
celling the bride's own pallor. But she was very pale.
It was her first appearance at a gathering of the kind,
not only there in Delverton, but anywhere at all since
her second marriage. And the invitation had been of
the correct, most ample length; it had had time to wind
itself about Rachel's nerves.
Mr. Venables, who of course did take her in, by no
means belied her husband's description of him; he was
a rotund man with a high complexion, and his bulg-
ing eye was on the menu before his soft body had sunk
into his chair. His conversation proved limited, but
strictly to the point; he told Rachel what to eat, and
once or twice what to avoid; lavished impersonal praise
upon one dish, impartial criticisms upon another, and
only spoke between the courses. It was a large dinner-
party; twenty-two sat down. Rachel was at last driven
to glancing at the other twenty.
To the man on her left she had not been introduced,
but he had offered one or two civil observations while
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Another New Friend
Mr. Venables was better engaged; and, after the second,
Rachel had chanced to catch sight of the card upon
which his name had been inscribed. He was, it seemed,
a Mr. Langholm; and all at once Rachel leant back
and looked at him. He was a loose-limbed, round-
shouldered man, with a fine open countenance, and a
great disorderly moustache; his hair might have been
shorter, and his dress-coat shone where it caught the
light. Rachel put the screw upon her courage.
“These cards,” she said, with a glimpse of her own
colonial self, “are very handy when one hasn't been
introduced. Your name is not very common, is it?”
“Not very,” he answered, “spelt like that.”
“Yet it's spelt the same way as the Mr. Langholm
who writes.”
“ It is.”
“Then are you any relation?”
“I am the man himself,” said Langholm, with quite
a hearty laugh, accompanied by a flush of pleasurable
embarrassment. He was not a particularly popular
writer, and this did not happen to him every day.
"I hoped you were," said Rachel, as she helped her-
self to the first entrée.
“ Then you haven't read my books," he chuckled,
"and you never must.”
“But I have,” protested Rachel, quite flushed in her
turn by the small excitement. “I read heaps of them
in Tauchnitz when we were abroad. But I had no
idea that I should ever meet you in the flesh!”
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The Shadow of the Rope
“Really?” he said. “Then that's funnier still; but
I suppose Mr. Steel didn't want to frighten you. We
saw quite a lot of each other last year; he wrote to me
from Florence before you came over; and I should have
paid my respects long ago, but I have been up in town,
and only just come back.”
The flush had died out of Rachel's face. Her hus-
band told her nothing—nothing! In her indignation
she was tempted to say so to this stranger; she had
to think a moment what to say instead. A falsehood
of any sort was always a peculiar difficulty to Rachel,
a constitutional aversion, and it cost her an effort to
remark at last that it was very stupid of her, she had
quite forgotten, but now she remembered—of course!
And with that she turned to her host, who was offering
an observation across his empty plate.
“Strange thing, Mrs. Steel, but you can't get the
meat in the country that you can in town. Those fillets,
now—I wish you could taste 'em at my club; but we
give our chef a thousand a year, and he drives up ev-
ery day in his brougham.”
The novels of Charles Langholm were chiefly re-
markable for their intricate plots, and for the hope of
better things that breathed through the cheap sensa-
tion of the best of them. But it was a hope that had
been deferred a good many years. His manner was
better than his matter; indeed, an incongruous polish
was said by the literary to prevent Langholm from
being a first favourite either with the great public or
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Another New Friend
the little critics. As a maker of plots, however, he
still had humble points; and Rachel assured him that
she had burnt her candle all night in order to solve one
of his ingenious mysteries.
“What!” he cried; “ you call yourself a lady, and
you don't look at the end before you reach it?”
“Not when it's a good book.”
“Well, you have pitched on about the best of a bad
lot; and it's a satisfaction to know you didn't cut the
knot it took some months to tie.”
Rachel was greatly interested. She had never before
met a literary man; had no idea how the trick was done;
and she asked many of those ingenuous questions which
seldom really displease the average gentleman of this
type. When not expatiating upon the heroine whom
the exigencies of “serial rights ” demanded in his
books, Charles Langholm, the talker and the man, was
an unmuzzled misogynist. But nobody would have
suspected it from his answers to Rachel's questions, or
from any portion of their animated conversation. Cer-
tainly the aquiline lady whom Langholm had taken in,
and to whom he was only attentive by remorseful fits
and penitential starts, had not that satisfaction; for her
right-hand neighbour did not speak to her at all. There
was thus one close and critical follower of a conversa-
tion which without warning took the one dramatic turn
for which Rachel was forever on her guard; only this
once, in an hour of unexpected entertainment, was she
not.
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The Shadow of the Rope
“How do I get my plots?” said Langholm.“ Some-
times out of my head, as they say in the nursery; occa-
sionally from real life; more often a blend of the two
combined. You don't often get a present from the
newspaper that you can lift into a magazine more or
less as it stands. Facts are stubborn things; they won't
serialise. But now and then there's a case. There
was one a little time ago. Oh, there was a great case
not long since, if we had but the man to handle it,
without spoiling it, in English fiction!”
“And what was that?"
“ The Minchin case!”
And he looked straight at her, as one only looks at
one's neighbour at table when one is saying or hearing
something out of the common; he turned half round,
and he looked in Rachel's face with the smile of an
artist with a masterpiece in his eye. It was an inevi-
table moment, come at last when least expected; in-
stinct, however, had prepared Rachel, just one moment
before; and after all she could stare coldly on his en-
thusiasm, without a start or a tremor to betray the
pose.
“Yes?” she said, her fine eyebrows raised a little.
“ And do you really think that would make a book?”
It was characteristic of Rachel that she did not for
a moment—even that unlooked-for moment-pretend
to be unfamiliar with the case.
“Don't you?” he asked.
"I haven't thought about it,” said Rachel, looking
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Another New Friend
pensively at the flowers. “But surely it was a very
sordid case?"
“The case!” he cried. “Yes, sordid as you like;
but I don't mean the case at all.”
“Then what do you mean, Mr. Langholm?”
“Her after life,” he whispered; “ the psychology of
that woman, and her subsequent adventures! She dis-
appeared into thin air immediately after the trial. I
suppose you knew that?”
“I did hear it.”
Rachel moistened her lips with champagne.
“Well, I should take her from that moment,” said
Langholm. “I should start her story there."
“And should you make her guilty or not guilty?”
“Ah!” said Langholm, as though that would re-
quire consideration; unluckily, he paused to consider
on the spot.
“Who are you talking about?" inquired Mr. Ven-
ables, who had caught Rachel's last words.
“Mrs. Minchin,” she told him, steadily.
“ Guilty!” cried Mr. Venables, with great energy.
“Guilty, and I'd have gone to see her hanged
myself!”
And Mr. Venables beamed upon Rachel as though
proud of the sentiment, while the diamonds rose and
fell upon her white neck, where he would have had the
rope.
“A greater scandal,” he went on, both to Rachel and
to the lady on his other side (who interrupted Mr.
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Another New Friend
“What does it matter what she was? What do the
facts matter, Mrs. Steel, when one has an idea like that
for fiction? Fiction is truer than fact!”
“But you haven't answered my question."
Rachel meant to have that answer.
“Oh, well, as a matter of fact, I read the case pretty
closely, and I was thankful the jury brought in an
acquittal. It required a little imagination, but the truth
always does. It is no treason to our host to whisper
that he has none. I remember having quite a heated
argument with him at the time. Oh, dear, no; she
was no more guilty than you or I; but it would be a
thousand times more artistic if she were; and I should
make her so, by Jove!”
Rachel finished her dinner in great tranquillity after
this; but there was a flush upon her face which had
not been there before, and Langholm received an as-
tonishing smile when the ladies rose. He had been
making tardy atonement for his neglect of the aquiline
lady, but Rachel had the last word with him.
“You will come and see us, won't you?” she said.
“ I shall want to hear how that plot works out.”
“I am afraid it's one I can't afford to use," he
said, “ unless I stick to foolish fact and make her
innocent.”
And she left him with a wry face, her own glowing
again.
“You looked simply great-especially towards the
end,” whispered Morna Woodgate in the drawing-
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The Shadow of the Rope
room, for she alone knew how nervous Rachel had been
about what was indeed her social début in Delverton.
The aquiline lady also had a word to say. Her eyes
were like brown beads, and her nose very long, which
gave her indeed a hawk-like appearance, somewhat un-
usual in a woman; but her gravity was rather that of
the owl.
“You talked a great deal to Mr. Langholm,” said
she, sounding her rebuke rather cleverly in the key of
mere statement of fact. “Have you read his books,
Mrs. Steel?”
“Some of them,” said Rachel; “ haven't you?”
“Oh, no, I never read novels, unless it be George
Eliot, or in these days Mrs. Humphry Ward. It's such
waste of time when there are Browning, Ruskin, and
Carlyle to read and read again. I know I shouldn't
like Mr. Langholm's; I am sure they are dreadfully
uncultured and sensational."
“But I like sensation,” Rachel said. “I like to be
taken out of myself.”
“So you suggested he should write a novel about
Mrs. Minchin!”
“No, I didn't suggest it,” said Rachel, hurriedly;
but the beady brown eyes were upon her, and she felt
herself reddening horribly as she spoke.
"You seemed to know all about her," said the
aquiline lady. “I am not in the habit of reading such
cases. But I must really look this one up.".
132


CHAPTER XII
EPISODE OF THE INVISIBLE VISITOR
That was something like a summer, as the saying is,
and for once they could say it even on the bleak north-
ern spurs of the Delverton Hills. There were days
upon days when that minor chain looked blue and
noble as the mountains of Alsace and hackneyed song,
seen with an envious eye from the grimy outskirts of
Northborough, and when from the hills themselves
the only blot upon the fair English landscape was the
pall of smoke that always overhung the town. On
such days Normanthorpe House justified its existence
in the north of England instead of in southern Italy;
the marble hall, so chill to the tread at the end of May,
was the one really cool spot in the district by the begin-
ning of July; and nowhere could a more delightful
afternoon be spent by those who cared to avail them-
selves of a general invitation.
The Steels had not as yet committed themselves to
formal hospitality, of the somewhat showy character
that obtained in the neighbourhood, but they kept
open house for all who liked to come, and whom they
themselves liked well enough to ask in the first in-
stance. And here (as in some other matters) this
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The Shadow of the Rope
curious pair discovered a reflex identity of taste, rare
enough in the happiest of conventional couples, but a
gratuitous irony in the makers of a merely nominal
marriage. Their mutual feelings towards each other
were a quantity unknown to either; but about a third
person they were equally outspoken and unanimous.
Thus they had fewer disagreements than many a loving
couple, and perhaps more points of insignificant con-
tact, while all the time there was not even the pretence
of love between them. Their lives made a chasm
bridged by threads.
This was not seen by more than two of their acquaint-
ance. Morna Woodgate had both the observation
and the opportunities to see a little how the land lay
between them. Charles Langholm had the experience
and the imagination to guess a good deal. But it was
little enough that Morna saw, and Langholm's guesses
were as wide of the mark as only the guesses of an
imaginative man can be. As for all the rest—honest
Hugh Woodgate, the Venables girls, and their friends
the young men in the various works, who saw the old-
fashioned courtesy with which Steel always treated his
wife, and the grace and charm of her consideration for
him—they were every one receiving a liberal object
lesson in matrimony, as some of them even realised at
the time.
“I wish I could learn to treat my wife as Steel does
his,” sighed the good vicar, once when he had been
inattentive at the table, and Morna had rebuked him
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Episode of the Invisible Visitor
in fun. “That would be my ideal—if I wasn't too
old to learn!”
“Then thank goodness you are,” rejoined his wife.
“Let me catch you dancing in front of me to open
the doors, Hugh, and I shall keep my eye on you as
I've never kept it yet!”
But Rachel herself did not dislike these little graces,
partly because they were not put on to impress an
audience, but were an incident of their private life as
well; and partly because they stimulated a study to
which she had only given herself since their return to
England and their establishment at Normanthorpe
House. This was her study of the man who was still
calmly studying her; she was returning the compliment
at last.
And of his character she forined by degrees some
remote conception; he was Steel by name and steel by
nature, as the least observant might discern, and the
least witty remark; a grim inscrutability was his dom-
inant note; he was darkly alert, mysteriously vigilant,
a measurer of words, a governor of glances; and yet,
with all his self-mastery and mastery of others, there
were human traits that showed themselves from
time to time as the months wore on. Rachel did not
recognise among these that studious consideration
which she could still appreciate; it seemed rather part
of a preconceived method of treating his wife, and the
wary eye gleamed through it all. But it has been
mentioned that Rachel at one time had a voice, of
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The Shadow of the Rope
which high hopes had been formed by inexperienced
judges. It was only at Normanthorpe that her second
husband became aware of her possession, one afternoon
when she fancied that she had the house to herself. So
two could play at the game of consistent concealment!
He could not complain; it was in the bond, and he
never said a word. But he stood outside the window
till she was done, for Rachel saw him in a mirror, and
for many an afternoon to come he would hover outside
the same window at the same time.
Why had he married her? Did he care for her, or
did he not? What could be the object of that ex-
traordinary step? Rachel was as far from hitting up-
on a feasible solution of these mysteries as she was from
penetrating the deeper one of his own past life. Some-
times she put the like questions to herself; but they
were more easily answered. She had been in desperate
straits, in reckless despair; even if her second marriage
had turned out no better than her first, she could not
have been worse off than she was on the night of her
acquittal; but she had been very well off ever since.
Then there had been the incentive of adventure, the
fascination of that very mystery which was a mystery
still. And then-yes!—there had been the compelling
will of a nature infinitely stronger than her own or
any other that she had ever known.
Did she regret this second marriage, this second leap
in the dark? No, she could not honestly pretend that
she did; yet it had its sufficiently sinister side, its
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Episode of the Invisible Visitor
occasional admixture of sheer horror. But this was
only when the mysteries which encompassed her hap-
pened to prey upon nerves unstrung by some out-
wardly exciting cause; it was then she would have giv-
en back all that he had ever given her, to pierce the veil
of her husband's past. Here, however, the impulse
was more subtle; it was not the mere consuming curi-
osity which one in Rachel's position was bound to feel;
it was rather a longing to be convinced that that veil
hid nothing which should make her shudder to live
under the same roof with this man.
Of one thing she was quite confident; wherever her
husband had spent or misspent his life (if any part of
so successful a whole could really have been misspent),
it was not in England. He was un-English in a hun-
dred superficial ways—in none that cut deep. With all
his essential cynicism, there was the breadth and toler-
ance of a travelled man. Cosmopolitan on the other
hand, he could not be called; he had proved himself too
poor a linguist in every country that they had visited.
It was only now, in their home life, that Rachel received
hints of the truth, and it filled her with vague alarms,
for that seemed to her to be the last thing he need have
kept to himself.
One day she saw him ride a fractious horse, not be-
cause he was fond of riding, but because nobody in the
stables could cope with this animal. Steel tamed it in
ten minutes. But a groom remarked upon the short-
ness of his stirrups, in Rachel's hearing, and on the
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The Shadow of the Rope
word a flash of memory lit up her brain. All at once
she remembered the incident of the gum-leaves, soon
after their arrival; he had told Morna what they were,
yet to his wife he had pretended not to know. If
he also was an Australian, why on earth should that
fact, of all facts, be concealed from her? Nor had it
merely been concealed; it was a point upon which
Rachel had been deliberately misled, and the only one
she could recall.
She was still brooding over it when a fresh incident
occurred, which served not only to confirm her sus-
picions in this regard, but to deepen and intensify the
vague horror with which her husband's presence some-
times inspired her.
Mr. Steel was an exceptionally early riser. It was
his boast that he never went to sleep a second time;
and one of his nearest approaches to a confidence was
the remark that he owed something to that habit.
Now Rachel, who was a bad sleeper, kept quite a dif-
ferent set of hours, and was seldom seen outside her
own rooms before the forenoon. One magnificent
morning, however, she was tempted to dress and make
the best of the day which she had watched breaking
shade by shade. The lawns were grey with dew; the
birds were singing as they never sing twice in one sum-
mer's day. Rachel thought that for once she would
like to be up and out before the sun was overpowering.
And she proceeded to fulfil her wish.
All had been familiar from the window; all was
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The Shadow of the Rope
“I must apologise,” said Steel, with an artificiality
which was seldom so transparent; “ my only excuse
is that you startled me out of my temper and
my manners. And I was upset to begin with. I
have a poor fellow in rather a bad way in the
boathouse.”
"Not one of the gardeners, I hope?” queried Ra-
chel; but her kind anxiety subsided in a moment, for
his dark eyes were measuring her, his dark mind med-
itating a lie; and now she knew him well enough to
read him thus far in his turn.
“No," replied Steel, deciding visibly against the
lie; “no, not one of our men, or anybody else
belonging to these parts; but some unlucky tramp,
whom I imagine some of our neighbours would have
given into custody forthwith. I found him asleep
on the lawn; of course he had no business upon
the premises; but he's so far gone that I'm taking
him something to pull him together before I turn
him off.”
"I should have said,” remarked Rachel, thought-
fully, “that tea or coffee would have been better for
him than spirits.”
Steel smiled indulgently across the tray.
“Most ladies would say the same,” he replied, “but
very few men.”
“And why didn't you bring him into the house,"
pursued Rachel, looking her husband very candidly
in the face, “instead of taking him all that way to the
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Episode of the Invisible Visitor
lake, and giving yourself so much more trouble than
was necessary?”
The smile broadened upon Steel's thin lips, perhaps
because it had entirely vanished from his glittering
eyes.
“That,” said he, “is a question you would scarcely
ask if you had seen the poor creature for yourself.
I don't intend you to see him ; he is a rather
saddening spectacle, and one of a type for which
one can do absolutely nothing permanent. And
now, if you are quite satisfied, I shall proceed, with
your permission, to get rid of him in my own
way.”
It was seldom indeed that Steel descended to a
display of sarcasm at his wife's expense, though few
people who came much in contact with him escaped
an occasional Alick from a tongue that could be as
bitter as it was habitually smooth. His last words
were therefore as remarkable as his first; both were
exceptions to a rule; and though Rachel moved away
without replying, feeling that there was indeed no more
to be said, she could not but dwell upon the matter
in her mind. Satisfied she certainly was not; and yet
there was so much mystery between them, so many
instinctive reservations upon either side, that every little
circumstance of the kind could not carry an ulterior
significance, but many must be due to mere force of
habit.
Rachel hated the condition of mutual secretiveness
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The Shadow of the Rope
upon which she had married this man; it was an-
tagonistic to her whole nature; she longed to repu-
diate it, and to abolish all secrets between them. But
there her pride stepped in and closed her lips; and the
intolerable thought that she would value her hus-
band's confidence more than he would value hers, that
she felt drawn to him despite every sinister attribute,
would bring humiliation and self-loathing in its train.
It was the truth, however, or, at all events, part of the
truth.
Yet a more unfair arrangement Rachel had been
unable to conceive, ever since the fatally reckless
moment in which she had acquiesced in this one.
The worst that could be known about her was known
to her husband before her marriage; she had nothing
else to hide; all concealment of the past, as between
themselves, was upon his side. But matters were
coming to a crisis in this respect; and, when Rachel
deemed it done with, this incident of the tramp was only
just begun.
It seemed that the servants knew of it, and that it
was not Steel who had originally discovered the sleep-
ing intruder, but an under-gardener, who, seeing his
master also up and about, had prudently inquired what
was to be done with the man before meddling with
him.
“And the master said, ' leave him to me,'” declared
Rachel's maid, who was her informant on the point,
as she combęd out her mistress's beautiful brown hair,
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Episode of the Invisible Visitor
before the late breakfast which did away with luncheon
when there were no visitors at Normanthorpe.
"And did he do so?” inquired Rachel, looking with
interest into her own eyes in the glass. “ Did he leave
him to your master?”
“He did that!” replied her maid, a simple York-
shire wench, whom Rachel herself had chosen in pref-
erence to the smart town type. “Catch any on 'em
not doing what master tells them!”
“Then did John see what happened?”.
“No, m'm-because master sent him to see if the
chap'd come in at t’ lodge gates, or where, and when he
got back he was gone, blanket an' all, an' master with
him.”
“ Blanket and all!” repeated Rachel. “Do you
mean to say he had the impudence to bring a blanket
with him?"
“And slept in it!” cried her excited little maid.
“ John says he found him tucked up in a corner of the
lawn, out of the wind, behind some othem shrubs,
sound asleep, and lapped round and round in his blue
blanket from head to heel.”
Rachel saw her own face change in the glass; but she
only asked one more question, and that with a smile.
“Did John say it was a blue blanket, Harris, or did
your own imagination supply the colour?”.
“He said it, m'm; faded blue.”
“And pray when did you see John to hear all
this?” demanded Rachel, suddenly remembering her
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The Shadow of the Rope
responsibility as mistress of this young daughter of
the soil.
“Deary me, m’m,” responded the ingenuous Harris,
“I didn't see him, not more than any of the others;
he just comed to t window of t' servants' hall, as we
were having our breakfasts, and he told us all at once.
He was that full of it, was John!”
Rachel asked no more questions; but she was not
altogether sorry that the matter had already become
one of common gossip throughout the house. Mean-
while she made no allusion to it at breakfast, but her
observation had been quickened by the events of the
morning, and thus it was that she noticed and recog-
nised the narrow blue book which was too long for
her husband's breast-pocket, and would show itself as
he stooped over his coffee. It was his cheque-book,
and Rachel had not seen it since their travels.
That afternoon a not infrequent visitor arrived on
his bicycle, to which was tied a bouquet of glorious
roses instead of a lamp; this was Charles Langholm,
the novelist, who had come to live in Delverton, over
two hundred miles from his lifelong haunts and the
literary market-place, chiefly because upon a happy-
go-lucky tour through the district he had chanced
upon what he never tired of calling “the ideal rose-
covered cottage of my dreams,” though also for other
reasons unknown in Yorkshire. His flat was aban-
doned before quarter-day, his effects transplanted at
considerable cost, and ever since Langholm had been a
144


Episode of the Invisible Visitor
bigoted countryman, who could not spend a couple of
days in town without making himself offensive on the
subject at his club, where he was nevertheless discreetly
vague as to the exact locality of his rural paradise.
Even at the club, however, it was admitted that his work
had improved almost as much as his appearance; and
he put it all down to the roses in which he lived em-
bowered for so many months of the year. Such was
their profusion that you could have filled a clothes-
basket without missing one, and Langholm never vis-
ited rich or poor without a little offering out of his
abundance.
“They may be coals to Newcastle,” he would say
to the Woodgates or the Steels, “but none of your
Tyneside collieries are a patch on mine."
Like most victims of the artistic temperament, the
literary Langholm was a creature of moods; but the
very fact of a voluntary visit from him was sufficient
guarantee of the humour in which he came, and this
afternoon he was at his best. He had indeed been
writing all day, and for many days past, and was filled
with the curious exhilaration which accompanies an
output too rapid and too continuous to permit a run-
ning sense of the defects. He was a ship with a fair
wind, which he valued the more for the belts of calms
and the adverse weather through which he had passed
and must inevitably pass again; for the moment he was
a happy man, though one with no illusion as to the
present product of his teeming pen.
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The Shadow of the Rope
“ It is nonsense,” he said to Rachel, in answer to a
question from that new and sympathetic friend, “ but
it is not such nonsense as to seem nothing else
when one's in the act of perpetrating it, and what more
can one want? It had to be done by the tenth of
August, and by Jove it will be! A few weeks ago I
didn't think it possible; but the summer has thawed
my ink.”
“Are you sure it isn't Mrs. Steel?” asked one of the
Venables girls, who had also ridden over on their bi-
cycles. “I heard you had a tremendously literary con-
versation when you dined with us.”
“We had, indeed!” said Langholm, with enthu-
siasm. “And Mrs. Steel gave me one of the best ideas
I ever had in my life; that's another reason why I'm
racing through this rubbish—to take it in hand.”
It was Sybil to whom he was speaking, but at this
point Rachel plunged into conversation with the sister,
Vera, which required an effort, since the elder Miss
Venables was a young lady who had cultivated languor
as a sign of breeding and sophistication. Rachel, how-
ever, made the effort with such a will that the talk
became general in a moment.
“I don't know how anybody writes books,” was the
elder young lady's solitary contribution; her tone added
that she did not want to know.
“Nor I,” echoed Sybil, “ especially in a place like
this, where nothing ever happens. If I wanted to write
a novel, I should go to Spain—or Siberia—or the
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Episode of the Invisible Visitor
Rocky Mountains—where things do happen, according
to all accounts.”
“Young lady," returned the novelist, a twinkle in
his eye, “I had exactly the same notion when I first
began, and I remember what a much older hand said
to me when I told him I was going down to Cornwall
for romantic background. “Young man,' said he,
' have you placed a romance in your mother's backyard
yet?' I had not, but I did so at once instead of
going to Cornwall, and sounder advice I never had in
my life. Material, like charity, begins at home; nor
need you suppose that nothing ever happens down here.
That is the universal idea of the native about his
or her own heath, but I can assure you it isn't the case
at all. Only just now, on my way here, I saw a scene
and a character that might both have been lifted bodily
out of Bret Harte."
Sybil Venables clamoured for particulars, while her
sister resigned herself to further weariness of the flesh.
Rachel put down her cup and leant forward with
curiously expectant eyes. They were sitting in the cool
square hall, with doors shut or open upon every hand,
and the gilded gallery overhead. Statuettes and ferns,
all reflected in the highly polished marble floor, added
a theatrical touch which was not out of keeping with
a somewhat ornate interior.
“ It was the character,” continued Langholm,“ who
was making the scene; and a stranger creature I have
never seen on English earth. He wore what I believe
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The Shadow of the Rope
they call a Crimean shirt, and a hat like a stage cow-
boy; and he informed all passers that he was knocking
down his cheque!”
“What? ” cried Rachel and Sybil in one breath, but
in curiously different tones.
“Knocking down his cheque,” repeated Langholm.
“It's what they do in the far west or the bush or some-
where—but I rather fancy it's the bush-when they
get arrears of wages in a lump in one cheque."
"And where did you see all this?” inquired Rachel,
whose voice was very quiet, but her hazel eyes alight
with a deeper interest than the story warranted.
“At the Packhorse on the York Road. I came
that way round for the sake of the surface and the
exercise."
“And did you see the cheque?”.
“No, I only stopped for a moment, to find out what
the excitement was about; but the fellow I can see now.
You never set eyes on such a pirate-gloriously drunk
and bearded to the belt. I didn't stop, because he was
lacing into everybody with a cushion, and the local
loafers seemed to like it.”
“What a joke!” cried Sybil Venables.
“ There is no accounting for taste," remarked her
sapient sister.
“And he was belabouring them with a cushion, did
you say?.” added Rachel, with the slightest emphasis
upon the noun.
“Well, it looked like one to me,” replied Lang-
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Episode of the Invisible Visitor
holm, “but, on second thoughts, it was more like a
bolster in shape; and now I know what it was! It has
just dawned on me. It looked like a bolster done up
in a blanket; but it was the swag that the tramps carry
in Australia, with all their earthly goods rolled up in
their bedding; and the fellow was an Australian swags-
man, that's what he was!”
“Swagman,” corrected Rachel, instinctively. “And
pray what colour was the blanket?” she made haste
to add.
“Faded blue.”
And, again from sheer force of instinct, Rachel gave
a nod.
“Were you ever out there, Mrs. Steel?” inquired
Langholm, carelessly. “I never was, but the sort of
thing has been done to death in books, and I only
wonder I didn't recognise it at once. Well, it was the
last type one thought to meet with in broad daylight
on an English country road!”.
Had Langholm realised that he had put a question
which he had no business to put? Had he convicted
himself of a direct though unpremeditated attempt to
probe the mystery of his hostess's antecedents, and were
his subsequent observations designed to unsay that
question in effect? If so there was no such delicacy in
the elder Miss Venables, who became quite animated
at the sudden change in Rachel's face, and at her own
perception of the cause.
“ Have you been to Australia, Mrs. Steel?” repeated
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The Shadow of the Rope
Vera, looking Rachel full in the eyes; and she added
slyly, “I believe you have!”.
There was a moment's pause, and then a crisp step
rang upon the marble, as Mr. Steel emerged from his
study.
“ Australia, my dear Miss Venables," said he, “is
the one country that neither my wife nor I have ever
visited in our lives, and the last one that either of us
has the least curiosity to see.”
And he took his seat among them with a smile.
150


CHAPTER XIII
THE AUSTRALIAN ROOM
It was that discomfort to man, that cruelty to beast,
that outrage by unnatural Nature upon all her children,
a bitter summer's day. The wind was in the east;
great swollen clouds wallowed across the sky, now
without a drop, now breaking into capricious showers
of stinging rain; and a very occasional burst of sunlight
served only to emphasise the evil by reminding one of
the season it really was, or should have been, even if it
did not entice one to the wetting which was the sure
reward of a walk abroad. The Delverton air was strong
and bracing enough, but the patron wind of the district
bit to the bone through garments never intended for
winter wear.
On such a day there could be few more undesirable
abodes than Normanthorpe House, with its marble
floors, its high ceilings, and its general scheme of Ital-
ian coolness and discomfort. It was a Tuesday, when
Mr. Steel usually amused himself by going on 'Change
in Northborough and lunching there at the Delverton
Club. Rachel was thus not only physically chilled and
depressed, but thrown upon her own society at its
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The Shadow of the Rope
worst; and she missed that of her husband more than
she was aware.
Once she had been a bright and energetic person
with plenty of resources within herself; now she had
singularly few. She was distraught and uneasy in her
mind, could settle less and less to her singing or a book,
and was the victim of an increasing restlessness of mind
and limb. Others did not see it; she had self-control;
but repression was no cure. And for all this there were
reasons enough; but the fear of identification by the
neighbours as the notorious Mrs. Minchin was no
longer one of them.
No; it was her own life, root and branch, that had
grown into the upas-tree which was poisoning existence
for Rachel Steel. She was being punished for her
second marriage as she had been punished for her first,
only more deservedly, and with more subtle stripes.
Each day brought a dozen tokens of the anomalous
position which she had accepted in the madness of an
hour of utter recklessness and desperation. Rachel was
not mistress in her own house, nor did she feel for a
moment that it was her own house at all. Everything
was done for her; a skilled housekeeper settled the
smallest details; and that these were perfect alike in
arrangement and execution, that the said housekeeper
was a woman of irreproachable tact and capability, and
that she herself had never an excuse for concrete com-
plaint, formed a growing though intangible grievance
in Rachel's mind. She had not felt it at first. She
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The Australian Room
had changed in these summer months. She wanted
to be more like other wives. There was Morna Wood-
gate, with the work cut out for every hour of her full
and happy days; but Morna had not made an anoma-
lous marriage, Morna had married for love.
And to-day there was not even Morna to come and
see her, or for her to go and see, for Tuesday after-
noon was not one of the few upon which the vicar's
wife had no settled duty or occupation in the parish.
Rachel so envied her the way in which she helped her
husband in his work; she had tried to help also, in a
desultory way; but it is one thing to do a thing because
it is a duty, and another thing to do it for something
to do, as Rachel soon found out. Besides, Hugh
Woodgate was not her husband. Rachel had the right
feeling to abandon those half-hearted attempts at per-
sonal recreation in the guise of good works, and the
courage to give Morna her reasons; but she almost re-
gretted it this afternoon.
She had explored for the twentieth time that strange
treasury known as the Chinese Room, a state apart-
ment filled with loot brought home from the Flowery
Land by a naval scion of the house of Normanthorpe,
and somewhat cynically included in the sale. The idols
only leered in Rachel's face, and the cabinets of gro-
tesque design were unprovided with any key to their
history or former uses. In sheer desperation Rachel
betook herself to her husband's study; it was the first
time she had crossed that threshold in his absence,
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The Shadow of the Rope
but within were the books, and a book she must
have.
These also had been purchased with the house.
With few exceptions, they were ancient books in bat-
tered calf, which Steel had stigmatised as “musty
trash” once when Rachel had asked if she might take
one. She had not made that request again; indeed, it
was seldom enough that she had set foot inside the
spacious room which the old books lined, and in which
the master of the house disliked being disturbed. Yet
it was anything but trash which she now discovered
upon the dusty shelves.
There was Tom Jones in four volumes and the
Spectator in eight, Gil Blas and the works of Swift, all
with the long “s,” and backs like polished oak; in the
lower shelves were Hogarth and Gilray in rare folios;
at every level and on either hand were books worth
taking out. But this was almost all that Rachel did;
she took them out and put them in again, for that was
her unsettled mood. She spent some minutes over
the Swifts, but not sufficiently attracted to march off
with them. The quaint obsolete type of the various
volumes attracted her more as a curiosity than as read-
able print; the coarse satires of the early masters of car-
icature and cartoon did not attract her at all. Rachel's
upbringing had deprived her of the traditions, the
superstitions, and the shibboleths which are at once
a strength and a weakness of the ordinary English
education; if, however, she was too much inclined to
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The Australian Room
take a world's masterpiece exactly as she found it, her
taste, such as it was, at all events was her own.
She had naturally an open mind, but it was not open
now; it was full and running over with the mysteries
and the perplexities of her own environment. Books
would not take her out of herself; in them she could
not hope to find a key to any one of the problems within
problems which beset and tortured her. So she ran her
hand along the dusty books, little dreaming that the
key was there all the time; so in the end, and quite
by chance, but for the fact that she was dipping into
so many, she took out the right book, and started back-
ward with it in her hand.
The book was The Faerie Queene, and Rachel had
extracted it in a Gothic spirit, because she had once
heard that very few living persons had read it from
end to end; since she could not become interested in
anything, she might as well be thoroughly bored. But
she never opened the volume, for in the dark slit which
it left something shone like a little new moon. Rachel
put in her hand, and felt a small brass handle; to turn
and pull it was the work of her hand without a guiding
thought; but when tiers of books swung towards her
with the opening door which they hid, it was not in
human nature to shut that door again without so much
as peeping in.
Rachel first peeped, then stepped, into a secret
chamber as disappointing at the first glance as such
a place could possibly be. It was deep in dust, and filled
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The Shadow of the Rope
with packing-cases not half unpacked, a lumber-room
and nothing more. The door swung to with a click
behind her as Rachel stood in the midst of this un-
interesting litter, and instinctively she turned round.
That instant she stood rooted to the ground, her eyes
staring, her chin fallen, a dreadful fear in every feature
of her face.
It was not that her second husband had followed and
discovered her; it was the face of her first husband that
looked upon Rachel Steel, his bold eyes staring into
hers, through the broken glass of a fly-blown picture-
frame behind the door.
The portrait was not hanging from the wall, but
resting against it on the floor. It was a photographic
enlargement in colours, and the tinted eyes looked up
at Rachel with all the bold assurance that she remem-
bered so keenly in the perished flesh. She had not an
instant's doubt about those eyes; they spoke in a way
that made her shiver; and yet the photograph was that
of a much younger man than she had married. It
was Alexander Minchin with mutton-chop whiskers,
his hair parted in the middle, and the kind of pin in the
kind of tie which had been practically obsolete for
years; it was none the less indubitably and indisputably
Alexander Minchin.
And indeed that fact alone was enough to shake
Rachel's nerves; her discovery had all the shock of
an unwelcome encounter with the living. But it was
the gradual appreciation of the true significance of her
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The Australian Room
discovery that redoubled Rachel's qualms even as she
was beginning to get the better of them. So they had
been friends, her first husband and her second! Rachel
stooped and looked hard at the enlargement, and there
sure enough was the photographer's imprint. Yes, they
had been friends in Australia, that country which John
Buchanan Steel elaborately and repeatedly pretended
never to have visited in all his travels!
Rachel could have smiled as she drew herself up
with this point settled in her mind for ever; why, the
room reeked of Australia! These cases which had
never been properly unpacked, they were overflowing
with memorials of the life which she herself knew so
well. Here a sheaf of boomerangs were peeping out;
there was an old grey wideawake, with a blue-silk fly-
veil coiled above the brim; that was an Australian sad-
dle; and those glass cases contained samples of merino
wool. So it was in Australia as a squatter that Steel
had made his fortune! But why suppress a fact so free
from all discredit? These were just the relics of a bush
life which a departing colonist might care to bring home
with him to the old country. Then why cast them into
a secret lumber-room whose very existence was un-
known to the old Australian's Australian wife?
Rachel felt her brain reeling; and yet she was
thankful for the light which had been vouchsafed to
her at last. It was but a lantern flash through the
darkness, which seemed the more opaque for that one
thin beam of light; but it was something, a beginning,
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The Shadow of the Rope
a clue. For the rest she was going straight to the
man who had kept her so long in such unnecessary
ignorance.
Why had he not told her about Australia, at all
events? What conceivable harm could that have done?
It would have been the strongest possible bond between
them. But Rachel went further as she thought more.
Why not have told her frankly that he had known
Alexander Minchin years before she did herself? It
could have made no difference after Alexander Min-
chin's death; then why had he kept the fact so jealously
to himself? And the dead man's painted eyes answered
“Why?” with the bold and mocking stare his wife
could not forget, a stare which at that moment as-
sumed a new and sinister significance in her sight.
Rachel looked upward through the window, which
was barred, and almost totally eclipsed by shrubs; but
a clout of sky was just visible under the architrave. It
was a very grey sky; grey also was Rachel's face in
the sudden grip of horror and surmise. Then a ragged
edge of cloud caught golden fire, a glimmer found its
way into the dust and dirt of the secret chamber, and
Rachel relaxed with a slight smile but an exceedingly
decided shake of the head. Thereafter she escaped in-
continently, but successfully, as she had entered;
closed the hidden door behind her, and restored The
Faerie Queene very carefully to its place. Rachel no
longer proposed to join the select band of those who
have read that epic through.
158


CHAPTER XIV
BATTLE ROYAL
She went to her own rooms to think and to decide;
and what she first thought and then decided was
sensible enough. She was thankful she had not been
caught like Fatima in the forbidden room; not that
she lacked the courage to meet the consequences of
her acts, but it would have put her in the wrong and
at a disadvantage at the first crash of battle. And
a battle royal Rachel quite expected; nor had she the
faintest intention of disguising what she had done; but
it was her husband who was to be taken aback, for
a change.
The Steels dined alone, as usual, or as much alone
as a man and his wife with a butler and two footmen
are permitted to be at their meals. Steel was at his
best after these jaunts of his to Northborough and
the club. He would come home with the latest news
from that centre of the universe, the latest gossip which
had gone the rounds on 'Change and at lunch, the
newest stories of Mr. Venables and his friends, which
were invariably reproduced for Rachel's benefit with
that slight but unmistakable local accent of which
these gentry were themselves all unconscious. Steel
159


The Shadow of the Rope
had a wicked wit, and Rachel as a rule a sufficiently
appreciative smile, but this was to-night either lacking
altogether or of an unconvincing character. Rachel
could never pretend, and her first spontaneous remark
was when her glass filled up with froth.
“ Champagne!” said she, for they seldom drank it.
" It has been such a wretched day,” explained Steel,
“that I ordered it medicinally. I am afraid it must have
been perishing here, as it was in the town. This it to
restore your circulation.”
“My circulation is all right,” answered Rachel, too
honest even to smile upon the man with whom she was
going to war. “I felt cold all the morning, but I have
been warm enough since the afternoon.”
And that was very true, for excitement had made
her blood run hot in every vein; nor had Rachel often
been more handsome, or less lovely, than she was to-
night, with her firm lip and her brooding eye.
“There was another reason for the champagne,”
resumed her husband, very frankly for him, when at
last they had the drawing-room to themselves. “I am
in disgrace with you, I believe, and I want to hear from
you what I have done.”
"It is what you have not done,” returned Rachel,
as she stood imperiously before the lighted fire; and
her bosom rose and fell, white as the ornate mantelpiece
of Carrara marble which gleamed behind her.
"And what, may I ask, is my latest sin of omis-
sion?”
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Battle Royal
Rachel rushed to the point with a passionate direct-
ness that did her no discredit.
“Why have you pretended all these months that
you never were in Australia in your life? Why did
you never tell me that you knew Alexander Minchin
out there?”
And she held her breath against the worst that he
could do, being well prepared for him to lose first his
colour and then the temper which he had never
lost since she had known him; to fly into a fury, to
curse her up hill and down dale; in a word, to behave
as her first husband had done more than once, but
this one never. What Rachel did not anticipate was a
smile that cloaked not a single particle of surprise, and
the little cocksure bow that accompanied the smile.
“So you have found it out,” said Steel, and his
smile only ended as he sipped his coffee; even then there
was no end to it in his eyes.
“ This afternoon,” said Rachel, disconcerted but not
undone.
“By poking your nose into places which you would
not think of approaching in my presence?”
“By the merest accident in the world!”
. And Rachel described the accident, truth flashing
from her eyes; in an instant her husband's face
changed, the smile went out, but it was no frown that
came in its stead.
“I beg your pardon, Rachel,” said he, earnestly.
“I suppose,” he added, " that a man may call his
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The Shadow of the Rope
wife by her Christian name for once in a way? I did
so, however, without thinking, and because I really
do most humbly beg your pardon for an injustice
which I have done you for some hours in my own mind.
I came home between three and four, and I heard you
were in my study. You were not, but that book was
out; and then, of course, I knew where you were.
My hand was on the knob, but I drew it back. I won-
dered if you would have the pluck to do the tackling!
And I apologise again,” Steel concluded, " for I knew
you quite well enough to have also known that at least
there was no question about your courage.”
“Then,” said Rachel, impulsively, after having made
up her mind to ignore these compliments, “then I think
you might at least be candid with me!”
“And am I not?” he cried. “Have I denied that
the portrait you saw is indeed the portrait of Alexander
Minchin? And yet how easy that would have been!
It was taken long before you knew him; he must have
altered considerably after that. Or I might have
known him under another name. But no, I tell you
honestly that your first husband was a very dear friend
of mine, more years ago now than I care to reckon.
Did you hear me?” he added, with one of his
sudden changes of tone and manner. “A very dear
friend, I said, for that he undoubtedly was; but was I
going to ask you to marry a very dear friend of the
man who deteriorated so terribly, and who treated you
so ill?”
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Battle Royal
Delivered in the most natural manner imaginable,
with the quiet confidence of which this man was full,
and followed by a smile of conscious yet not unkindly
triumph, this argument, like most that fell from his
lips upon her ears, was invested with a value out of
all proportion to its real worth; and Steel clinched it
with one of those homely saws which are not disdained
by makers of speeches the wide world over.
“Could you really think,” he added, with one of his
rarest and most winning smiles, “ that I should be such
a fool as to invite you to step out of the frying-pan into
the fire? ”
Rachel felt for a moment that she would like to say
it was exactly what she had done; but even in that mo-
ment she perceived that such a statement would have
been very far from the truth. And her nature was large
enough to refrain from the momentary gratification
of a bitter repartee. But he was too clever for her;
that she did feel, whatever else he might be; and her
only chance was to return to the plain questions with
which she had started, demanding answers as plain.
Rachel led up to them, however, with one or two
of which she already knew the answer, thus preparing
for her spring in quite the Old Bailey manner,
which she had mastered subconsciously at her trial,
and which for once was to profit a prisoner at
the bar.
“Yet you don't any longer deny that you have been
to Australia?”
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The Shadow of the Rope
“ It is useless. I lived there for years.”
“And you admit that you knew Alexander quite
well out there?”
“ Most intimately, in the Riverina, some fifteen or
twenty years ago; he was on my station as almost ev-
erything a gentleman could be, up to overseer; and by
that time he was half a son to me, and half a younger
brother.”
“But no relation, as a matter of fact?”
“None whatever, but my very familiar friend, as I
have already told you.”
“ Then why in the world,” Rachel almost thundered,
“could you not tell me so in the beginning?”
“That is a question I have already answered.”
“Then I have another. Why so often and so sys-
tematically pretend that you never were in Australia
at all? ”
“ That is a question which I implore you not to
press!”
The two answers, so like each other in verbal form,
were utterly dissimilar in the manner of their utter-
ance. Suddenly, and for the first time in all her knowl-
edge of him, his cynical aplomb had fallen from the
man like a garment. One moment he was brazening
past deceit with a smiling face; the next, he was in
earnest, even he, and that mocking voice vibrated with
deep feeling.
"I should have thought all the more of you for be-
ing an Australian,” continued Rachel, vaguely touched
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Battle Royal
at the change in him, “I who am proud of being one
myself. What harm could it have done, my knowing
that?”
“You are not the only one from whom I have hid-
den it,” said Steel, still in a low and altered voice.
“ Yet you brought home all those keepsakes of the
bush?”
“ But I thought better of them, and have never even
unpacked them all, as you must have seen for your-
self.”
“ Yet your mysterious visitor of the other day~ "
“Another Australian, of course; indeed, another
man who worked upon my own run.”
“And he knows why you don't want it known over
here?”
“He does,” said Steel, with grim brevity.
Rachel moved forward and pressed his hand impul-
sively. To her surprise the pressure was returned.
That instant their hands fell apart.
“I beg your pardon in my turn,” she said. “I can
only promise you that I will never again re-open that
wound—whatever it may be—and I won't even try to
guess. I undertook not to try to probe your past, and
I will keep my undertaking in the main; but where it
impinges upon my own past I simply cannot! You say
you were my first husband's close friend,” added Ra-
chel, looking her second husband more squarely than
ever in the eyes. “Was that what brought you to my
trial for his murder ?”.
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Battle Royal
you ought not to be hurt if I suspect you of another.
Come! Can you look me in the face and tell me that
you married me for love? No, you turn away-be-
cause you cannot! Then will you, in God's name,
tell me why you did marry me?”
And she followed him with clasped hands, her beau-
tiful eyes filled with tears, her white throat quivering
with sobs, until suddenly he turned upon her as though
in self-defence.
“No, I will not!” he cried. “Since the answer I have
given you, and the obvious answer, is not good enough
for you, the best thing you can do is to find out for
yourself.”
A truculent look came into Rachel's eyes, as they
rested upon the smooth face so unusually agitated be-
neath the smooth silvery hair.
"I will!” she answered through her teeth. “I shall
take you at your word, and find out for myself I will!”
And she swept past him out of the room.
167


The Shadow of the Rope
larly ruly tongue of John Buchanan Steel. And then,
in those same days, there fell the two social events to
which the bidden guests had been looking forward for
some two or three weeks, and of which the whole
neighbourhood was to talk for years.
On the tenth of August the Uniackes were giving a
great garden-party at Hornby Manor, while the elev-
enth was the date of the first real dinner-party for which
the Steels had issued invitations to Normanthorpe
House.
The tenth was an ideal August day: deep blue sky,
trees still untarnished in the hardy northern air, and
black shadows under the trees. Rachel made herself
ready before lunch, to which she came down looking
quite lovely, in blue as joyous as the sky's, to find her
husband as fully prepared, and not less becomingly
attired, in a grey frock-coat without a ripple on its sur-
face. They looked critically at each other for an in-
stant, and then Steel said something pleasant, to which
Rachel made practically no reply. They ate their lunch
in a silence broken good-naturedly at intervals from
one end of the table only. Then the Woodgates arrived,
to drive with them to Hornby, which was some seven
or eight miles away; and the Normanthorpe landau
and pair started with the quartette shortly after three
o'clock.
Morning, noon, and afternoon of this same tenth of
August, Charles Langholm, the minor novelist, never
lifted his unkempt head from the old bureau at which
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A Chance Encounter
he worked, beside an open window overlooking his cot-
tage garden. A tumbler of his beloved roses stood in
one corner of the writing space, up to the cuts in MSS.,
and roses still ungathered peeped above the window-sill
and drooped from either side. But Langholm had a
soul far below roses at the present moment; his neatly
numbered sheets of ruled sermon-paper were nearing
the five hundredth page; his hero and his heroine were
in the full sweep of those emotional explanations which
they had ingeniously avoided for the last three hundred
at least; in a word, Charles Langholm's new novel
is being finished while you wait. It is not one of his
best; yet a moment ago there was a tear in his eye, and
now he is grinning like a child at play. And at play he
is, though he be paid for playing, and though the game
is only being won after weeks and months of uphill
labour and downhill joy.
At last there is the final ticking of inverted commas,
and Charles Langholm inscribes the autograph for
which he is importuned once in a blue moon, and which
the printer will certainly not set up at the foot of the last
page; but the thing is done, and the doer must needs
set his hand to it out of pure and unusual satisfaction
with himself. And so, thank the Lord!
Langholm rose stiffly from the old bureau, where
at his best he could lose all sense of time; for the mo-
ment he was bent double, and faint with fasting, be-
cause it was his mischievous rule to reach a given point
before submitting to the physical and mental distrac-
171


The Shadow of the Rope
tion of a meal. But to-day's given point had been the
end of his book, and for some happy minutes Lang-
holm fed on his elation. It was done at last, yet another
novel, and not such a bad one after all. Not his best by
any means, but perhaps still further from being his
worst; and, at all events, the thing was done. Lang-
holm could scarcely grasp that fact, though there was
the last page just dry upon the bureau, and most of the
rest lying about the room in galley-proofs or in type-
written sheets. Moreover, the publishers were pleased;
that was the joke. It was nothing less to Langholm
when he reflected that the final stimulus to finish this
book had been the prospect and determination of at
last writing one to please himself. And this reflection
brought him down from his rosy clouds.
It was the day of the Uniackes' garden-party; they
had actually asked the poor author, and the poor au-
thor had intended to go. Not that he either shone or
revelled in society; but Mrs. Steel would be there, and
he burned to tell her that he had finished his book, and
was at last free to tackle hers; for hers at bottom it
would be, the great novel by which the name of Lang-
holm was to live, and which he was to found by Rachel
Steel's advice upon the case of her namesake Rachel
Minchin.
The coincidence of the Christian names had naturally
struck the novelist, but no suspicion of the truth had
crossed a mind too skilled in the construction of dra-
matic situations to dream of stumbling into one ready-
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A Chance Encounter
made. It was thus with a heart as light as any feather
that Langholm made a rapid and unwholesome meal,
followed by a deliberate and painstaking toilet, after
which he proceeded at a prudent pace upon his bicycle
to Hornby Manor.
Flags were drooping from their poles, a band clash-
ing fitfully through the sleepy August air, and carriages
stili sweeping into the long drive, when Langholm also
made his humble advent. He was a little uneasy and
self-conscious, and annoyed at his own anxiety to im-
part his tidings to Mrs. Steel, but for whom he would
probably have stayed at home. His eye sought her
eagerly as he set foot upon the lawn, having left his bi-
cycle at the stables, and carefully removed the clips
from his trousers; but before his vigilance could be
rewarded he was despatched by his hostess to the tea-
tent, in charge of a very young lady, detached for the
nonce from the wing of a gaunt old gentleman with
side whiskers and lantern jaws.
Fresh from his fagging task, Langholm did not know
what on earth to say to the pretty schoolgirl, whose
own shyness reacted on himself; but he was doing his
best, and atoning in attentiveness for his shortcomings
as a companion, when in the tent he had to apologise
to a lady in blue, who turned out to be Rachel herself,
with Hugh Woodgate at her side.
“Oh, no, we live in London,” the young girl was
saying; “only I go to the same school as Ida Uniacke,
and I am staying here on a visit.”
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The Shadow of the Rope
“ I've finished it," whispered Langholm to Rachel,
“this very afternoon; and now I'm ready for yours!
I see,” he added, dropping back into the attitude of re-
spectful interest in the young girl; “ only on a visit;
and who was the old gentleman from whom I tore you
away?”
The child laughed merrily.
“That was my father,” she said; but he is only here
on his way to Leeds."
“You musn't call it my book," remonstrated Ra-
chel, while Woodgate waited upon both ladies.
“But it was you who gave me the idea of writing a
novel round Mrs. Minchin.”
“I don't think I did. I am quite sure it was your
own idea. But one book at a time. Surely you will
take a rest?”
“I shall correct this thing. It will depress me to
the verge of suicide. Then I shall fall to upon my
magnum opus.”
“ You really think it will be that?”
“ It should be mine. It isn't saying much; but I
never had such a plot as you have given me!”
Rachel shook her head in a last disclaimer as she
moved away with the Vicar of Marley.
“Oh, Mr. Langholm, do you write books?” asked
the schoolgirl, with round blue eyes.
"For my sins," he confessed. “But do you prefer
an ice, or more strawberries and cream?”
“Neither, thank you. I've been here before," the
174


The Shadow of the Rope
Mrs. Uniacke, with the Irish brogue which rendered
her slightest observation a delight to the appreciative.
"Sir Baldwin Gibson-Mrs. Steel.”
Langholm and the little Miss Gibson were standing
close behind, and the trained eye of the habitual ob-
server took in every detail of a scene which he never for-
got. Handsome Mrs. Uniacke was clinching the intro-
duction with a smile, which ended in a swift expression
of surprise. Sir Baldwin had made an extraordinary
pause, his hand half-way to his hat, his lantern jaws
fallen suddenly apart. Mrs. Steel, though slower at her
part of the obvious recognition, was only a second
slower, and thereupon stood abashed and ashamed in
the eyes of all who saw; but only for another second
at the most; then Sir Baldwin Gibson not only raised
his hat, but held out his hand in a fatherly way, and as
she took it Rachel's colour changed from livid white
to ruby red.
Yet even Rachel was mistress of herself so quickly
that the one or two eye-witnesses of this scene, such
as Mrs. Uniacke and Charles Langholm, who saw that
it had a serious meaning, without dreaming what that
meaning was, were each in hopes that no one else had
seen as much as they. Sir Baldwin plunged at once in-
to amiable and fluent conversation, and before many
moments Rachel's replies were infected with an approx-
imate assurance and ease; then Langholm turned to
his juvenile companion, and put a question in the form
of a fib,
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A Chance Encounter
“So that is your father," said he. “I seem, do you
know, to know his face?”
Little Miss Gibson fell an easy prey.
“ You probably do; he is the judge, you know!”
“ The judge, is he?"
“Yes; and I wanted to ask you something just now
in the tent. Did you mean the Mrs. Minchin who
was tried for murder, when you were talking about
your plot?”
Langholm experienced an unforeseen shock from
head to heel; he could only nod.
“He was the judge who tried her!” the schoolgirl
said with pardonable pride.
A lady joined them as they spoke.
“Do you really mean that that is Mr. Justice Gibson,
who tried Mrs. Minchin at the Old Bailey last Novem-
ber?”
“Yes—my father,” said the proud young girl.
“What a very singular thing! How do you do, Mr.
Langholm? I didn't see it was you."
And Langholm found himself shaking hands with
the aquiline lady to whom he had talked so little at the
Upthorpe dinner-party; she took her revenge by giv-
ing him only the tips of her fingers now, and by look-
ing deliberately past him at Rachel and her judge.
177


CHAPTER XVI
A MATCH FOR MRS. VENABLES
That was absolutely all that happened at the Uniackes'
garden-party. There was no scene, no scandal, no in-
cident whatsoever beyond an apparently mutual recog-
nition between Mrs. Steel and Mr. Justice Gibson. Of
this there were not half-a-dozen witnesses, all of whom
were given immediate reason to suppose that either
they or the pair in question had made a mistake; for
nothing could have surpassed the presence of mind
and the kindness of heart with which Sir Baldwin Gib-
son chatted to the woman whom he had tried for her
life within the year. And his charity continued behind
her back.
“Odd thing,” said Sir Baldwin to his hostess, at the
earliest opportunity, “but for the moment I could have
sworn that woman was some one else. May I ask who
she is exactly?"
“Sure, Sir Baldwin,” replied Mrs. Uniacke, “and
that's what I thought we were to hear at last. It's
who she is we none of us know. And what does it mat-
ter? She's pretty and nice, and I'm just in love with
her; but then nobody knows any more about her hus-
band, and so we talk.”
A few more questions satisfied the judge that he
178


A Match for Mrs. Venables
could not possibly have been mistaken, and he hesi-
tated a moment, for he was a pious man; but Rachel's
face, combined with her nerve, had deepened an im-
pression which was now nearly a year old, and the su-
perfluous proximity of an angular and aquiline lady,
to whom Sir Baldwin had not been introduced, but
who was openly hanging upon his words, drove the
good man's last scruple to the winds.
“ Very deceptive, these likenesses," said he, raising
his voice for the interloper's benefit; “ in future I shall
beware of them. I needn't tell you, Mrs. Uniacke, that
I never before set eyes upon the lady whom I fear I
embarrassed by behaving as though I had."
Rachel was not less fortunate in her companion of
the moment which had so nearly witnessed her undo-
ing. Ox-eyed Hugh Woodgate saw nothing inexplic-
able in Mrs. Steel's behaviour upon her introduction to
Sir Baldwin Gibson, and anything he did see he attrib-
uted to an inconvenient sense of that dignitary's great-
ness. He did not think the matter worth mentioning
to his wife, when the Steels had dropped them at the
Vicarage gate, after a pleasant but somewhat silent
drive. Neither did Rachel see fit to speak of it to her
husband. There was a certain unworthy satisfaction
in her keeping something from him. But again she
underrated his uncanny powers of observation, and yet
again he turned the tables upon her by a sudden dis-
play of the very knowledge which she was painfully
keeping to herself.
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The Shadow of the Rope
“Of course you recognised the judge?” said Steel,
following his wife for once into her own apartments,
where he immediately shut a door behind him and
another in front of Rachel, who stood at bay before
the glitter in his eyes.
“Of course," she admitted, with irritating noncha-
lance.
“And he you?”
“I thought he did at first; afterwards I was not so
sure.”
“But I am!” exclaimed Steel through his teeth.
Rachel's face was a mixture of surprise and incre-
dulity.
“How can you know?” she asked coldly. “You
were at least a hundred yards away at the time, for
I saw you with Morna Woodgate.”
“And do you think my sight is not good for a hun-
dred yards,” retorted Steel," when you are at the end
of them? I saw the whole thing—his confusion and
yours—but then I did not know who he was. He must
have been in the house when we arrived; otherwise
I should have taken good care that you never met. I
saw enough, however, to bring me up in time to see
and hear more. I heard the way he was talking to you
then; that was his damned good-nature, and he has us
at his mercy all the same."
Rachel had never seen her husband in such a pas-
sion; indeed, she had never before known him in a state
of mind to justify the use of such a word. He was
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A Match for Mrs. Venables
cr.
paler than his wont, his eyes brighter, his lips more
bloodless. Rachel experienced a strange sense of ad-
vantage, at once unprecedented and unforeseen, and
with it an irresistible temptation to the sort of revenge
which she knew to be petty at the time. But he had
made her suffer; for once it was his turn. He could
be cold as ice when she was not, could deny her his con-
fidence when she all but fell upon her knees before
him; he should learn what it was to be treated as he
had treated her.
“I'm well aware of it,” said Rachel, with a harsh
dry laugh, “ though in point of fact I don't for a mo-
ment believe that he'll give me away. But really I
don't think it matters if he does.”
Steel stared; it was wonderful to her to see his face.
“It doesn't matter?” he repeated in angry astonish-
ment.
“Not to me,” rejoined Rachel, bitterly. “You tell
me nothing. What can matter to me? When you can
tell me why you felt compelled to marry me—when you
have the courage to tell me that—other things may
begin to matter again!”
Steel stared harder than before; he did not flinch,
but his eyes seemed to hedge together as he stared,
and the glittering light in them to concentrate in one
baleful gleam. Yet it was not a cruel look; it was the
look of a man who has sealed his lips upon one point
for ever, and who views any questioning on that point
as an attempt upon his treasury. There was more of
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The Shadow of the Rope
self-defence than of actual hostility in the compressed
lips, the bloodless face, the glaring eyes. Then, with
a shrug, the look, the resentment, and the passion were
shaken off, and Steel stepped briskly to the inner door
which he had shut in Rachel's path. Opening it, he
bowed her through with a ceremony conspicuous even
in their ceremonious relations.
But Rachel nursed her contrariety, even to the ex-
tent of a perverse satisfaction at her encounter with the
judge, and a fierce enjoyment of its still possible con-
sequences. The mood was neither logical nor gen-
erous, and yet it was human enough in the actual cir-
cumstances of the case. At last she had made him
feel! It had taken her the better part of a year, but here
at last was something that he really felt. And it had
to do with her; it was impending disaster to herself
which had brought about this change in her husband;
she knew him too well not to acquit him of purely self-
ish solicitude for his own good name and comfortable
status in a society for which he had no real regard.
There was never a man less dependent upon the good
opinion of other men. In absolute independence of
character, as in sheer strength of personality, Steel
stood by himself in the estimation of his wife. But he
had deceived her unnecessarily for weeks and months.
He had lied to her. He had refused her his whole con-
fidence when she begged him for it, and when he knew
how he could trust her. There was some deep mys-
tery underlying their marriage, he could not deny it,
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A Match for Mrs. Venables
yet he would not tell her what it was. He had made
her suffer needless pain; it was his turn. And yet,
with all her resentment against him, and all her grim
savouring of the scandal which he seemed to fear so
much, there ran a golden thread of unacknowledged
contentment in the conviction that those fears were
all for her.
Outwardly she was callous to the last degree, reckless
as on the day she made this marriage, and as light-
hearted as it was possible to appear; but the excitement
of the coming dinner-party was no small help to Ra-
chel in the maintenance of this attitude. It was to
be a very large dinner-party, and Rachel's first in her
own house; in any case she must have been upon her
mettle. Two dozen had accepted. The Upthorpe par-
ty was coming in force; if anybody knew anything,
it would be Mrs. Venables. What would she do or
say? Mrs. Venables was capable of doing or of say-
ing anything. And what might not happen before the
day was out?
It was a stimulating situation for one so curiously
compact of courage and of nerves as the present mis-
tress of Normanthorpe House; and for once she really
was mistress, inspecting the silver with her own eyes,
arranging the flowers with her own hands, and, what
was more difficult, the order in which the people were
to sit. She was thus engaged, in her own sanctum,
when Mrs. Venables did the one thing which Rachel
had not dreamt of her doing.
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The Shadow of the Rope
She called at three in the afternoon, and sent her
name upstairs.
Rachel's heart made itself felt; but she was not
afraid. Something was coming earlier than she had
thought; she was chiefly curious to know what. Her
first impulse was to have Mrs. Venables brought up-
stairs, and to invoke her aid in the arrangement of the
table before that lady could open fire. Rachel disliked
the great cold drawing-room, and felt that she must be
at a disadvantage in any interview there. On the
other hand, if this was a hostile visit, the visitor could
not be treated with too much consideration. And so
the servant was dismissed with word that her mistress
would not be a moment; nor was Rachel very many.
She glanced in a glass, but that was all; she might
have been tidier, but not easily more animated, confi-
dent, and alert. She had reached the landing when she
returned and collected all the cards which she had
been trying to arrange; they made quite a pack; and
Rachel laughed as she took them downstairs with her.
Mrs. Venables sat in solitary stiffness on the highest
chair she had been able to find; neither Sybil nor Vera
was in attendance; a tableful of light literature was at
her elbow, but Mrs. Venables sat with folded hands.
“This is too good of you!” cried Rachel, greeting
her in a manner redeemed from hypocrisy by a touch
of irresistible irony. “You know my inexperience,
and you have come to tell me things, have you not?
You could not have come at a better time. How do
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A Match for Mrs. Venables
you fit in twenty-six people at one table? I wanted to
have two at each end, and it can't be done!”
Mrs. Venables suppressed a smile suggestive of some
unconscious humour in these remarks, but sat more
upright than ever in her chair, with a hard light in the
bright brown eyes that stared serenely into Rachel's
own.
“I cannot say I came to offer you my assistance,
Mrs. Steel. I only take liberties with very intimate
friends."
“Then I wonder what can have brought you!”
And Rachel returned both the smile and the stare
with irritating self-control.
“I will tell you,” said Mrs. Venables, weightily.
“There is a certain thing being said of you, Mrs. Steel;
and I wish to know from your own lips whether there
is any truth in it or none."
Rachel held up her hands as quick as thought.
“My dear Mrs. Venables, you can't mean that you
are bringing me a piece of unpleasant gossip on the
very afternoon of my first dinner-party?”
" It remains with you," said Mrs. Venables, chang-
ing colour at this hit, “ to say whether it is mere gossip
or not. You must know, Mrs. Steel, though we were
all quite charmed with your husband from the moment
he came among us, we none of us had the least idea
where he came from-nor have we yet.”
“ You are speaking for the neighbourhood?” in-
quired Rachel, sweetly.
185


The Shadow of the Rope
“I am,” said Mrs. Venables.
“Town and county," murmured Rachel. “And
you mean that nobody in the district knew anything
at all about my husband?”
“Not a thing," said Mrs. Venables.
“And yet you called on him; and yet you took pity
on him, poor lonely bachelor that he was!”
This shaft also left its momentary mark upon the
visitor's complexion. “ The same applies to you," she
went on the more severely. “We had no idea who you
were, either!”
“And now?” said Rachel, still mistress of the situa-
tion, for she knew so well what was coming.
“And now we hear, and I wish to know whether it
is true or not. Were you, or were you not, the Mrs.
Minchin who was tried last winter for her husband's
murder?”
Rachel looked steadily into the hard brown eyes,
until a certain hardness came into her own.
“I don't quite know what right you think you have
to ask me such a question, Mrs. Venables. Is it the
usual thing to question people who have made a sec-
ond marriage—supposing I am one-about their first?
I fancied myself that it was considered bad form; but
then I am still very ignorant of the manners and cus-
toms in this part of the world. Since you ask it, how-
ever, you shall have your answer.” And Rachel's voice
rang out through the room, as she rose majestically
from the chair which she had drawn opposite that of
186


A Match for Mrs. Venables
the visitor. “Yes, Mrs. Venables, I am that unhappy
woman. And what then ?"
"No wonder you were silent about yourself,” said
Mrs. Venables, in a vindictive murmur. “No wonder
we never even heard ”
“And what then?” repeated Rachel, with a quiet
and compelling scorn. “Does it put one outside the
local pale to keep to oneself any painful incident in
one's own career? Is an accusation down here the
same thing as a conviction? Is there nothing to choose
between 'guilty' and 'not guilty'?”
“ You must be aware," proceeded Mrs. Venables,
without taking any notice of these questions—"indeed,
you cannot fail to be perfectly well aware—that a large
proportion of the public was dissatisfied with the ver-
dict in your case.”
“ Your husband, for one!” Rachel agreed, with a
scornful laugh. “He would have come to see me
hanged; he told me so at his own table.”
“ You never would have been at his table," retort-
ed Mrs. Venables, with some effect, “ if he or I had
dreamt who you were; but now that we know, you may
be quite sure that none of us will sit at yours.”
And Mrs. Venables rose up in all her might and
spite, her brown eyes flashing, her handsome head
thrown back.
"Are you still speaking for the district?” inquired
Rachel, conquering a recreant lip to put the question,
and putting it with her finest scorn.
187


The Shadow of the Rope
“I am speaking for Mr. Venables, my daughters,
and myself,” rejoined the lady with great dignity;
“others will speak for themselves; and you will soon
learn in what light you are regarded by ordinary peo-
ple. It is a merciful chance that we have found you out
-a merciful chance! That you should dare-you,
about whom there are not two opinions among sensible
people—that you should dare to come among us as you
have done and to speak to me as you have spoken!
But one thing is certain—it is for the last time.”
With that Mrs. Venables sailed to the door by which
she was to make her triumphant exit, but she stopped
before reaching it. Steel stood before her on the
threshold, and as he stood he closed the door behind
him, and as he closed it he turned and took out the key.
There was the other door that led through the con-
servatory into the garden. Without a word he crossed
the room, shut that door also, locked it, and put the
two keys in his pocket. Then at last he turned to the
imprisoned lady.
“You are quite right, Mrs. Venables. It is the last
conversation we are likely to have together. The great-
er the pity to cut it short !”
“Will you have the goodness to let me go?” the
visitor demanded, white and trembling, but yet not un-
impressive in her tremendous indignation.
" With the greatest alacrity,” replied Steel, “when
you have apologised to my wife.”
Rachel stood by without a word.
188


A Match for Mrs. Venables
“For what?” cried Mrs. Venables. “For telling
her what the whole world thinks of her? Never; and
you will unlock that door this instant, unless you wish
my husband to-to-horsewhip you within an inch of
your life!”
Steel merely smiled; he could well afford to do so,
lithe and supple as he still was, with flabby Mr. Ven-
ables in his mind's eye.
"I might have known what to expect in this house,”
continued Mrs. Venables, in a voice hoarse with sup-
pressed passion, “what unmanly and ungentlemanly
behaviour, what cowardly insults! I might have
known!”
And she glanced from the windows to the bells.
“It is no use ringing,” said Steel, with a shake of his
snowy head, “or doing anything else of the sort. I
am the only person on the premises who can let you
out; your footman could not get in if he tried; but
if you like I will shout to him to try. As for insults, you
have insulted my wife most cruelly and gratuitously,
for I happen to have heard more than you evidently
imagine. In fact, 'insult' is hardly the word for what
even I have heard you say; let me warn you, madam,
that you have sailed pretty close to the wind already in
the way of indictable slander. You seem to forget
that my wife was tried and acquitted by twelve of her
fellow-countrymen. You will at least apologise for
that forgetfulness before you leave this room.”
“Never!”
189


The Shadow of the Rope
Steel looked at his watch and sat down.
“I begin to fear you are no judge of character, Mrs.
Venables; otherwise you would have seen ere this which
of us will have to give in sooner or later. I can only
tell you which of us never will!”
And Rachel still stood by without a word.
190


CHAPTER XVII
FRIENDS IN NEED
THAT afternoon the Vicar of Marley, . was paying
house-to-house visits among his humbler parishioners.
Though his conversation was the weak point to which
attention has been drawn, Hugh Woodgate neverthe-
less possessed the not too common knack of chatting
with the poor. He had the simplicity which made
them kin, and his sympathy, unlike that of so many
persons who consider themselves sympathetic, was not
exclusively reserved for the death-bed and the ruined
home. He wrote letters for the illiterate, found places
for the unemployed, knew one baby from another as
soon as their own mothers, and with his own hand
sent to the local papers full reports of the village
matches in which he rarely scored a run. Until this
August afternoon he was not aware that he had made
an actual enemy in all the years that he had spent in
Delverton, first as an overworked Northborough curate,
and latterly as one of the busiest country vicars in the
diocese. But towards five o'clock, as Mr. Woodgate
was returning to the Vicarage, a carriage and pair,
sweeping past him in a cloud of dust, left the clergyman
quite petrified on the roadside, his soft felt hat still in
191


The Shadow of the Rope
his hand; the carriage contained Mrs. Venables, who
had simply stared him in the face when he took
it off.
Woodgate was quite excited when he reached the
Vicarage. Morna met him in the garden.
“Mrs. Venables cut me dead!” he cried while they
were still yards apart.
“I am not surprised,” replied Morna, who was in a
state of suppressed excitement herself.
“ But what on earth is the meaning of it?”
“She has just been here."
“Well?”
“She is not likely to come again. Oh, Hugh, I
don't know how to tell you! If you agree with her for
a moment, if you see any possible excuse for the wom-
an, it will break my heart!”.
Morna's fine eyes were filled with tears; the sight of
them put out the flame that had leapt for once from
stolid Hugh, and he took her hand in his own great
soothing grasp.
“Come and sit down," he said, “and tell me all
about it. Have I ever taken anybody's part against
you, Morna, that you should think me likely to be-
gin now?”
“No; but you would if you thought they were right
and I was wrong.”
Hugh reflected until they reached the garden-seat
upon the lawn.
“Well, not openly, at all events,” said he; “and
192


Friends in Need
not under any circumstances I can conceive in which
Mrs. Venables was the other person."
“But she isn't the only other person; that is just it.
Oh, Hugh, you do like Rachel, don't you?”
“I do,” he said emphatically. “But surely you
haven't been quarrelling with her?”
“No, indeed! And that is exactly why I have quar-
relled with Mrs. Venables, because I wouldn't refuse
to go to the dinner-party at Normanthorpe to-night!”
Woodgate was naturally nonplussed.
“Wouldn't refuse?” he echoed.
“Yes. She actually asked me not to go; and now
I do believe she has gone driving round to ask every-
body else!”
Woodgate's amazement ended in a guffaw.
“And that is what you quarrelled about!” he roared.
“The woman must be mad. What reason did she
give? ”
“She had a reason, dear.”
“But not a good one! There can be no excuse for
such an action, let alone a good reason!”
Morna looked at her husband with sidelong anxiety,
wondering whether he would say as much when he
had heard all. She was sure enough of him. But as yet
they had never differed on a point that mattered, and
the one which was coming mattered infinitely to Morna.
“Hugh,” she began, “ do you remember being with
Rachel yesterday at Hornby, when she was introduced
to Sir Baldwin Gibson?”
193


Friends in Need
tian would, I should hope! But do you mean to tell
me that Mrs. Steel has been tried for something?”
“ Yes; and by Justice Gibson!”
“Poor thing,” said Hugh Woodgate, after a pause.
Morna took his hand.
“My dear, she is, or rather she was, Mrs. Minchin!”
“What! The woman who was tried for murdering
her husband?”
“Yes—and acquitted.”
“Good heavens!” exclaimed the vicar, and for a
minute that was all. “Well,” he continued, “ I didn't
read the case, and I am glad that I didn't, but I remem-
ber, of course, what was said about it at the time. But
what does it matter what is said? I imagine the jury
knew what they were about; they listened to the evi-
dence for a week, I believe, which other people read in
a few minutes. Of course they knew best! But how
long have you known this, Morna?”
“Never until this afternoon; there was no reason
why I should.”
“Of course there was not.”
“Then you agree with me, Hugh?”
And Morna was transfigured.
“Of course I agree with you! But I want to know
more. Do you mean to tell me that a woman of ed-
ucation and ability, who calls herself a Christian, like
Mrs. Venables, has actually backed out of this dinner-
party on this account, and asked others to do the
sane?”
195


The Shadow of the Rope
“She certainly asked me, point-blank," said Morna.
"And when I refused, and persisted in my refusal, she
flounced out in a rage, and must have cut you dead
next minute."
“ Incredible!” exclaimed Woodgate. “I mean, she
must have had some further reason.”
“Oh, but she had! I forgot to tell you in my anxi-
ety to know what you thought. She came to me
straight from Normanthorpe, where they had insulted
her as she had never been insulted in her life be-
fore!”
“Who? Steel or his wife?”
"Mr. Steel, I fancy. Mrs. Venables had no name
bad enough for him, but she brought it on herself, and
I think more of him than I ever did before. You know
that Mrs. Vinson, the Invernesses' new agent's wife?”
“I do. Langholm took her in to dinner the night
we dined at Upthorpe, and she was in the offing yester-
day when Mrs. Steel was talking to the judge.”
"Exactly! It appears that it was Mrs. Vinson who
first suspected something, the very night you mention;
and yesterday her suspicions were confirmed to her
own satisfaction. At all events she felt justified in men-
tioning them to Mrs. Venables, who instantly drove
over to ask Rachel to her face if there was any truth in
the rumour that she was or had been Mrs.. Minchin."
“ Well?”
“Rachel told her it was perfectly true.”
“ Good!”
196


The Shadow of the Rope
“In about three minutes," replied Rachel, dryly,
with some pride but no triumph in her tone.
Morna had not spoken. Now she took a quick step
forward, her eyes brimming. But Rachel held up her
hand.
“You are sure you realise who I am?”
“ Yes, Rachel.”
“Rachel Minchin!” added Rachel, harshly. “The
notorious Mrs. Minchin—the Mrs. Minchin whom Mr.
Venables would have come to see hanged!”
“Hush, Rachel, hush!”
“Then be honest with me-mind, honest—not kind!
You would not have said what Mrs. Venables said to
me; she said that all the world believed me guilty.
You would not have said that, Morna; but are you
sure you would not have said it in your heart? Can
you look me in the face and tell me you don't believe
it, like all the rest of the world?”
There was no faltering of the firm sweet voice; it
was only unutterably sad.
And Morna answered it only with a sob, as she flung
her arms round Rachel's neck, while her husband wait-
ed with outstretched hand.
198


CHAPTER XVIII
“THEY WHICH WERE BIDDEN"
The rose-covered cottage of Charles Langholm's
dreams, which could not have come true in a more
charming particular, stood on a wooded hill at the back
of a village some three miles from Normanthorpe. It
was one of two cottages under the same tiled roof, and
in the other there lived an admirable couple who sup-
plied all material wants of the simple life which the
novelist led when at work. In his idle intervals the
place knew him not; a nomadic tendency was given free
play, and the man was a wanderer on the face of Eu-
rope. But he wandered less than he had done from
London, finding, in this remote but fragrant corner of
the earth, that peace which twenty years of a strenuous
manhood had taught him to value more than down-
right happiness.
Its roses were not the only merit of this ideal retreat,
though in the summer months they made it difficult
for one with eyes and nostrils to appreciate the others.
There was a delightful room running right through the
cottage; and it was here that Langholm worked, ate,
smoked, read, and had his daily being; his bath was
199


The Shadow of the Rope
in the room adjoining, and his bed in another adjoining
that. Of the upper floor he made no use; it was filled
with the neglected furniture of a more substantial es-
tablishment, and Langholm seldom so much as set foot
upon the stairs. The lower rooms were very simply
furnished. There was a really old oak bureau, and
some solid, comfortable chairs. The pictures were
chiefly photographs of other writers. There were bet-
ter pictures deep in dust upstairs. .
An artist in temperament, if not in attainment, Lang-
holm had of late years found the ups and downs of his
own work supply all the excitement that was necessary
to his life; it was only when the work was done that
his solitude had oppressed him; but neither the one
nor the other had been the case of late weeks. His new
book had been written under the spur of an external
stimulus; it had not written itself, like all the more
reputable members of the large but short-lived family
to which it belonged. Langholm had not felt lonely
in the breathing spaces between the later chapters.
On the contrary, he would walk up and down among
his roses with the animated face of one on the happy
heights of intercourse with a kindred spirit, when in
reality he was quite alone. But the man wrote novels,
and withal believed in them at the time of writing. It
is true that on one occasion, when the Steels came to
tea, the novelist walked his garden with the self-same
radiant face with which he had lately taken to walking
it alone; but that also was natural enough.
200


“ They Which Were Bidden ”
The change came on the very day he finished his
book, when Langholm made himself presentable and
rode off to the garden-party at Hornby Manor in spirits
worthy of the occasion. About seven of the same
evening he dismounted heavily in the by-lane outside
the cottage, and pushed his machine through the
wicket, a different man. A detail declared his depres-
sion to the woman next door, who was preparing him a
more substantial meal than Langholm ever thought of
ordering for himself; he went straight through to his
roses without changing his party coat for the out-
at-elbow Norfolk jacket in which he had spent that
summer and the last.
The garden behind the two cottages was all Lang-
holm's. The whole thing, levelled, would not have
made a single lawn-tennis court, nor yet a practice
pitch of proper length. Yet this little garden con-
tained almost everything that a garden need have.
There were tall pines among the timber to one side,
and through these set the sun, so that on the hottest
days the garden was in sufficient shadow by the time
the morning's work was done. There was a little grass-
plot, large enough for a basket-chair and a rug. There
was a hedge of Penzance sweet-briar opposite the back-
door and the window at which Langholm wrote, and
yet this hedge broke down in the very nick and place
to give the lucky writer a long glimpse across a green
valley, with dim woods upon the opposite hill. And
then there were the roses, planted by the last cottager
201


The Shadow of the Rope
-a retired gardener—a greater artist than his suc-
cessor—a man who knew what roses were!
Over the house clambered a William Allen Richard-
son and two Gloires de Dijon, these last a-blowing, the
first still resting from a profuse yield in June; in the
south-east corner, a Crimson Rambler was at its ripe
red height; and Caroline Testout, Margaret Dickson,
La France, Madame Lambard, and Maman Cochet,
blushed from pale pink to richest red, or remained cold-
ly but beautifully white, at the foot of the Penzance
briars. Langholm had not known one rose from anoth-
er when he came to live among this galaxy; now they
were his separate, familiar, individual friends, each with
its own character in his eyes, its own charm for him;
and the man's soul was the sweeter for each summer
spent in their midst. But to-night they called to closed
nostrils and blind eyes. And the evening sun, redden-
ing the upper stems of the pines, and warming the mel-
low tiles of his dear cottage, had no more to say to
Langholm's spirit than his beloved roses.
The man had emerged from the dreamy, artistic,
æsthetic existence into which he had drifted through
living alone amid so much simple beauty; he was in
real, human, haunting trouble, and the manlier man
for it already.
Could he be mistaken after all? No; the more he
pondered, the more convinced he felt. Everything
pointed to the same conclusion, beginning with that
first dinner-party at Upthorpe, and that first conver-
202


“ They Which Were Bidden ”
Langholm had a fatal knack of overlooking the lady
whom he had taken in to dinner at Upthorpe Hall, and
scarcely noticed at Hornby Manor. Cocksure as he
himself was of the significance of that which he had
seen with his own eyes, the observer flattered himself
that he was the only real one present; remembered the
special knowledge which he had to assist his vision;
and relied properly enough upon the silence of Sir
Baldwin Gibson.
The greater the secret, however, the more piquant
the situation for one who was in it; and there were
moments of a sleepless night in which Langholm found
nothing new to regret. But he was in a quandary none
the less. He could scarcely meet Mrs. Steel again
without a word about the prospective story, which they
had so often discussed together, and upon which he
was at last free to embark; nor could he touch upon that
theme without disclosing the new knowledge which
would burn him until he did. Charles Langholm and
Rachel Steel had two or three qualities in common;
an utter inability to pretend was one, if you do not hap-
pen to think it a defect.
As a rule when he had finished a rapid bit of writing,
Langholm sat down to correct, and a depressing task
his spent brain always found it; but for once he let it
beat him altogether. After a morning's tussle with one
unfortunate chapter, the desperate author sent off the
rest in their sins, and rode his bicycle to abolish
thought. But that mild pastime fell lamentably short
205


“They Which Were Bidden ”
lain of these romances. The likeliest of the lot was the
idea that the pair had really met abroad, at some out-of-
the-way place, where Rachel had been in hiding from
the world, and that in her despair of receiving common
justice from her kind, she had accepted the rich man
without telling him who she was. His subsequent en-
lightenment was Langholm's explanation of Steel's
coldness towards his wife.
He wondered if it was the kind of coldness that would
ever be removed; if Steel believed her guilty, it never
would. Langholm would not have admitted it, was not
even aware of it in his own introspective mind, but he
almost hoped that Steel was not thoroughly convinced
of his wife's innocence.
The night of the dinner-party was so fine and the
roads so clean that Langholm went off on his bicycle
once more, making an incongruous figure in his dress-
suit, but pedalling sedately to keep cool. Fortune,
however, was against him, for they had begun clipping
those northern hedgerows, and an ominous bumping
upon a perfectly flat road led to the discovery of a
puncture a long mile from Normanthorpe. Thence
onward the unhappy cyclist had to choose between
running beside his machine and riding on the rims, and
between the two expedients arrived at last both very
hot and rather late. But he thought he must be very
late; for he neither met, followed, nor was followed by
any vehicle whatsoever in the drive; and the door did
207


“ They Which Were Bidden ”
Langholm, you were almost at her heels when she was
introduced to the old judge yesterday?"
“I was.”
“Have you guessed who she was-before she mar-
ried me—or has anybody told you?”
“I have guessed."
Steel stood silent for an instant, his eyes resting in
calm scrutiny upon the other, his mouth as firm and
fixed, his face fresh as a young man's, his hair like spun
silver in the electric light. Langholm looked upon the
man who was looking upon him, and he could not hate
him as he would.
"And do you still desire to dine with us?” inquired
his host at last.
"I don't want to be in the way,” faltered Langholm,
“on a painful "
“Oh, never mind that!” cried Steel. “Are you quite
sure you don't want to cut our acquaintance?”
“You know I don't,” said Langholm, bluntly.
“ Then come in, pray, and take us as we are.”
“One moment, Steel! All this is inconceivable; do
you mean to say that your guests have thrown you
over on account of-of- ”.
“My wife having been a certain Mrs. Minchin before
she changed her name to Steel! Yes, every one of
them, except our vicar and his wife, who are real good
friends.”
"I am another," said Langholm through his big
moustache.
209


The Shadow of the Rope
“The very servants are giving notice, one by one!"
“I am her servant, too!” muttered Langholm, as
Steel stood aside to let him pass out first; but this time
it was through his teeth, though from his heart, and
the words were only audible to himself.
210


CHAPTER XIX
RACHEL'S CHAMPION
The immediate ordeal proved less trying than Lang-
holm was prepared to find it. His vivid imagination
had pictured the long table, laid for six-and-twenty,
with four persons huddled at one end; but the tele-
grams had come in time to have the table reduced to
its normal size, and Langholm found a place set for
him between Mrs. Woodgate and Mrs. Steel. He was
only embarrassed when Rachel rose and looked him in
the eyes before holding out her hand.
"Have you heard?” she asked him, in a voice as
cold as her marble face, but similarly redeemed and
animated by its delicate and distant scorn.
“Yes," answered Langholm, sadly; "yes, I have
heard.”
“And yet
He interrupted her in another tone.
“I know what you are going to say! I give you
warning, Mrs. Steel, I won't listen to it. No' and yets'
for me; remember the belief I had, long before I knew
anything at all! It ought not to be a whit stronger for
what I guessed yesterday for myself, and what your
2II


Rachel's Champion
There was no effort to ignore the absorbing topic
before the butler and his satellites, but the line was
drawn in the right place, excluding as it did any refer-
ence to the rout of Mrs. Venables, and indeed all de-
tails whatsoever.
The butler, however, and in a less degree the foot-
men, presented a rather interesting study during the
course of this momentous meal, had the professional
observer present been only a little less concerned for
his hostess. The butler was a pompous but capable
creature, whom Steel had engaged when he bought the
place. Though speedily reduced to a more respectful
servitude than he was accustomed to, the man had long
since ceased to complain of his situation, which carried
with it the highest wages and all arbitrary powers over
his subordinates. On the steps, at her deferred de-
parture, Mrs. Venables had screamed the secret of his
mistress's identity into the butler's ear. The butler had
risen with dignity to the occasion, and, after a brief
interview, resigned on the spot with all his men. The
mild interest was in the present behaviour of these
gentry, which was a rich blend of dignity and depres-
sion, and betrayed a growing doubt as to whether the
sinking ship, that they had been so eager to abandon,
was really sinking after all.
Certainly the master's manner could not have been
very different at the head of his table as originally laid.
It was not festive, it was neither unnaturally jocular
nor showy in any way, but it was delightfully confident
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Rachel's Champion
and her counsel was inclined to bully them; it was
delightful to see the fatherly consideration that they
received as compensation from the bench."
Langholm's breath was taken away. Here was an
end to the likeliest theory that he had evolved that
morning among his roses. Steel had not married his
wife in ignorance of her life's tragedy; he had been
present, and probably fallen in love with her, at her
trial! Then why did he never behave as though he
were in love? And why must he expatiate upon the
judge's kindness to the female witnesses, instead of on
the grand result of the trial over which he had presid-
ed? Did Steel himself entertain the faintest doubt
about the innocence of his wife, whose trial he had
heard, and whom he had married thereafter within a
few months at the most? Langholm's brain buzzed,
even while he listened to what Hugh Woodgate was
saying.
"I am not surprised,” remarked the vicar. “I re-
member once hearing that Sir Baldwin Gibson and
Lord Edgeware were the two fairest judges on the
bench; and why, do you suppose? Because they are
both old athletes and Old Blues, trained from small
boys to give their opponents every possible chance!”
Steel nodded an understanding assent. Langholm,
however, who was better qualified to appreciate the
vicar's point, took no notice of it.
“If it was not the judge,” said he, “who in the world
is it who has sprung this mine? I saw them meet, and
215


The Shadow of the Rope
as a matter of fact I did guess the truth. But I had
special reasons. I had thought, God forgive me, of
making something out of your wife's case, Steel, little
dreaming it was hers, though I knew it had no ordinary
fascination for her. But no one else can have known
that.”
“You talked it over with her, however?”
And Steel had both black eyes upon the novelist,
who made his innocent admission with an embarrass-
ment due entirely to their unnecessarily piercing scru-
tiny.
“You talked it over with her,” repeated Steel, this
time in dry statement of fact, “ at least on one occa-
sion, in the presence of a lady who had a prior claim
upon your conversation. That lady was Mrs. Vinson,
and it is she who ought to have a millstone hanged
about her neck, and be cast into the sea. Don't look
as though you deserved the same fate, Langholm! It
would have been better, perhaps, if you had paid more
attention to Vinson's wife and less to mine; but she is
the last woman in the world to blame you—naturally!
And now, if you are ready, we will join them, Wood-
gate.”
Sensitive as all his tribe, and himself both gentle by
nature and considerate of others according to his lights,
which thoughtlessness might turn down or passion
blur, but which burnt steadily and brightly in the main,
Charles Langholm felt stung to the soul by the last few
words, in which Hugh Woodgate noticed nothing
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The Shadow of the Rope
should like to know? And what does it matter what
they think or say? A hole-and-corner district like this
is not the world!”
Rachel shook her head sadly; her beautiful eyes were
dry now, and only the more lustrous for the tears that
they had shed. Langholm saw nothing else.
" But it is the world,” she asserted. “It is part of
the world, and the same thing would happen in any
other part. It would happen in London, and every-
where else as soon as I became known. And hence-
forth I mean to be known!” cried Rachel, wilfully;
" there shall be no more hiding who I was, or am; that
is the way to make them think the worst when they
find out. But is it not disgraceful? I was acquitted,
and yet I am to be treated as though I had been
merely pardoned. Is that not a disgrace to common
humanity ?”
“Humanity is not so common as you imagine,” re-
marked Steel.
“ It is un-Christian!” cried Hugh Woodgate, with
many repetitions of the epithet.
Langholm said nothing. His eyes never left Ra-
chel's face. Neither did she meet them for an instant,
nor had she a look for Hugh Woodgate or even for his
wife. It was to her husband that Rachel had spoken
every word; it was nearest him she stood, in his face
only that she gazed.
· “ Are you going to let the disgrace continue? ” she
asked him fiercely.
218


Rachel's Champion
quick, short step in his direction. “You, with your
plots and your problems that nobody can solve; don't
you think you could unravel this one for me?”
Her eyes were radiant now, and their radiance all
for him. Langholm felt the heart swimming in his
body, the brain in his head. A couple of long-legged
strides to meet her nine-tenths of the way, and he had
taken Rachel's hand before her husband and her friends.
“ Before God,” said Langholm, “ I'll try!”
Their hands met only to part. There was a sardonic
laugh from Rachel's husband.
“Do you forbid me?” demanded Langholm, turning
upon him.
“ Far from it,” said Steel. “I shall be most inter-
ested to see you go to work.”
“Is that a challenge?”
The two men faced each other, while the third man
and the women looked on. It had sounded like a
challenge to all but the vicar, though neither of the
others had had time to think so before they heard the
word and recognised its justice.
“ If you like,” said Steel, indifferently.
“I accept it as such,” rejoined Langholm, dogging
the other with his eyes. “And find him I will—the
guilty man-if I never write another line-and if the
villain is still alive!”
221


CHAPTER XX
MORE HASTE
THERE are eminent men of action who can acquit
themselves with equal credit upon the little field of let-
ters, as some of the very best books of late years go to
prove. The man of letters, on the other hand, capable
of cutting a respectable figure in action, is, one fears,
a much rarer type. Langholm was essentially a man
of letters. He was at his best among his roses and his
books, at his worst in unforeseen collision with the
rougher realities of life. But give him time, and he
was not the man to run away because his equipment for
battle was as short as his confidence in himself; and
perhaps such courage as he possessed was not the less
courageous for the crust of cowardice (mostly moral)
through which it always had to break. Langholm had
one other qualification for the quest to which he had
committed himself, but for which he was as thorough-
ly unsuited by temperament as by the whole tenor of
his solitary life. In addition to an ingenious imagina-
tion (a quality with its own defects, as the sequel will
show), he had that capacity for taking pains which
has no disadvantageous side, though in Langholm's
case, for one, it was certainly not a synonym for genius.
It was 3.45 on the Monday afternoon when he
222


More Haste
alighted at King's Cross, having caught the 9.30 from
Northborough after a early adieu to William Allen
Richardson and the rest. Langholm made sure of the
time before getting into his hansom at the terminus.
“Drive hard,” he said, “ to the Capital and Counties
Bank in Oxford Street.”
And he was there some minutes before the hour.
“I want to know my exact balance, if it is not too
much trouble to look it up before you close.”
A slip of paper was soon put into Langholm's hand,
and at a glance he flushed to the hat with pleasure and
surprise, and so regained his cab. “ The Cadogan Ho-
tel, in Sloane Street,” he cried through the trap; "and
there's no hurry, you can go your own pace.”
Nor was there any further anxiety in Langholm's
heart. His balance was a clear hundred more than he
had expected to find it, and his whole soul sang the
praises of a country life. Unbusinesslike and unme-
thodical as he was, in everything but the preparation of
MS., such a discovery could never have been made
in town, where Langholm's expenditure had marched
arm-in-arm with his modest earnings.
"And it can again,” he said recklessly to himself, as
he decided on the best hotel in the field of his investi-
gations, instead of lodgings; "thank God, I have
enough to run this racket till the end of the year at
least! If I can't strike the trail by then- ”.
He lapsed into dear reminiscence and dearer day-
dreams, their common scene some two hundred miles
223


The Shadow of the Rope
north; but to realise his lapse was to 'recover from it
promptly. Langholm glanced at himself in the little
mirror. His was an honest face, and it was an honest
part that he must play, or none at all. He leant over
the apron and interested himself in the London life
that was so familiar to him still. It was as though he
had not been absent above a day, yet his perceptions
were sharpened by his very absence of so many weeks.
The wood pavement gave off a strong but not unpleas-
ant scent in the heavy August heat; it was positively
dear to the old Londoner's nostrils. The further he
drove upon his south-westerly course, the emptier were
the well-known thoroughfares. St. James's Street
might have been closed to traffic; the clubs in Pall Mall
were mostly shut. On the footways strolled the folk
whom one only sees there in August and September,
the entire families from the country, the less affluent
American, guide-book in hand. Here and there was a
perennial type, the pale actor with soft hat and blue-
black chin, the ragged sloucher from park to park.
Langholm could have foregathered with one and all,
such was the strange fascination of the town for one
who was twice the man among his northern roses. But
that is the kind of mistress that London is to those who
have once felt her spell; you may forget her by the year,
but the spell lies lurking in the first whiff of the wood
pavement, the first flutter of the evening paper on the
curb; and even in the cab you wonder how you have
borne existence elsewhere.
224


More Haste
The hotel was very empty, and Langholm found not
only the best of rooms at his disposal, but that flatter-
ing quality of attention which awaits the first comer
when few come at all. He refreshed himself with tea
and a bath, and then set out to reconnoitre the scene
of the already half-forgotten murder. He had a vague
though sanguine notion that his imaginative intuition
might at once perceive some possibility which had nev-
er dawned upon the academic intelligence of the police.
Of course he remembered the name of the street, and
it was easily found. Nor had Langholm any difficulty
in discovering the house, though he had forgotten the
number. There were very few houses in the street,
and only one of them was empty and to let. It was
plastered with the bills of various agents, and Lang-
holm noted down the nearest of these, whose office was
in King's Road. He would get an order to view the
house, and would explore every inch of it that very
night. But his bath and his tea had made away with
the greater part of an hour; it was six o'clock before
Langholm reached the house-agent's, and the office
was already shut.
He dined quietly at his hotel, feeling none the less
that he had made a beginning, and spent the evening
looking up Chelsea friends, who were likely to be more
conversant than himself with all the circumstances of
Mr. Minchin's murder and his wife's arrest; but who,
as might have been expected, were one and all from
home.
225


The Shadow of the Rope
In the morning the order of his plans were some-
what altered. It was essential that he should have those
circumstances at his finger's ends, at least so far as
they had transpired in open court. Langholm had
read the trial at the time with the inquisitive but imper-
sonal interest which such a case inspires in the average
man. Now he must study it in a very different spirit,
and for the nonce he repaired betimes to the news-
paper room at the British Museum.
By midday he had mastered most details of the com-
plex case, and made a note of every name and address
which had found their way into the newspaper reports.
But there was one name which did not appear in any
account. Langholm sought it in bound volume after
bound volume, until even the long-suffering attendants,
who trundle the great tomes from their shelves on trol-
lies, looked askance at the wanton reader who filled
in a new form every five or ten minutes. But the read-
er's face shone with a brighter light at each fresh fail-
ure. Why had the name he wanted never come up in
open court? Where was the evidence of the man who
had made all the mischief between the Minchins?
Langholm intended having first the one and then the
other; already he was on the spring to a first con-
clusion. With a caution, however, which did infinite
credit to one of his temperament, the amateur detective
determined to look a little further before leaping even
in his own mind.
Early in the afternoon he was back in Chelsea, mak-
226


More Haste
ing fraudulent representations to the house-agent near
the Vestry Hall.
“Not more than ninety,” repeated that gentleman,
as he went through his book, and read out particulars
of several houses at about that rental; but the house
which Langholm burned to see over was not among
the number.
“I want a quiet street," said the wily writer, and
named the one in which it stood. “Have you noth-
ing there?”
“I have one,” said the agent with reserve, “and it's
only seventy.”
“ The less the better,” cried Langholm, light-heart-
edly. “I should like to see that one.”
The house-agent hesitated, finally looking Langholm
in the face.
“ You may as well know first as last,” said he," for
we have had enough trouble about that house. It was
let last year for ninety; we're asking seventy because
it is the house in which Mr. Minchin was shot dead.
Still want to see it?” inquired the house-agent, with a
wry smile.
It was all Langholm could do to conceal his eager-
ness, but in the end he escaped with several orders to
view, and the keys of the house of houses in his pocket.
No caretaker could be got to live in it; the agent seemed
half-surprised at Langholm's readiness to see over it
all alone.
About an hour later the novelist stood at a door
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The Shadow of the Rope
whose street and number were not inscribed upon any
of the orders obtained by fraud from the King's Road
agent. It was a door that needed painting, and there
was a conspicuous card in the ground-floor window.
Langholm tugged twice in his impatience at the old-
fashioned bell. If his face had been alight before, it
was now on fire, for by deliberate steps he had arrived
at the very conclusion to which he had been inclined
to jump. At last came a slut of the imperishable
lodging-house type.
“Is your mistress in?”
“No."
“When do you expect her?”
“Not before night.”
“Any idea what time of night?"
The untidy child had none, but at length admitted
that she had orders to keep the fire in for the landlady's
supper. Langholm drew his own deduction. It would
be little use his returning before nine o'clock. Five
hours to wait! He made one more cast before he
went.
“Have you been here long, my girl?”
“Going on three months."
“But your mistress has been here some years?"
“I believe so.”
“ Are you her only servant?”
“ Yes.”
And five hours to wait for more!
It seemed an infinity to Langholm as he turned
228


More Haste
away. But at all events the house had not changed
hands. The woman he would eventually see was the
woman who had given invaluable evidence at the Old
Bailey.
229


CHAPTER XXI
WORSE SPEED
LANGHOLM returned to his hotel and wrote a few lines
to Rachel. It had been arranged that he was to report
progress direct to her, and as often as possible; but it
was a very open arrangement, in which Steel had sar-
donically concurred. Yet, little as there was to say,
and for all his practice with the pen, it took Langholm
the best part of an hour to write that he believed he
had already obtained a most important clue, which
the police had missed in the most incredible manner,
though it had been under their noses all the time. So
incredible did it appear, however, even to himself, when
written down, that Langholm decided not to post this
letter until after his interview with the Chelsea land-
lady.
To kill the interval, he went for his dinner to the
single club to which he still belonged. It was a Bohe-
mian establishment off the Strand, and its time-
honoured name was the best thing about it in this
member's eyes. He was soon cursing himself for com-
ing near the place while engaged upon his great and
sacred quest. Not a “clubbable” person himself, as
230


Worse Speed
that epithet was understood in this its home, Lang-
holm was not a little surprised when half-a-dozen men
(most of whom he barely knew) rose to greet him on
his appearance in the smoking-room. But even with
their greetings came the explanation, to fill the new-
comer with a horror too sudden for concealment.
It appeared that Mrs. Steel's identity with the whi-
lom Mrs. Minchin had not only leaked out in Delver-
ton. Langholm gathered that is was actually in one
of that morning's half-penny papers, at which he had
not found time to glance in his hot-foot ardour for the
chase. For the moment he was shocked beyond
words, and not a little disgusted, to discover the cause
of his own temporary importance.
“Talk of the devil!” cried a comparative crony.
“I was just telling them that you must be the well-
know novelist ' in the case, as your cottage was some-
where down there. Have you really seen anything of
the lady?”
“Seen anything of her?” echoed a journalist to
whom Langholm had never spoken in his life. “Why,
can't you see that he bowled her out himself and came
up straight to sell the news?”
Langholm took his comparative crony by the arm.
“Come in and dine with me,” he said; “ I can't stand
this! Yes, yes, I know her well,” he whispered, as
they went round the screen which was the only par-
tition between pipes and plates; “but let me see what
that scurrilous rag has to say while you order. I'll do
231


The Shadow of the Rope
the rest, and you had better make it a bottle of cham-
pagne."
The “scurrilous rag,” had less to say than Lang-
holm had been led to expect. He breathed again when
he had read the sequence of short but pithy paragraphs.
Mrs. Minchin's new name was not given after all, nor
that of her adopted district; while Langholm himself
only slunk into print as “a well-known novelist who,
oddly enough, was among the guests, and eye-witness
of a situation after his own heart.” The district might
have been any one of the many manufacturing centres
in “the largest of shires,” which was the one geo-
graphical clue vouchsafed by the half-penny paper.
Langholm began to regret his readiness to admit the
impeachment with which he had been saluted; it was
only in his own club that he would have been pounced
upon as the “ well-known novelist;" but it was some
comfort to reflect that even in his own club his exact
address was not known, for his solicitor paid his sub-
scription and sent periodically for his letters. Charles
Langholm had not set up as hermit by halves; he had
his own reasons for being thorough there. And it
was more inspiriting than the champagne to feel that
no fresh annoyance was likely to befall the Steels
through him.
“It's not so bad as I thought,” said Langholm,
throwing the newspaper aside as his companion, whose
professional name was Valentine Venn, finished with
the wine-card.
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Worse Speed
“Dear boy,” said Venn, “it took a pal to spot you.
Alone I did it! But I wish you weren't so dark about
that confounded cottage of yours; the humble mummer
would fain gather the crumbs that fall from the rich
scribe's table, especially when he's out of a shop, which
is the present condition of affairs. Besides, we might
collaborate in a play, and make more money apiece in
three weeks than either of us earns in a fat year. That
little story of yours-
“Never mind my little stories,” said Langholm, has-
tily; “I've just finished a long one, and the very
thought of fiction makes me sick.”
“Well, you've got facts to turn to for a change, and
for once they really do seem as strange as the other
thing. Lucky bargee! Have you had her under the
microscope all the summer? Ye gods, what a part
of Mrs. ”
“Drink up,” said Langholm, grimly, as the cham-
pagne made an opportune appearance; “ and now tell
me who that fellow is who's opening the piano, and
since when you've started a musical dinner.”
The big room that the screen divided had a grand
piano in the dining half, for use upon those Saturday
evenings for which the old club was still famous, but
rarely touched during the working days of the week.
Yet even now a dark and cadaverous young man was
raising the top of the piano, slowly and laboriously,
as though it were too heavy for him. Valentine Venn
looked over his shoulder.
233


Worse Speed
Langholm, as the young fellow returned to the piano
with rather a sad shake of the head.
“What!” cried Venn, below his breath: “ do you
mean to say you are a friend of Mrs. Minchin's, or
whatever her name is now, and that you never heard
of Severino?”
"No," replied Langholm, his heart in an instanta-
neous flutter. “Who is he?”
“ The man she wanted to nurse the night her husband
was murdered—the cause of the final row between
them! His name was kept out of the papers, but that's
the man.”
Langholm sat back in his chair. To have spent a
summer's day in stolid search for traces of this man,
only to be introduced to the man himself by purest
chance in the evening! It was, indeed, difficult to
believe; nor was persuasion on the point followed by
the proper degree of gratitude in Langholm for a
transcendent stroke of fortune. In fact, he almost re-
sented his luck; he would so much rather have stood
indebted to his skill. And there were other causes for
disappointment, as in an instant there were things more
incredible to Langholm than the everyday coincidence
of a chance meeting with the one person whom one
desires to meet
“So that's the man!” he echoed, in a tone that might
have told his companion something, only the fingers
which Langholm had feared to crush had already fallen
upon the keys, with the strong, tender, unerring touch
235


Worse Speed
him up here; and I'll introduce you to him, if you like,
after dinner.”
“ Thank you,” said Langholm, after some little hes-
itation; “ as a matter of fact, I should like it very much.
Venn,” he added, leaning right across the little table,
“I know the woman well! I believe in her absolute-
ly, on every point, and I mean to make her neighbours
and mine do the same. That is my object-don't give
it away!"
“Dear boy, these lips are sealed,” said Valentine
Venn.
But a very little conversation with the doctor sufficed
to satisfy Langholm's curiosity, and to remove from his
mind the wild prepossession which he had allowed to
grow upon it with every hour of that wasted day. The
doctor was also one of the Bohemian colony in Chelsea,
and by no means loth to talk about a tragedy of which
he had exceptional knowledge, since he himself had
been one of the medical witnesses at each successive
stage of the investigations. He had also heard, on the
other side of the screen, that Langholm was the novelist
referred to in a paragraph which had of course had a
special interest for him; and, as was only fair, Lang-
holm was interrogated in his turn. What was less fair,
and indeed ungrateful in a marked degree, was the way
in which the original questioner parried all questions
put to himself; and he very soon left the club. On his
way out, he went into the writing-room, and, tearing
into little pieces a letter which he had written that after-
237


Worse Speed
“He knows her, do you tell me? He knows Mrs.
Minchin— "
“Or whatever her name is now; yes; so he says.”
“ And what is her name?”
“He won't say."
“Nor where she lives?”
“No.”
“ Then where does he live?”
“None of us know that either; he's the darkest horse
in the club.”
Venn agreed with this speaker, some little bitterness
in his tone. Another stood up for Langholm.
“We should be as dark,” said he,“ if we had married
Gaiety choristers, and they had left us, and we went in
dread of their return!”
They sum up the life tragedies pretty pithily, in these
clubs.
“He was always a silly ass about women,” rejoined
Langholm's critic, summing up the man. “So it's
Mrs. Minchin now!”
The name acted like magic upon young Severino.
His attention had wandered. In an instant it was
more eager than before.
“If you don't know where he lives in the country,"
he burst out," where is he staying in town?”
“We don't know that either."
“Then I mean to find out!”.
And the pale musician rushed from the room, in pur-
suit of the man who had been all day pursuing him.
239


The Darkest Hour
Langholm, however, had enough lightness of tem-
perament to abandon an idea as readily as he formed
one, and his late suspicion was already driven to the
four winds. He only hoped he had not shown what
was in his mind at the club. Langholm was a just man,
and he honestly regretted the injustice that he had
done, even in his own heart, and for ever so few hours,
to a thoroughly innocent man.
And all up Piccadilly this man was sitting within a
few inches of him, watching his face with a passionate
envy, and plucking up courage to speak; he only did
so at Hyde Park Corner, where an intervening passen-
ger got down.
Langholm was sufficiently startled at the sound of
his own name, breaking in upon the reflections indi-
cated, but to find at his elbow the very face which was
in his mind was to lose all power of immediate reply.
"My name is Severino,” explained the other. "I
was introduced to you an hour or two ago at the club."
“Ah, to be sure!” cried Langholm, recovering.
“Odd thing, though, for we must have left about the
same time, and I never saw you till this moment."
Severino took the vacant place by Langholm's side.
“Mr. Langholm,” said he, a tremor in his soft voice,
“I have a confession to make to you. I followed you
from the club!”
“You followed me?”
Langholm could not help the double emphasis; to
him it seemed a grotesque turning of the tables, a too
241


The Shadow of the Rope
poetically just ending to that misspent day. It was
all that he could do to repress a smile.
“Yes, I followed you,” the young Italian repeated,
with his taking accent, in his touching voice; " and
I beg your pardon for doing so—though I would do the
same again—I will tell you why. I thought that you
were talking about me while I was strumming to them
at the club. It is possible, of course, that I was quite
mistaken; but when you went out I stopped at once
and asked questions. And they told me you were a
friend of—a great friend of mine—of Mrs. Minchin!”
“It is true enough,” said Langholm, after a pause.
“Well?”
“She was a very great friend of mine,” repeated Sev-
erino. “That was all.”
And he sighed.
“So I have heard,” said Langholm, with sympathy.
“I can well believe it, for I might almost say the same
of her myself.”
The 'bus toiled on beside the park. The two long
lines of lights rose gently ahead until they almost met,
and the two men watched them as they spoke.
“ Until to-day,” continued Severino, “ I did not know
whether she was dead or alive.”
“She is both alive and well.”
“And married again?”
“And married again.”
There was a long pause. The park ended first.
“I want you to do me a great favour,” said Severino
242


The Shadow of the Rope
“My dear fellow," he said, “I will let her know. No,
no, not that, of course! But I will write to her at once
-to-night! Will that not do?”
Severino thanked him, with a heavy sigh. “Oh,
don't get down,” he added as Langholm rose. "I
won't talk about her any more."
“I am staying in this street,” explained Langholm,
guardedly.
"And these are my lodgings,” rejoined the other,
pulling a letter from his pocket, and handing the en-
velope to Langholm. “Let me hear from you, for
pity's sake, as soon as you hear from her!”
Langholm sauntered on the pavement until the om-
nibus which he had left was no longer distinguishable
from the general traffic of the thoroughfare. The ad-
dress on the envelope was that of the lodging-house
at which he was to have called that night. He was
glad now that his luck had not left him to find Severino
for himself; the sense of fatuity would have been even
keener than it was. In a way he now felt drawn to the
poor, frank boy who had so lately been the object of
his unjust and unfounded suspicions. There was a new
light in which to think of him, a new bond between
them, a new spring of sympathy or jealousy, if not of
both. But Langholm was not in London to show sym-
pathy or friendship for any man. He was in London
simply and solely upon his own great quest, in which
no man must interrupt him. That was why he had
been so guarded about his whereabouts—though not
244


The Darkest Hour
guarded enough—and why he watched the omnibus
out of sight before entering his hotel. The old Lon-
doner had forgotten how few places there are at which
one can stay in Sloane Street.
A bad twenty-four hours was in store for him.
They began well enough with the unexpected dis-
covery that an eminent authority on crime and crimi-
nals, who had been a good friend to Langholm in his
London days, was still in town. The novelist went
round to his house that night, chiefly because it was
not ten minutes' walk from the Cadogan Hotel, and
with little hope of finding anybody at home. Yet
there was his friend, with the midnight lamp just
lighted, and so kind a welcome that Langholm confided
in him on the spot. And the man who knew all the
detectives in London did not laugh at the latest recruit
to their ranks; but smile he did.
“I'll tell you what I might do,” he said at length.
“I might give you a card that should get you into the
Black Museum at New Scotland Yard, where they
would show you any relics they may have kept of the
Minchin murder; only don't say why you want to see
them. Every man you see there will be a detective;
you may come across the very fellows who got up the
case; if so, they may tell you what they think of it, and
you should be able to find out whether they're trying
again. Here you are, Langholm, and I wish you luck.
Doing anything to-morrow night?”.
Langholm could safely say that he was not.
245


The Darkest Hour
and Langholm sighed as he handled the weapon with
which the crime had been committed, in the opinion of
the police.
“What makes you so certain that this was the re-
volver?” he inquired, more to satisfy his conscience by
leaving no question unasked than to voice any doubt
upon the point.
The other smiled as he explained the peculiarity of
the pistol; it had been made in Melbourne, and it carried
the bullet of peculiar size which had been extracted
from Alexander Minchin's body.
“But London is full of old Australians," objected
Langholm, for objection's sake.
“Well, sir,” laughed the officer, “ you find one who
carries a revolver like this, and prove that he was in
Chelsea on the night of the murder, with a motive for
committing it, and we shall be glad of his name and
address. Only don't forget the motive; it wasn't rob-
bery, you know, though her ladyship was so sure it
was robbers! There's the maker's name on the barrel.
I should take a note of it, sir, if I was you!”
That name and that note were all that Langholm had
to show when he dined with the criminologist at his
service club the same evening. The amateur detective
looked a beaten man already, but he talked through his
teeth of inspecting the revolvers in every pawnbroker's
shop in London.
“ It will take you a year,” said the old soldier, cheer-
fully.
247


The Darkest Hour
“Wouldn't leave his name, sir; said he'd call again;
a foreign gentleman, he seemed to me.”
“A delicate-looking man?”
“Very, sir. You seem to know him better than he
knows you,” added the hall-porter, with whom Lang-
holm had made friends. “He wasn't certain whether
it was the Mr. Langholm he wanted who was staying
here, and he asked to look at the register.”.
“ Did you let him see it?” cried Langholm, quickly.
“I did, sir.”
“Then let me have another look at it, please!”
It was as Langholm feared. Thoughtlessly, but
naturally enough, when requested to put his own name
in the book, he had also filled in that full address which
he took such pains to conceal in places where he was
better known. And that miserable young Italian, that
fellow Severino, had discovered not only where he was
staying in town, but where he lived in the country, and
his next discovery would be Normanthorpe House
and its new mistress! Langholm felt enraged; after
his own promise to write to Rachel, a promise already
fulfilled, the unhappy youth might have had the decen-
cy to refrain from underhand tricks like this. Lang-
holm felt inclined to take a cab at once to Severino's
lodgings, there to relieve his mind by a very plain
expression of his opinion. But it was late; and per-
haps allowances should be made for a sick man with a
passion as hopeless as his bodily state; in any case he
would sleep upon it first.
249


The Shadow of the Rope
But there was no sleep for Charles Langholm that
night, nor did the thought of Severino enter his head
again; it was suddenly swept aside and as suddenly re-
placed by that of the man who was to fill the novelist's
mind for many a day.
Idly glancing up and down the autographed pages
of the hotel register, as his fingers half-mechanically
turned leaf after leaf backward, Langholm's eye had
suddenly caught a name of late as familiar to him as
his own.
It was the name of John Buchanan Steel.
And the date was the date of the Minchin murder.
250


CHAPTER XXIII
DAWN
The hall-porter was only too ready for further chat.
It was the dull season, and this visitor was one of a
variety always popular in the quieter hotels; he was
never above a pleasant word with the servants. Yet
the porter stared at Langholm as he approached. His
face was flushed, and his eyes so bright that there
would have been but one diagnosis by the average ob-
server. But the porter knew that Langholm had come
in sober, and that for the last twenty minutes he had sat
absorbed in the hotel register.
“I see,” said Langholm—and even his voice was al-
tered, which made the other stare the harder— “I see
that a friend of mine stayed here just upon a year ago.
I wonder if you remember him?"
“If it was the off-season, sir, I dare say I shall.”
“ It was in September, and his name was Steel.”
“How long did he stay?”
“Only one night, I gather-an elderly gentleman
with very white hair.”
The porter's face lighted up.
“I remember him, sir! I should think I did! A
very rich gentleman, I should say; yes, he only stayed
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The Shadow of the Rope
the one night, but he gave me a sovereign when he
went away next day.”
“He is very rich,” said Langholm, repressing by
main force a desire to ask a string of questions. He
fancied that the porter was not one who needed ques-
tioning, and his patience had its immediate reward.
“I remember when he arrived,” the man went on.
“ It was late at night, and he hadn't ordered his room.
He came in first to see whether we could give him one.
I paid the cab myself and brought in his bag.”
“He had just arrived from the country, I presume?"
The porter nodded.
“ At King's Cross, by the 10.45, I believe; but it
must have been a good bit late, for I was just coming
off duty, and the night-porter was just coming on.”
“Then you didn't see any more of Mr. Steel that
night? ”
"I saw him go out again,” said the porter, dryly,
“after he had something to eat, for we are short-handed
in the off-season, and I stopped up myself to see he
got it. I didn't see him come in the second time.”
Langholm could hardly believe his ears. To cover
his excitement he burst out laughing.
“The old dog!” he cried. “Do you know if he
ever came in at all?”
“Between two and three, I believe," said the porter
in the same tone.
Langholm laughed again, but asked no more ques-
tions, and in a little he was pacing his bedroom floor,
252


Dawn
investigation had been conducted upon the supposi-
tion that his wife, and no other, had caused the death
of Alexander Minchin. No business friend of the de-
ceased had been included among the witnesses, and the
very least had been made of his financial difficulties,
which had formed no part of the case for the Crown.
Langholm, however, his wits immensely quickened
by the tonic of his new discovery, began to see possibil-
ities in this aspect of the matter, and, as soon as the tel-
egraph offices were open, he despatched a rather long
message to Mrs. Steel, reply paid. It was simply to
request the business address of her late husband, with
the name and address of any partner or other business
man who had seen much of him in the City. If the
telegram were not intercepted, Langholm calculated
that he should have his reply in a couple of hours, and
one came early in the forenoon :-
“ Shared office 2 Adam's Court Old Broad Street
with a Mr. Crofts his friend but not mine Rachel Steel.”
Langholm looked first at the end, and was thankful
to see that the reply was from Rachel herself. But the
penultimate clause introduced a complication. It must
have some meaning. It would scarcely be a wholly
irrelevant expression of dislike. Langholm, at all
events, read a warning in the words—a warning to
himself not to call on Mr. Crofts as a friend of the dead
man's wife. And this increased the complication, ulti-
255


The Shadow of the Rope
mately suggesting a bolder step than the man of letters
quite relished, yet one which he took without hesita-
tion in Rachel's cause. He had in his pocket the card
of the detective officer who had shown him over the
Black Museum; luckily it was still quite clean; and
Langholm only wished he looked the part a little more
as he finally sallied forth.
Mr. Crofts was in, his small clerk said, and the sham
detective followed the real one's card into the inner
chamber of the poky offices upon the third floor. Mr.
Crofts sat aghast in his office chair, the puzzled picture
of a man who feels his hour has come, but who wonders
which of his many delinquencies has come to light.
He was large and florid, with a bald head and a dyed
moustache, but his colouring was an unwholesome pur-
ple as the false pretender was ushered in.
“I am sorry to intrude upon you, Mr. Crofts,” began
Langholm, “but I have come to make a few inquiries
about the late Alexander Minchin, who, I believe,
once- "
“Quite right! Quite right!” cried Crofts, as the pur-
ple turned a normal red in his sanguine countenance.
“ Alexander Minchin—-poor fellow—to be sure! Take
a seat, inspector, take a seat. Happy to afford you any
information in my power.”
If Mr. Crofts looked relieved, however, as many a
decent citizen might under similar visitation, it was
a very real relief to Langholm not to have been found
out at a glance. He took the proffered seat with the
256


The Shadow of the Rope
nothing of her own husband. I remember one night
on the pier-
“I won't trouble you about Brighton, Mr. Crofts,"
Langholm interrupted as politely as he could. “Mr.
Minchin was not afterwards a partner of yours, was
he?”
“ Never; though I won't say he mightn't have
been if things had panned out differently, and he
had gone back to Westralia with some capital.
Meanwhile he had the run of my office, and that
was all.”
“And not even the benefit of your advice?"
“He wouldn't take it, once he was bitten with the
game."
Thus far Langholm had simply satisfied his own
curiosity upon one or two points concerning a dead
man who had been little more than a name to him hith-
erto. His one discovery of the least potential value was
that Minchin had evidently died in difficulties. He now
consulted some notes jotted down on an envelope upon
his way to the City.
“Mr. Minchin, as you are aware," resumed Lang-
holm, "was, like his wife, an Australian by birth. Had
he many Australian friends here in London?”
“None at all,” replied Mr. Crofts, "that I am aware
of.”
"Nor anywhere else in the country, think you?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Not in the north of England, for example?”
258


Dawn
Thus led, Mr. Crofts frowned at his desk until an
enlightened look broke over his florid face.
" By Jove, yes!” said he. “ Now you speak of it,
there was somebody up north-a rich man, too—but
he only heard of him by chance a day or so before his
death.”
“ A rich man, you say; and an Australian?”.
“I don't know about that, but it was out there they
had known each other, and Minchin had no idea he
was in England till he saw it in the paper a day or two
before his death."
“Do you remember the name?”.
“No, I don't, for he never told it to me; fact is, we
were not on the best of terms just at the last,” explained
Mr. Crofts. “Money matters—money matters—they
divide the best of friends—and to tell you the truth
he owed me more than I could afford to lose. But the
day before the last day of his life he came in and said it
was all right, he'd square up before the week was out,
and if that wasn't good enough for me I could go to
the devil. Of course I asked him where the money
was coming from, and he said from a man he'd not
heard of for years until that morning, but he didn't
say how he'd heard of him then, only that he must be
a millionaire. So then I asked why a man he hadn't
seen for so long should pay his debts, but Minchin
only laughed and swore and said he'd make him. And
that was the last I ever heard of it; he sat down at that
desk over yonder and wrote to his millionaire there
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The Shadow of the Rope
and then, and took it out himself to post. It was the
last time I saw him alive, for he said he wasn't coming
back till he got his answer, and it was the last letter he
ever wrote in the place.”
“On that desk, eh?” Langholm glanced at the spare
piece of office furniture in the corner. “Didn't he keep
any papers here?” he added.
“He did, but you fellows impounded them."
“Of course we did," said Langholm, hastily. “Then
you have nothing of his left?”.
“Only his pen, and a diary in which he hadn't writ-
ten a word. I slipped them into a drawer with his
papers, and there they are still.”
Langholm felt disappointed. He had learnt so
much, it was tantalising not to learn a little more. If
only he could make sure of that millionaire friend of
Minchin! In his own mind he was all but sure, but
his own mind was too elastic by half.
Crofts was drumming on the blotting-pad in front of
him; all of a sudden Langholm noticed that it had a
diary attached.
"Minchin's diary wasn't one like yours, was it?” he
exclaimed.
“The same thing," said Mr. Crofts.
“Then I should like to see it."
“There's not a word written in it; one of you chaps
overhauled it at the time.”
“ Never mind!”
“Well, then, it's in the top long drawer of the desk
260


One Who Was Not Bidden
tion was as yet impossible, and a consecutive review
the most difficult of intellectual feats. Langholm was
too excited, and the situation too identical with sus-
pense, for a clear sight of all its bearings and poten-
tialities; and then there was the stern self-discipline, the
determined bridling of the imagination, in which he
had not yet relaxed. Once in the night, however, in
the hopeless hours between darkness and broad day,
he had seen clearly for a while, and there and then
pinned his vision down to paper.
It concerned only one aspect of the case, but this
was how Langholm found that he had stated it, on
taking out his pocket-book during the final stages of
his journey—
PROVISIONAL CASE AGAINST -
1. Was in Sloane Street on the night of the murder,
at an hotel about a mile from the house in
which the murder was committed. This can be
proved.
2. Left hotel shortly after arrival towards mid-
night, believed to have returned between two
and three, and would thus have been absent
at very time at which crime was committed
according to medical evidence adduced at trial.
But exact duration of absence from hotel can
be proved.
3. Knew M. in Australia, but was in England un-
known to M. till two mornings before murder,
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The Shadow of the Rope
when M. wrote letter on receipt of which -
- - came up to town (arriving near scene
of murder as above stated, about time of com-
mission). All this morally certain and probably
capable of legal proof.
4. “So then I asked why a man he hadn't seen
for so long should pay his debts; but M. only
laughed and swore, and said he'd make him.”
C. could be subpænaed to confirm if not to am-
plify this statement to me, with others to effect
that it was for money M. admitted having
written to "a millionaire."
5. Attended Mrs. Mi's trial throughout, thereafter
making her acquaintance and offering marriage
without any previous private knowledge what-
soever of her character or antecedents.
POSSIBLE MOTIVES
- is a human mystery, his past life a
greater one. He elaborately pretends that no part
of that past was spent in Australia.
M. said he knew him there; also that “he'd make
him”—pay up!
Blackmail not inconsistent with Mi's character.
Men have died as they deserved before to-day for
threatening blackmail.
Possible Motive for Marriage
Atonement of the Guilty to the Innocent.
264


One Who Was Not Bidden
As Langholm read and re-read these precise pro-
nouncements, with something of the detachment and
the mild surprise with which he occasionally dipped
into his own earlier volumes, he congratulated himself
upon the evidently lucid interval which had produced
so much order from the chaos that had been his mind.
Chaotic as its condition still was, that orderly array of
impression, discovery, and surmise, bore the test of
conscientious reconsideration. And there was nothing
that Langholm felt moved to strike out in the train;
but, on the other hand, he saw the weakness of his case
as it stood at present, and was helped to see it by the
detective officer's remark to him at Scotland Yard:
“You find one (old Australian) who carries a revolver
like this, and prove that he was in Chelsea on the night
of the murder, with a motive for committing it, and we
shall be glad of his name and address.” Langholm had
found the old Australian who could be proved to have
been in Chelsea, or thereabouts, on the night in ques-
tion; but the pistol he could not hope to find, and the
motive was mere surmise.
And yet, to the walls of the mind that he was trying
so hard to cleanse from prejudice and prepossession-
to school indeed to an inhuman fairness—there clung
small circumstances and smaller details which could
influence no one else, which would not constitute evi-
dence before any tribunal, but which weighed more
with Langholm himself than all the points arrayed in
his note-book with so much primness and precision.
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One Who Was Not Bidden
sky that has rained itself out and an earth that can
hold no more, and came finally to his dripping garden
by the wicket at the back of the cottage. There he
stood to inhale the fine earthy fragrance which atoned
somewhat for a rather desolate scene. The roses were
all washed away. William Allen Richardson clung
here and there, in the shelter of the southern eaves, but
he was far past his prime, and had better have perished
with the exposed beauties on the tiny trees. The soak-
ing foliage had a bluish tinge; the glimpse of wooded
upland, across the valley through the gap in the hedge
of Penzance briars, lay colourless and indistinct as a
faded print from an imperfect negative. A footstep
crunched the wet gravel at Langholm's back.
“Thank God you've got back, sir!” cried a York-
shire voice in devout accents; and Langholm, turning,
met the troubled face and tired eyes of the woman next
door, who kept house for him while living in her own.
“My dear Mrs. Brunton,” he exclaimed, “what on
earth has happened? You didn't expect me earlier, did
you? I wired you my train first thing this morning."
“Oh, no, it isn't that, sir. It's—it's the poor young
gentleman- ”
And her apron went to her eyes.
"What young gentleman, Mrs. Brunton?”
“Him 'at you saw i' London an' sent all this way for
change of air! He wasn't fit to travel half the distance.
I've been nursing of him all night and all day too."
“A young gentleman, and sent by me?” Langholm's
267


The Shadow of the Rope
face was blank until a harsh light broke over it.
“What's his name, Mrs. Brunton?”
"I can't tell you, sir. He said he was a friend of
yours, and that was all before he took ill. He's been
too bad to answer questions all day. And then we
knew you'd soon be here to tell us.”
“ A foreigner, I suppose?”
"I should say he was, sir.”
“And did he really tell you I had sent him?"
“Well, I can't say he did, not in so many words, but
that was what I thought he meant. It was like this,
sir,” continued Mrs. Brunton, as they stood face to face
on the wet gravel: “just about this time yesterday I
was busy ironing, when my nephew, the lad you used
to send with letters, who's here again for his summer
holidays, comes to me an' says, “ You're wanted.' So
I went, and there was a young gentleman looking fit
to drop. He'd a bag with him, and he'd walked all the
way from Upthorpe station, same as I suppose you
have now; but yesterday was the hottest day we've
had, and I never did see living face so like the dead. He
had hardly life enough to ask if this was where you
lived; and when I said it was, but you were away, he
nodded and said he'd just seen you in London; and he
was sure he might come in and rest a bit. Well, sir,
I not only let him do that, but you never will lock up
anything, so I gave him a good sup o' your whisky
too!”
“ Quite right,” said Langholm—"and then?”
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The Shadow of the Rope
straight into our own; and now he has everything nice
and clean and comfortable as I could make it. If only
we can pull him through, poor young gentleman, be-
tween us!”
“God bless you for a good woman,” said Langholm,
from his heart; “ it will be His will and not your fault
if we fail. Yes, I should like to see the poor fellow, if
I may.”
“He is expecting you, sir. He told Dr. Sedley he
must see you the moment you arrived, and the doctor
said he might. No, he won't know you're here yet,
and he can't have heard a word, for our room is at
t'front o’t’house."
“Then I'll go up alone, Mrs. Brunton, if you won't
mind.”
Severino was lying in a high square bed, his black
locks tossed upon a spotless pillow no whiter than
his face; a transparent hand came from under the bed-
clothes to meet Langholm's outstretched one, but it
fell back upon the sick man's breast instead.
“Do you forgive me?” he whispered, in a voice both
hoarse and hollow.
“What for?” smiled Langholm. “You had a right
to come where you liked; it is a free country, Severino."
“But I went to your hotel—behind your back!”
“That was quite fair, my good fellow. Come, I
mean to shake hands, whether you like it or not.”
And the sound man took the sick one's hand with
womanly tenderness; and so sat on the bed, looking far
270


One Who Was Not Bidden
into the great dark sinks of fever that were human
eyes; but the fever was of the brain, for the poor fel-
low's hand was cool.
“You do not ask me why I did it,” came from the
tremulous lips at last.
“Perhaps I know.”
“ I will tell you if you are right.”
“It was to see her again-your kindest friend and
mine," said Langholm, gently.
“ Yes! It was to see her again—before I die!”
And the black eyes blazed again.
“You are not going to die," said Langholm, with
the usual reassuring scorn.
"I am. Quite soon. On your hands, I only fear.
And I have not seen her yet!”
“You shall see her,” said Langholm, tenderly, grave-
ly. He was rewarded with a slight pressure of the
emaciated hand; but for the first time he suspected that
all the scrutiny was not upon one side—that the sick
youth was trying to read him in his turn.
“I love her!” at last cried Severino, in rapt whispers.
“Do you hear me? I love her! I love her! What
does it matter now?”.
“It would matter to her if you told her,” rejoined
Langholm. “ It would make her very unhappy."
“ Then I need not tell her.”
“ You must not, indeed.”
“ Very well, I will not. It is a promise, and I keep
my promises; it is only when I make none "
271


CHAPTER XXV
A POINT TO LANGHOLM
“I am glad you have come back," said Dr. Sedley with
relief. “Of course eventually he will require trained
nursing, either here or somewhere else; there is only
one end to such a case, but it needn't come yet, unless
he has another hemorrhage. I understand you offered
him your cottage while you were away, but there was
some muddle, and he came before they were ready for
him? It was like your kindness, my dear fellow, only
never you send another consumptive to the north-east
coast or anywhere near it! As to his seeing any ladies
who like to look him up, by all means, only one at a
time, and they mustn't excite him. Your return, for
example, has been quite enough excitement for to-day,
and I should keep him quiet for the next twenty-four
hours.”
The doctor had called within an hour of the return
of Langholm, who repeated these stipulations upstairs,
with his own undertaking in regard to Rachel. He
would write that night and beg her to call the follow-
ing day. No, he preferred writing to going to see her,
and it took up far less time. But he would write at
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The Shadow of the Rope
once. And, as he went downstairs to do so then and
there, Langholm asked himself whether an honourable
man could meet the Steels again without reading to
their faces the notes that he had made in London and
conned in the train.
This letter written, there was a small pile of them
awaiting attention on top of the old bureau; and Lang-
holm sat glancing at proofs and crumpling up press-
cuttings until he needed a lamp. The letter that he
kept to the last looked like one of the rare applications
for his autograph which he was not too successful to
welcome as straws showing the wind of popular ap-
proval. In opening the envelope, however, he noticed
that it bore the Northborough postmark, also that the
handwriting was that of an illiterate person, and his
very surname misspelt. The contents were as fol-
lows:-
NORTHBOROUGH, August 18, 189—.
“MR. LANGHAM, SIR,
"I here as you are on the tracks of them
that murdered Alexander Minchin, if you want to know
of them that had a Reason for doing it I can give you
the straight Tip.
“I have been out to your place to-night, but you
are only due home to-morrow night, therefore I will
be your way again to-morrow night, but will only come
to the cross-roads as your old girl look suspichious last
night and this is on the strickt Q.T.
“Till to-morrow night then at the cross-roads near
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The Shadow of the Rope
"Name of Langholm?” said a rather rollicking
voice, with a rank puff and a shower of sparks, as the
cautious steps followed the rapping stick.
“That's it,” said Langholm; “if yours is Abel, I
have got your letter."
“You have, have you?” cried the other, with the
same jovial familiarity. “And what do you think of it?"
The glowing pipe lit a wild brown beard and mous-
tache, thickly streaked with grey, a bronzed nose, and
nothing more. Indeed, it was only at each inhalation
that so much stood out upon the surrounding screen
of impenetrable blackness. Langholm kept his dis-
tance, stick in hand, his gaunt figure as invisible as the
overhanging trees; but his voice might have belonged
to the most formidable of men.
“As yet,” said he, sternly, “I think very little of
either you or your letter. Who are you, and what
do you mean by writing to me like that?”
"Steady, mister, you do know my name!” remon-
strated the man, in rather more respectful tones. “It's
Abel—John William—and as much at your service as
you like if you take him proper; but he comes from a
country where Jack isn't the dirt under his master's
feet, and you're no master o' mine."
"I don't want to be, my good fellow," rejoined
Langholm, modifying his own manner in turn. “ Then
you're not a Northborough man?”
“ Not me!”
“I seem to have heard your voice before," said
276


The Shadow of the Rope
“You knew him in Australia, then?”
“Knew him? I should think I did know him! But
who told you he was ever out there? Not him, I'll
warrant!”
“I happen to know it,” said Langholm, “ that's all.'
But do you mean to tell me that it was Mr. Steel to
whom you referred in your letter?”
“I do so!” cried Abel, and clinched it with an oath.
“You said 'they.'”
“But I didn't mean anybody else.”
Langholm lowered his voice. Neither foot nor hoof
had passed or even sounded in the distance. There
was scarcely a whisper of the trees; an ordinary ap-
proach could have been heard for hundreds of yards,
a stealthy one for tens. Langholm had heard nothing,
though his ears were pricked. And yet he lowered
his voice.
“Do you actually hint that Mr. Steel has or could
have been a gainer by Mr. Minchin's death?”
Abel pondered his reply.
“What I will say,” he declared at length, " is that
he might have been a loser by his life!”
“You mean if Mr. Minchin had gone on living?”.
“Yes-amounts to the same thing, doesn't it?”
“You are not thinking of-of Mrs. Steel?” queried
Langholm, after pausing in his turn.
“ Bless you, no! She wasn't born or thought of, so
far as we was concerned, when we were all three mates
up the bush.”
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A Point to Langholm
“Ah, all three!”
“Steel, Minchin, and me," nodded Abel, as his cutty
glowed.
“And you were mates!”
“Well, we were and we weren't: that's just it,” said
Abel, resentfully. “It would be better for some coves
now, if we'd all been on the same footin' then. But
that we never were. I was overseer at the principal
out-station—a good enough billet in its way—and Min-
chin was overseer in at the homestead. But Steel was
the boss, damn him, trust Steel to be the boss!”
“But if the station was his?” queried Langholm.
“I suppose it was a station?” he added, as a furious
shower of sparks came from the cutty.
"Was it a station?” the ex-overseer echoed. “Only
about the biggest and the best in the blessed back-
blocks—that's all! Only about half the size of your
blessed little old country cut out square! Oh, yes, it
was his all right; bought it for a song after the bad
seasons fifteen year ago, and sold it in the end for a
quarter of a million, after making a fortune off of his
clips alone. And what did I get out of it?” demanded
Abel, furiously. “What was my share? A beggarly
cheque same as he give me the other day, and not a
penny more!”
"I don't know how much that was,” remarked
Langholm; “ but if you weren't a partner, what claim
had you on the profits?”.
“Aha! that's tellings,” said Abel, with a sudden
279


CHAPTER XXVI
A CARDINAL POINT
The irresistible discomfiture of this ruffian did not af-
fect the value of the evidence which he had volun-
teered. Langholm was glad to remember that he had
volunteered it; the creature was well served for his
spite and his cupidity; and the man of peace and
letters, whose temperament shrank from contention
of any kind, could not but congratulate himself upon
an incidental triumph for which it was impossible to
feel the smallest compunction. Moreover, he had
gained his point. It was enough for him to know that
there was a certain secret in Steel's life, upon which
the wretch Abel had admittedly traded, even as his
superior Minchin had apparently intended to do be-
fore him. Only those two seemed to have been in
this secret, and one of them still lived to reveal it
when called upon with authority. The nature of the
secret mattered nothing in the meanwhile. Here was
the motive, without which the case against John Bu-
chanan Steel must have remained incomplete. Lang-
holm added it to his notes—and trembled!
He had compunction enough about the major tri-
umph which now seemed in certain store for him; the
larger it loomed, the less triumphant and the more
285


The Shadow of the Rope
phaeton was at the door when Langholm also arrived,
and Rachel herself ran out to greet him on the steps
-tall and lissome, in a light-coloured driving cloak
down to her heels, and a charming hat-yet under it
a face still years older than the one he wore in his heart,
though no less beautiful in its distress.
“I hardly dare ask you!” she gasped, her hand
trembling in his. “Have you found out—anything at
all? "
“A little."
And he opened his hand so that hers must drop.
“Oh, but anything is better than nothing! Come in
and tell me-quick!”
“Bravo!” added an amused voice from the porch.
It was Steel, spruce and serene as ever, a pink glow
upon his mobile face, a pink flower in his reefer jacket,
a jaunty Panama straw covering his white hairs, and
buckskin shoes of kindred purity upon his small and
well-shaped feet. Langholm greeted him in turn, only
trusting that the tremors which had been instantly com-
municated to his own right hand might not be detected
by the one it was now compelled to meet.
“I came to tell Mr. Steel,” said Langholm, a little
lamely.
“Excellent!” murmured that gentleman, with his
self-complacent smile.
“But am I not to hear also?” demanded Rachel.
“My dear Mrs. Steel, there is very little to tell you
as yet. I only wish there were more. But one or two
290


A Cardinal Point
me see—the point was—ah, yes! Of course, my dear
Langholm, you haven't really anything of any account
to tell? I considered you a Quixote when you under-
took your quest; but I shall begin to suspect a dash of
Munchausen if you tell me you have found out any-
thing in the inside of a week!”
“Nevertheless,” said Langholm, grimly, “I have.”
“ Anything worth finding out?”
“I think so."
“You don't mean to tell me you have struck a clue?”
"I believe I can lay hands upon the criminal,” said
Langholm, as quietly as he could. But he was the
more nervous man of the two.
The other simply stood still and stared his incredulity.
The stare melted into a smile. “My dear fellow!” he
murmured, in a mild blend of horror and reproof, as
though it were the fourth dimension that Langholm
claimed to have discovered. It cost the discoverer no
small effort not to cry out that he could lay hands on
him then and there. The unspoken words were gulped
down, and a simple repetition substituted at the last.
“I could swear to him, myself,” added Langholm.
“It remains to be seen whether there is evidence
enough to convict.”
“Have you communicated with the police?"
“Not yet.”
“They seem to have some absurd bee in their hel-
met down here, you know.”
“They don't get it from me."
293


A Cardinal Point
inch. “ It would be fairest to yourself, I agree. Two
heads are better than one, and-well, I'm open to con-
viction still, of course.”
But even Langholm was not conscious of the sinister
play upon words; he had taken out his pocket-book,
and was nervously turning to the leaves that he had
filled during his most sleepless night in town.
“Got it all down?” said Steel.
“Yes,” replied Langholm, without raising his eyes;
"at least I did make some notes of a possible—if not
a really damning—case against the man I mean.”
“And what may the first point be?” inquired Steel,
who was gradually drifting back into the tone which
Langholm had resented on the shore; he took no notice
of it now.
“The first point,” said Langholm, slowly, “is that
he was in Chelsea, or at least within a mile of the scene
of the murder, on the night that it took place.”
“So were a good many people,” remarked Steel,
smiling as he dipped the sculls in and out, and let his
supple wrists fall for the feather, as though he were
really rowing.
“But he left his—he was out at the time!” declared
Langholm, making his amended statement with all
the meaning it had for himself.
“Well, you can't hang him for that."
“He will have to prove where he was, then.”
"I am afraid it will be for you to prove a little more
first."
295


The Shadow of the Rope
Langholm sat very dogged with his notes. There
had been a pause on Steel's part; there was a thin new
note in his voice. Langholm was too grimly engrossed
to take immediate heed of either detail, or to watch the
swift changes in the face which was watching him.
And there he lost most of all.
“The next point is that he undoubtedly knew Min-
chin in Australia "
“Aha!”
“That he was and is a rich man, whereas Minchin
was then on the verge of bankruptcy, and that Min-
chin only found out that he was in England thirty-six
hours before his own death, when he wrote to his old
friend for funds."
"And you have really established all that!”
Steel had abandoned all pretence of rowing; his tone
was one of admiration, in both senses of the word, and
his dark eyes seemed to penetrate to the back of Lang-
holm's brain.
“I can establish it,” was the reply.
“Well! I think you have done wonders; but you
will have to do something more before they will listen
to you at Scotland Yard. What about a motive?”
“I was coming to that; it is the last point with which
I shall trouble you for the present.” Langholm took
a final glance at his notes, then shut the pocket-book
and put it away. “The motive,” he continued, meeting
Steel's eyes at last, with a new boldness in his own-
"the motive is self-defence! There can be no doubt
296


The Shadow of the Rope
“I shall!” said he through his moustache. “I have
consulted you; there will be no need to do so again. I
shall make a point of taking you at your word. And
now do you mind putting me ashore?”.
A few raindrops were falling when they reached the
landing-stage; they hurried to the house, to find that
Langholm's bicycle had been removed from the place
where he had left it by the front entrance.
“Don't let anybody trouble," he said, ungraciously
enough, for he was still smarting from the other's
sneer. “I can soon find it for myself."
Steel stood on the steps, his midnight eyes upon
Langholm, the glint of a smile in those eyes, but not
the vestige of one upon his lips.
“Oh, very well,” said he. “You know the side-
door near the billiard-room? They have probably put
it in the first room on the left; that is where we keep
ours—for we have gone in for them at last. Good-bye,
Langholm; remember my advice.”
And, that no ceremony should be lost between them,
the host turned on his heel and disappeared through
his own front door, leaving Langholm very angry in
the rain.
But anger was the last emotion for such an hour;
the judge might as well feel exasperated with the pris-
oner at the bar, the common hangman with the felon
on the drop. Langholm only wished that, on even
one moment's reflection, he could rest content in so
primitive and so single a state of mind. He knew well
298


A Cardinal Point
that he could not, and that every subtle sort of contest
lay before him, his own soul the arena. In the mean-
time let him find his bicycle and get away from this
dear and accursed spot; for dear it had been to him, all
that too memorable summer; but now of a surety the
curse of Cain brooded over its cold white walls and
deep-set windows like sunken eyes in a dead face.
Langholm found the room to which he had been di-
rected; in fact, he knew it of old. And there were the
two new Beeston Humbers; but their lustrous plating
and immaculate enamel did not shame his own old dis-
reputable roadster, for the missing machine certainly
was not there. Langholm was turning away when the
glazed gun-rack caught his eye. Yes, this was the
room in which the guns were kept. He had often seen
them there. They had never interested him before.
Langholm was no shot. Yet now he peered through
the glass-gasped—and opened one of the sliding
panels with trembling hand.
There on a nail hung an old revolver, out of place,
rusty, most conspicuous; and at a glance as like the
relic in the Black Museum as one pea to another. But
Langholm took it down to make sure. And the mak-
er's name upon the barrel was the name that he had
noted down at the Black Museum; the point gained,
the last of the cardinal points postulated by the official
who had shown him round.
The fortuitous discoverer of them all was leaving
like a thief-more and more did Langholm feel him-
299


The Shadow of the Rope
casement was small, and further contracted by an over-
growth of creeper; those two great eyes seemed to
shine the brighter through the dusk. Langholm could
not make his visit a very short one, after all. He felt
it would be cruel.
“What did you talk about, then?” he asked.
A small smile came with the answer, “ You!”
“Me! What on earth had you to say about me?”
“I heard all you had been doing.”
“Oh, that.”
“You know you didn't tell me, that evening in
town.”
“No, I was only beginning, then.”
It seemed some months ago—more months since
that very afternoon.
“ Have you found out anything?”
Langholm hesitated.
“Yes.”
Why should he lie?
“Do you mean to say that you have any suspicion
who it is?” Severino was on his elbow.
“More than a suspicion. I am certain. There can
be no doubt about it. A pure fluke gave me the clue,
but every mortal thing fits it.”
Severino dropped back upon his pillow. Langholm
seemed glad to talk to him, to loosen his tongue, to
unburden his heart ever so little. And, indeed, he was
glad.
“And what are you going to do about it?”
304


The Shadow of the Rope
light. His breath came quickly. A shiver seemed to
pass through the bed.
“ You needn't have done that,” he whispered at last.
“I thought it was the fair thing to do.”
“ Yet you needn't have done it-because—your first
idea was right!”
“Right?” echoed Langholm, densely. “My first
idea was—right?”
“You said you first thought it was I who killed-
her husband.”
" It couldn't have been!”
“But it was.”
Langholm got back to his feet. He could conceive
but one explanation of this preposterous statement.
Severino's sickness had extended to his brain. He was
delirious. This was the first sign.
“Where are you going?” asked the invalid, quer-
ulously, as his companion moved towards the door.
“When was the doctor here last?" demanded Lang-
holm in return.
There was silence for a few moments, and then a
faint laugh, that threatened to break into a sob, from
the bed.
“I see what you think. How can I convince you
that I have all my wits about me? I'd rather not have
a light just yet—but in my bag you will find a writing-
case. It is locked, but the keys are in my trousers
pocket. In my writing-case you will find a sealed en-
velope, and in that a fuller confession than I shall have
306


The Whole Truth
member that my feet were rather cold, but that is
about all.
" It was near midnight, as you know, and the room
it happened in—the study—had the brightest light of
all. An electric lamp was blazing on the writing-table
at the window, and another from a bracket among the
books. The window was as wide open as it would go,
the lower sash thrown right up; it was just above the
scullery window, which is half underground, and has
an outside grating. The sill was only the height of
one's chin. I can tell you all that now, but at the time
I knew very little until I was in the room itself. Thank
you, I will take another sip. It does me more good
than harm to tell you. But you will find it all written
down.”
Langholm set down the glass and replenished it.
The night had fallen without. The single candle in
the farthest corner supplied the only light; in it the one
man sat, and the other lay, their eyes locked.
“I spilt the ink as I was creeping over the desk.
That is an odd thing to remember, but I was looking
for something to wipe it up with when I heard their
voices upstairs."
“You heard them both?”.
“ Yes—quarrelling—and about me! The first thing
I heard was my own name. Then the man came run-
ning down. But I never tried to get away. The doors
were all open. I had heard something else, and I
waited to tell him what a liar he was! But I turned out
311


The Whole Truth
expected, the unnatural strength which had sustained
the teller till the last; he had used up every ounce of
it, and he lay exhausted and collapsed. Langholm be-
came uneasy.
Severino could not swallow the champagne which
Langholm poured into his mouth.
Langholm fetched the candle in high alarm-higher
yet at what it revealed.
Severino was struggling to raise himself, a deadly
leaden light upon his face.
“Raise me up—raise me up.”
Langholm raised him in his arms.
“Another—hemorrhage!” said Severino, in a gasp-
ing whisper.
And his blood dripped with the words.
Langholm propped him up and rushed out shouting
for Brunton—for Mrs. Brunton-for anybody in the
house. Both were in, and the woman came up brave-
ly without a word.
"I'll go for the doctor myself,” said Langholm. “I
shall be quickest.”
And he went on his bicycle, hatless, with an unlit
lamp.
But the doctor came too late.
315


CHAPTER XXVIII
IN THE MATTER OF A MOTIVE
That was between eight and nine o'clock at night;
before ten an outrageous thought occurred to the man
with the undisciplined imagination. It closed his mind
to the tragedy of an hour ago, to the dead man lying
upstairs, whose low and eager voice still went on and
on in his ears. It was a thought that possessed Lang-
holm like an unclean spirit from the moment in which
he raised his eyes from the last words of the manu-
script to which the dead man had referred.
In the long low room that Langholm lived in a fire
was necessary in damp weather, irrespective of the sea-
son. It was on the fire that his eyes fell, straight from
the paper in his hand ..
No one else had read it. There was an explicit as-
surance on the point. The Chelsea landlady had no
idea that such a statement was in existence; she would
certainly have destroyed it if she had known; and fur-
ther written details convinced Langholm that the wom-
an would never speak of her own accord. There were
strange sidelights on the feelings which the young
Italian had inspired in an unlikely breast; a mother
could have done no more to shield him. On the night
316


In the Matter of a Motive
of the acquittal, for example, when he was slowly re-
covering in her house, it had since come to the writer's
knowledge that this woman had turned Mrs. Minchin
from her door with a lying statement as to his where-
abouts. This he mentioned to confirm his declaration
that he always meant to tell the truth to Rachel, that
it was his first resolve in the early stages of his recovery,
long before he knew of her arrest and trial, and that
this woman was aware of that resolve as of all else.
But he doubted whether she could be made to speak,
though he hoped that for his sake she would. And
Langholm grinned with set teeth as he turned back to
this passage: he would be diabolically safe.
It was only an evil thought. He did not admit it
as a temptation. Yet how it stuck, and how it grew!
There was the fire, as though lit on purpose; in a
minute the written evidence could be destroyed for
ever; and there was no other kind. Dead men tell no
tales, and live men only those that suit them!
It all fitted in so marvellously. To a villain it would
have been less a temptation than a veritable gift of his
ends. Langholm almost wished he were a villain.
There was Steel. Something remained for explana-
tion there, but there really was a case against him.
The villain would let that case come on; the would-be
villain did so in his own ready fancy, and the end of it
was a world without Steel but not without his wife;
only, she would be Steel's wife no more.
And this brought Langholm to his senses. “Idi-
317


The Shadow of the Rope
bered that, before his absolute refusal to answer her
crucial question about his prime motive for the mar-
riage, Rachel had grown rather to like that place.
They had been strolling quite apart, though chat-
ting amiably. Rachel had not dreamt of putting her
hand within his arm, as she had sometimes done tow.
ards the end before their quarrel. Yet she did it
again now, the very moment his quicker vision descried
the cyclist in the drive.
“I hope they are not going to run me in to-night,"
he said. “If they do, I shall run them in for riding
without a light. So it's Langholm! Well, Langholm,
put salt on him yet?”
“On whom?"
“Your murderer, of course.”
“I have his confession in my pocket.”
It was the first time that Rachel had known her hus-
band taken visibly aback.
“Good God!” he cried. “Then you don't think
it's me any longer?”
“I know it is not. Nevertheless, Mrs. Steel must
prepare for a shock.”
Rachel was shocked. But her grief and horror,
though both were real and poignant, were swept away
for that hour at least by the full tide of her joy.
It was a double joy. Not only would Rachel be
cleared for ever before the world, but her husband
would stand exonerated at her side. The day of un-
founded suspicions, of either one of them, by the other
320


The Shadow of the Rope
stayed at the Cadogan and was out at that particular
time. I went there because it was the one decent hotel
I knew of in those parts, which was probably your own
reason, and I was out reconnoitring my old friend's
house because I knew him for an inveterate late-bird,
and he did not write as though marriage had improved
his habits. In fact, as you know, he had gone to the
dogs altogether.”
This reminded Langholm of the hour.
"It is late now," said he, “and I must be off. Poor
Severino had not a relation in this country that I know
of. There will be a great deal to do to-morrow.”.
Steel at once insisted on bearing all expenses; that
would be the lightest part, he said. “You have done
so much!” he added. “By the way, you can't go with-
out saying good night to my wife. She has still to
thank you."
“I don't want to be thanked.”
“But for you the truth might never have come out.”
“Still I shall be much happier if she never speaks
of it again."
“Very well, she shall not-on one condition.”
“What is that?”
“ Langholm, I thought last summer we were to be
rather friends? I don't think that of many people.
May I still think it of you?”
“If you will,” said Langholm. “I–I don't believe
I ever should have brought myself to give you away!."
“ You behaved most fairly, my dear fellow. I shall
322


The Shadow of the Rope
your answer in a deeper knowledge of the human heart,
a stronger grasp of the realities of life, a keener sympa-
thy with men and (particularly) with women, than for-
merly distinguished this writer's books. These, at all
events, are some of the things which Charles Langholm
has to show, if he will only show them. And in the
meantime you are requested not to pity him.
Steel went straight to his wife. Tears were still in
her eyes, but such tears, and such eyes! It cost him
an effort to say what he had to say, and that was un-
usual in his case.
“Rachel,” he said at length, in a tone as new as his
reluctance, “I am going to answer the question which
you have so often asked me. I am going to answer it
with perfect honesty, and very possibly you will never
speak to me again. I shall be sorry for both our sakes
if you do anything precipitate, but in any case you shall
act as you think best. You know that I was exceeding-
ly fond of Alec Minchin as a young man; now, I am
not often exceedingly fond of anybody, as you may al-
so know by this time. Before your trial I was con-
vinced that you had killed my old friend, whom I was
so keen to see again that I came up to town by the very
first train after getting his letter. You had robbed me
of the only friend I had in England at the very mo-
ment when he needed me and I was on my way to him.
I could have saved his ship, and you had sent both him
and it to the bottom! That, I say candidly, was what
I thought.”
324


In the Matter of a Motive
thought me guilty. I forgive you for denying it at the
time. I suppose that was necessary. But you have
not yet told me why you did it.”
“Honestly, Rachel, it was largely fascination "
“But not primarily.”
“No.”
“ Then let me hear the prime motive at last, for I
am tired of trying to guess it !”.
Steel stood before his wife as he had never stood
before her yet, his white head bowed, his dark eyes
lowered, hands clasped, shoulders bent, the suppliant
and the penitent in one.
“I did it to punish you,” he said. “I thought some
one must-I felt I could have hanged you if I had
spoken out what I had seen—and 1-married you in-
stead!”
His eyes were on the ground. When he raised them
she was smiling through unshed tears. But she had
spoken first.
"It was not a very terrible motive, after all,” she
had said; “ at least, it has not been such a very terrible
-punishment!”
“No; but that was because I did the very last thing
I ever thought of doing.”
“And that was?”
“To fall in love with you at the beginning!”
Rachel gave a little start.
“ Although you thought me guilty?”
“That made no difference at all. But I have
327


The Shadow of the Rope
thought it less and less, until, on the night you appealed
first to me and then to Langholm-on thinking over
that night-it was impossible to suppose it any more.”
Rachel rose, her cheeks divinely red, her lip trem-
bling, her hand outstretched.
“And you fell in love with me!” she murmured.
“God knows I did, Rachel, in my own way,” said
Steel.
"I am so glad!” whispered his wife.
THE END.
328


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