Front matter (continued 3)

Sport in Scotland and Ireland, sport in Norway, or even in Iceland, might inure a man to a hard life, but it would not bring him within measurable distance of the hazards and hardships in that white world beyond Dawson City.

John Faunce, seated in front of his empty fireplace, listened mechanically to a barrel-organ playing the "Washington Post," and meditated upon Arthur Haldane's statement.

He had not been idle since his return to London, and had made certain inquiries about Colonel Rannock among people who were likely to know. He had interviewed a fashionable gunmaker with whom Rannock had dealt for twenty years, and the secretary of a club which he had frequented for about the same period. The man was frankly Bohemian in his tastes, but had always kept a certain footing in society, and, in his own phrase, had never been "bowled out." He had been banished from no baccarat table, though he was not untainted with a suspicion of occasionally tampering with his stake. He played all the fashionable card games, and, like Dudley Smooth, though he did not cheat, he always won. He had plenty of followers among the callow youth who laughed at his jokes and almost died of his cigars; but he had no friends of his own age and station, and the great ladies of the land never admitted him within their intimate circle, though they might send him a card once or twice a year for a big party, out of friendly feeling for his mother—five-and-twenty years a widow, and for the greater part of her life attached to the Court.

Would such a man wheel a barrow and tramp the snow-bound shores of the Yukon River? Unlikely as the thing seemed, Faunce told himself that it was not impossible. Rannock had fought well in the Indian hill-country, had never been a feather-bed soldier, and had never affected the passing fashion of effeminacy. He had loved music with that inborn love which is like an instinct, and had made himself a fine player with very little trouble, considering the exacting nature of the 'cello; but he had never put on dilettante airs, or pretended that music was the only thing worth living for. He was as much at home with men who painted pictures as with composers and fiddlers. Versatility was the chief note in his character. The Scotch University, the Army school, the mess-room, the continental wanderings of later years, had made him an expert in most things that people care for. He was at home in the best and the worst society.

He was a soldier and a sportsman, tall, and strongly built, a remarkably handsome man in his best days, and handsome still in his moral and social decadence. There was no reason, Faunce thought, why such a man should shrink from the dangers and hardships of the Alaska goldfields, if the whim took him to try his luck there.

Again, there was no reason that he should not have changed his mind at the last hour, and gone to Ostend or Spa, to risk his capital in a more familiar way, at the gaming table instead of the goldfields. Faunce had allies at both places, and he wrote to each of these, bidding him find out if Rannock was, or had been, there. He was not a man who could appear anywhere without attracting notice.

The letters written, Faunce dismissed the subject for the time being. Colonel Rannock's proceedings seemed to him a matter of minor importance, since he doubted if Rannock could be made instrumental in Lady Perivale's rehabilitation. It was the woman he wanted, the woman whose likeness to his client was the source of evil.

Women had been the chief factors in Mr. Faunce's successful coups, and he had seldom failed in his management of that sensitive and impulsive sex.

He had to find out who the woman was, and her present whereabouts. He thought it highly probable that so handsome a woman had adorned the burlesque stage at some period of her career, as actress or chorus-girl. The theatre is the only arena where low-born beauty can win the recognition which every handsome girl believes her due; and the desire to tread the stage is almost an instinct in the town-bred girl's mind. She has heard of actresses and their triumphs ever since she can remember. She looks in her glass and sees that she is pretty. She picks up the music-hall tunes, and shrills them as she goes about the house-work, and is sure that she can sing. She skips and prances to the organ in the court, and thinks that she can dance. She discovers some acquaintance of her father's whose second cousin knows the stage-manager at the Thalia Theatre; and, armed with this introduction, her pretty face forces its way to the front row of the ballet, and her shrill voice pipes in unison with her sister cockneys in the chorus.

Such an apprenticeship to the Drama Faunce thought probable in the case of the lady known as Mrs. Randall; so he called upon two of the dramatic agents, most of whom had become known to him in his efforts to disentangle patrician youth from the snares of the theatrical syrens.

He went first to the agent of highest standing in his profession; but this gentleman was either too much a gentleman or too busy to help him. He glanced at Lady Perivale's photograph with a careless eye. Yes, a remarkably handsome woman! But he did not remember anybody in the theatrical world who resembled her. He remembered Sir Hubert Withernsea only as one of the wealthy young fools whom one heard of every season, and seldom heard of long, since they must either pull up or die.

"This young man died," said Faunce. "Now do you happen to remember any lady in your line to whom he attached himself?"

"No; I don't. With a young man of that kind it's generally a good many ladies in my line. He gives supper-parties, and chucks away his money, and nobody cares about him or remembers him when he's gone."

"Ah, but this one had a particular attachment, and the lady was like this," said Faunce, with his hand on the photograph.

"Non mi ricordo," said the agent, and Faunce went a little way farther east, to one of the smaller streets out of the Strand, not more than ten minutes' walk from his own office in Essex Street, and called upon agent number two, whose chief business lay among "the halls," a business that paid well and justified handsome offices, with a lady typist, and the best and newest development in type-writing machines.

Mr. Mordaunt was in the thick of the morning's business when Faunce entered the office, but the detective cultivated an air of never being in a hurry, and he seated himself near an open window in a retired spot, from which he could observe two lady clients who were engaging Mordaunt's attention, and one gentleman client in a white hat and a light-grey frock-coat, patent leather boots, and a gardenia buttonhole, a costume more suggestive of Ascot than of the Strand, who was looking at the innumerable photographs of lovely song-birds, skirt-dancers, lion-comiques, and famous acrobats, that covered the wall, and reading the programmes that hung here and there, lightly stirred by the summer air, and clouded with the summer dust.

The ladies were young, handsome, in a pearl-powdery and carmine-lipped fashion, and dressed in the top of the mode, with picture hats on the most commanding scale, piled with the greatest number of ostrich feathers and paste ornaments the human hat can carry.

"You must look slippy, and get me another turn, Mordy," urged the taller damsel, whose name appeared in the theatrical papers as "Vicky Vernon, the Wide World's Wonder." "Fact is, I ain't gettin' a livin' wage."

"Come, now; forty pound from one hall and thirty from another——"

"It ain't enough, Mordy; nothink under the century suits my book, and it didn't ought to suit yours, neither. You must get me another show—another thirty quid. You know you'll get your commission off it."

Yes, Mr. Mordaunt reckoned that he would get his ten per cent.

"But, you see, Vicky, there's ever so many ladies who can sing bet—nearly as well as you—walking about London, with their hands in their tailor-made pockets."

"Not one of 'em whose songs have ever caught on like my 'Rats' and 'The Demon of Drink.'"

"Those were two ripping songs, Vicky. But your new ones haven't hit as hard. They're mawkish, Vicky; too much milk-and-water, and not enough Tabasco. 'Rats' was a fine song—and you did the 'D.T.' first-class."

"The man who wrote 'Rats' is dead," said Miss Vernon, with a gloomy look. "He was a genius, poor devil. Could knock off a song like that in a day—if he could keep sober—band-parts and all."

"I wonder how much you gave him for 'Rats'?"

"Wouldn't you like to know? Well, then, not so much by ten touch-me's as I give for this sun-shade," said the charmer, with a winning laugh, flourishing her gold-handled parasol.

"You gave the poor devil a fiver for a song that has earned you five thou.," said the agent. "Oh, I know the ladies. They haven't got much head for figures, but they are closer——"

"Not closer than a music-hall agent, Mordy. They're the nailers. And what would have been the good of giving that poor feller twenty thick uns for a song he was glad to sell for five? He'd only have drunk himself into his coffin a little sooner."

Here the gentleman in the white hat, who was on too friendly terms with his professional sisters to think of removing that article of apparel, broke in upon the conversation.

"Business is business, Queen of my Soul," he said, "but, if you expect me to wait while you and Mordy indulge in casual patter, you don't know the kind of man I am. Come, old chap, I want your private ear for a little bit."

He took the agent by the buttonhole, and led him into a corner, where they conversed in whispers for a few minutes, while the two stars of the halls, the girl with fierce eyebrows and dark hair who sang "Rats," and the girl with flaxen fringe and pink cheeks, who sang baby-songs in a pinafore, walked about the room, or stood in front of a looking-glass twitching their veils, and correcting the slant of their hats, whistling softly the while with rosy, pursed-up lips.

"I say, Bill, are you going to stand Chippie and me a scrap of lunch?" inquired Miss Vernon, when the whispered interview was over.

"Nought o' t' sort, my angel; but I'll take you to a snug little Italian ristoranty near Leicester Square, where you'll get the best lunch in London, and I'll give you the inestimable advantage of my company while you eat it—but when it comes to 'lardishong,' it must be Yorkshire, my pretty ones, distinctly Yorkshire."

"There's a little too much Yorkshire about you, Bill. Hurry up! Ta, ta, Mordy. Skip the gutter!" wheeling sharply on her Louis heels, with an artful turn of her skirt that revealed the crisp flounces and lace ruchings of a cherry-coloured silk petticoat. "For surely you'll be your pint stoup, and surely I'll be mine?" shrilled the cantatrice, in a voice whose metallic timbre made the electric globes shiver.

The three professionals bounced out of the room, and Faunce heard the ladies' heels rattle down the stairs, and the hall door close behind them with a bang.

"Nice, quiet, refined style, Miss Vernon," he said, as he seated himself opposite the agent.

"Not quite what you'd like for a permanency; gets on your nerves after a bit—eh, Mr. Faunce?" commented Mordaunt. "But she knocks 'em at the halls with her 'Rats' and her 'Demon Drink.' She can make their blood run cold one minute, and make 'em roar with laughter the next. Her father died with the horrors, and she's a first-rate mimic. She got every trick of the thing from watching the old man. It ain't every girl of eighteen would have had the grit to do it. The song ain't a 'Ta-ra-ra,' but it has caught on, and she's making a pot of money. And now, my dear sir, what's up with you? Who are you lookin' for, and what's it all about?"

"I want you to throw your memory back ten years, Mordaunt. Do you remember Sir Hubert Withernsea? He was knocking about London at that time, I think."

"Of course I do. Yorkshire swell, regular oof-bird, and a born mug; ran through his money as if he had an unnatural curiosity to see the inside of a workhouse. But he was a good-natured bloke; and I've seen some first-class company at his Sunday dinners, in a house he had in the Abbey Road. He used to have a dinner-party every Sunday in May and June, and a game of cards after dinner, and one met some queer specimens there sometimes."

"Was there a lady at the head of his table?"

"Rather! There was Lady Withernsea—everybody called her Lady Withernsea in her own house, whatever they may have called her out of it. I knew her as Kate Delmaine, in the chorus at the Spectacular Theatre; but it isn't for me to say he hadn't married her. He was fool enough for anything, and he was awfully fond of her, and awfully jealous of every man who ventured to pay her attention."

"Did you ever meet a Colonel Rannock there?"

"Did I ever dine there without seeing him? Rannock was 'mine own familiar friend'—the Mephistopheles to Withernsea's Faust. I believe Rannock pouched more of his stuff than anybody else in the gang, though they were all blackguards. I never touched a card in his house; so I can talk of them with a clear conscience. A gang of well-bred swindlers, that's what I call them."

"The chorus-girl was handsome, I suppose?"

"Well, strange to say, she was. She was worth all the money Withernsea spent on her; and I suppose it's about the only bargain he ever made in which he wasn't had. She was one of the handsomest women that ever stepped upon the Spectacular stage; and while she was behind the footlights not a man in the stalls had eyes for anybody else."

"Was she anything like that?" asked Faunce, handing him Lady Perivale's photograph.

"She was. Ten years ago you might have passed that off for her photo. But she ain't up to that now."

"You've seen her lately."

"She was here the week before last, a wreck, looking ill and poor. I never knew a handsome woman go off so sudden. I saw her in a box at Drury Lane last Christmas, in fine form; but that's all over. She wanted me to get her an engagement—chorus again—she was never up to speaking parts, used to lose her head directly she had to utter. I couldn't do anything for her. We've no use for anything old and faded at the West End theatres. Managers won't consider it."

"Can you give me the lady's address?"

"I think I booked it," said the agent, "just to satisfy her, though I knew it was no use—at any rate not till the pantomime season, when I might get her an engagement for a Flora or a Juno at the back of the stage, or a Queen in a historical procession, perhaps. Yes, here it is: Mrs. Randall, Miss Kate Delmaine, 14, Selburne Street, Chelsea."

"Thank you, Mordaunt," replied Faunce, handing him a sovereign. "I don't want to waste your time for nothing."

"Well, Faunce, time is money, ain't it?" said Mordaunt, pocketing the coin with a pleasant smile.

CHAPTER XI.

"And the Abbé uncrossed his legs, Took snuff, a reflective pinch. Broke silence: 'The question begs Much pondering ere I pronounce. Shall I flinch? The love which to one and one only has reference Seems terribly like what perhaps gains God's preference.'"

Faunce ate his modest luncheon at the immemorial Cock; and, after a quarter of an hour's rest and meditation, assisted by tobacco, took a hansom and drove to Selburne Street, which the cabman discovered, after some research, in a labyrinth of shabby streets between the King's Road and the Thames, to the west of the red-brick mansions of Cheyne Walk, and all the pleasantness of fashionable Chelsea—a wilderness of eight-roomed houses, slate roofs, narrow areas, steep steps, dirty windows, and gutters overcharged with small children: one of those depressing neighbourhoods which fill the stranger's mind with a despairing pity, but where, nevertheless, there exist worthy, hard-working people who contrive somehow to be happy, and even comfortable—people who have their Christmas puddings and their household affections, like the Cratchets, and who do not desire to curse God and die.

The houses in Selburne Street were of the same pattern as most of the other streets, and just as shabby, but a little larger. The door at No. 14 was opened by the landlady, who did not know, or apparently care, whether Mrs. Randall was at home or out, but who bade the visitor go up to the first-floor front and inquire.

"She's got her key," said this lady, "and I don't always hear her come in."

Faunce went upstairs and tapped politely at the door of the front room.

"Come in, whoever you are," said a voice, with a listless melancholy in its tone.

An odour of tobacco greeted Faunce as he opened the door, and a woman sitting by the window threw the end of a cigarette into the street.

"Is it you, Jim?" she asked drearily, with her face towards the window; then, turning, and seeing a stranger, she gave a cry of surprise that had a touch of fear in it.

"What do you want?" she cried sharply, and Faunce saw that her hand shook a little as she caught hold of a chair.

"Nerves gone. The usual thing," he thought; "drink or drugs; the usual resource when bad luck sets in."

"I have ventured to call upon you on a matter of business, Mrs. Randall," he said, "without writing to ask leave. But as it's a business that may be profitable—very profitable—to yourself, I hope you will pardon the liberty."

"Who are you?" she asked fiercely. "I don't want any of your gammon. Who are you?"

She was a wreck. The agent had been right so far. But she was a beautiful wreck. The brilliant colouring was faded, the cheeks were hollow, the eyes haggard, but the perfect lines of the face were there; and Faunce saw that she had been beautiful, and also that when she was at her best she must have been curiously like Lady Perivale. In height, in figure, in the poise of the head, the modelling of the throat, she resembled her as a sister might have done.

She must have fallen upon evil days since her visit to Algiers—very evil days. There was the pinch of poverty in her aspect, in her tawdry morning wrapper, in the shabbily-furnished sitting-room.

"Pray don't be alarmed, madam. My business is not of an unpleasant nature."

"I want to know who and what you are!" she said in the same tone, half fear, half fury; "and how you had the cheek to march into my room without sending up your name first. Do you think because I'm in cheap lodgings I ain't a lady?"

"Your landlady told me to come upstairs, or I should not have taken that liberty. That is my name," handing her a card, which she snatched impatiently and looked at with a scowling brow. "I am engaged in the interests of a lady whose social position has suffered by her resemblance to you."

"What do you mean?"

"You were in Algiers last February with Colonel Rannock."

Her face lost colour, and her breathing quickened, as she answered—

"Well, what then?"

"You were seen by friends of my client, and mistaken for her, and the result was a scandal which has seriously affected that lady. Now, in the event of a libel suit, which is very likely to arise out of that scandal, it will be in your power to put matters straight by stepping into the witness-box, and stating that you were Colonel Rannock's travelling companion in Algiers, and Corsica, and Sardinia last winter. The lady will be in court, and the likeness between you and her will explain the mistake."

"I'll see you and your lady client in—— first!" answered the termagant. "I wonder at your cheek in coming to ask a lady to give herself away like that. You just make yourself scarce, Mr. Faunce," looking at his card. "I haven't another word to say to you."

"Oh yes, you have, Mrs. Randall. You have got to ask me what recompense I am prepared to offer you for your assistance in this little matter."

"I don't believe a word of your story; and I want to see you outside that door."

"Come, come, madam. Is it reasonable to be so touchy with a man who comes to propose a very profitable transaction?"

"What do you mean by profitable?"

"I mean that in the event of the libel suit coming off, and your going into the witness-box and swearing that you were with Rannock from the beginning to the end of that little tour, I am prepared to pay you a hundred pounds. A hundred pounds for one morning's work. Not so bad, eh?"

Her colour had come back, and, after a long scrutiny of Faunce's amiable countenance, she seemed reassured.

"Sit down," she said, and seated herself opposite him, with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands.

He noted the wedding-ring, and two or three trumpery turquoise and garnet rings on her left hand. Her day of splendour was past, and the spoils of her youth had vanished.

"A hundred ain't much, if your client is a rich woman," she said. "Of course, I can guess who she is—Lady Perivale. I've been told I'm like her. If it's her, she can afford to pay two hundred quid as easy as one. And I ain't going to stand up in court and tell my life and adventures for a lower figure."

"You are a hard one, Mrs. Randall."

"I'm a hard-up one, Mr. Faunce. There's no use denying it when you see me in such a beggarly hole as this. I ain't used to it. I've lived like a lady ever since I was eighteen years old, and this beastly lodging-house gets upon my nerves. That's why I was so nasty with you when you came in," she concluded, with a little laugh that didn't sound quite genuine.

"Well, Mrs. Randall, if you oblige my client I know she will deal generously with you."

"Two hundred quid paid down before I go into the box; not a penny less."

"We'll see about it. In the mean time, to show good faith, there's a trifle on account," said Faunce, handing her a ten-pound note.

He would have offered her more had he found her in better surroundings, but he reckoned the rooms she was in at ten shillings a week, and he thought she had come to her lowest stage.

"Thanks," she said, putting the note in a shabby porte-monnaie, whose contents Faunce's eye discovered in the instant of its opening—sixpence and a few coppers.

The door opened suddenly at this moment, and Faunce, who sat opposite, caught one brief glimpse of the man who opened it, and who, on seeing him, stepped back, shut it quickly, and ran downstairs. Faunce started up, and was at the window in time to see the visitor leave the house, and walk down the street. He was a big man, with broad shoulders and a bull neck, flashily dressed, and with a fox-terrier at his heels.

"I'm sorry I frightened your friend away," said Faunce.

"Oh, it don't matter. He can come another time if he wants to see me," Mrs. Randall answered carelessly.

That sensitive complexion of hers had paled at the interruption, just as at the mention of Rannock's name, and a gloomy look had come into her eyes. The visitor could hardly have been the bringer of pleasant things.

"An old friend of yours?" hazarded Faunce.

"Oh lord, yes; old enough! I've known him since I was a kid."

"But apparently not a favourite of yours?"

"I've got no favourites," she answered curtly. "All I want is to go my own way, and not to be bothered."

"Nobody can call that an unreasonable desire, madam. And now will you be so very kind as to oblige me with one of your photographs—one that, in your own opinion, does you most justice."

"Then it had better be one that wasn't taken yesterday," she said. "They wipe the wrinkles out, but they can't hide the lantern jaws. Oh, you can have a photo if you want one; I've got plenty. The photographers were the plague of my life when I was on the boards, and as long as I was about London, driving my carriage. But they've left off worrying now. There's new faces in the market."

"None handsomer than yours, madam."

She dragged open a reluctant drawer in an ill-made mahogany sideboard, and produced half a dozen cabinet photographs, from which Faunce selected two of the best, with polite acknowledgment of the favour.

"You have my address, Mrs. Randall," he said, rising, and taking up his hat; "let me know if you change your quarters."

"I shan't be able to do that—on a tenner," she said; "but it will keep me out of the workhouse for a week or two."

"By-the-by, can you tell me where Colonel Rannock is to be found at this present time?" Faunce asked, as he shook hands with her.

Her hand was in his when he asked the question, and he felt it grow cold. She was fond of Rannock, he thought—fond of him, and angry with him for abandoning her.

"No, I can't," she answered, looking at him steadily, but with the same pale change in her face that he had noted before.

"I'm told he went to San Francisco, viâ New York, on his way to the Alaska goldfields," he said.

"Yes, I believe he went to the goldfields."

"Do you know when he started?"

"Some time in March. I don't remember the date."

"Do you remember by what line he went—whether from Liverpool or Southampton?"

"I know nothing about him—after he left London."

"Well, Mrs. Randall, expect to hear from me soon. Good-bye."

Faunce left her, pleased with his success. Everything was now easy. There was nothing wanted but the audacious libel, which should afford ground for an action; and that, as Mr. Faunce told Lady Perivale, would be forthcoming.

He was satisfied, but he was also thoughtful. There had been something unaccountable in the woman's manner: that strange mixture of anger and apprehension, the sick, white look that came over her face when she spoke of Rannock. Something evil there was assuredly—some hidden thing in her mind which made that name a sound of fear.

He had studied the woman intently during the quarter of an hour's tête-à-tête, and he did not think that she was a bad woman, from the criminal point of view. He did not think she was treacherous or cruel. If any evil thing had befallen Rannock, the evil was not her doing. And, after all, her agitation might be only that of a woman of shattered nerves and quick feelings, who had loved intensely and been badly treated—cast off and left in poverty—by the man she loved. It might be that the perturbed look which he had taken for fear was not fear, but resentment.

He telegraphed to Lady Perivale, asking for an appointment, and presented himself at Runnymede Grange on the following afternoon. He had not seen his client since their first interview, and he was astonished at the change in her countenance and manner. On the former occasion she had been all gloom: to-day she was all brightness. The nervous irritability, the fiery indignation were gone. She treated the subject of her wrongs in a business-like tone, almost as a bagatelle.

"Something has happened since I saw her. Something that has changed the whole tenor of her life," thought Faunce.

He had a shrewd idea of what that "something" was a few minutes later, when Lady Perivale told him that she would like a friend, in whose judgment she had confidence, to hear his report; and when Arthur Haldane came into the room—

"This is Mr. Faunce," said Grace, in a tone that showed her friend had been told all about him; and the two men saluted each other politely, without any hint of their former meeting.

Faunce told Lady Perivale that he had found the woman who resembled her, and that her evidence would be ready when it was required.

"She will not shrink from standing up in court and acknowledging that she was with Colonel Rannock in Algiers?" asked Lady Perivale, wonderingly.

"No, she won't shrink—provided the reward is good enough. She is prepared to tell the truth—and—shame the devil—for two hundred pounds."

"Give her ten times as much if she wants it!" cried Lady Perivale. "But what are we to do if nobody libels me? Messrs. Rosset have sent me two or three newspaper paragraphs. They are very insolent, but I'm afraid one could hardly go to law about them."

At Faunce's request she produced the impertinent snippets, pasted on flimsy green paper.

From the Morning Intelligencer: "Lady Perivale, whose small dinners and suppers after the opera were so popular last season, has not done any entertaining this year. She is living in her house in Grosvenor Square, but is spending the summer in strict retirement. She may be seen in the morning riding with the 'liver brigade,' and she occasionally takes an afternoon drive in the Park; but she has joined in none of the season's festivities—a fact that has caused some gossip in the inner circles of the smart world."

From Miranda's "Crême de la Crême," in the Hesperus: "Among the beauties at Lady Morningside's ball, Lady Perivale was conspicuous by her absence, although last season she was so prominent a personage in the Morningside set. What can be the cause of this self-effacement on the part of a young and wealthy widow who had the ball of fashion at her feet last year?"

There were other paragraphs of the same calibre.

"You are right, Lady Perivale," Faunce said, after having gravely read them. "These are not good enough. We must wait for something better."

"And you think that somebody will libel me?"

"I am—almost—sure that you will be called upon to punish some very gross libel within the next few weeks."

"Then I hope I shall have the pleasure of horsewhipping the writer, and the editor who publishes it!" said Haldane, hotly.

"If you please, Mr. Haldane," cried Faunce, earnestly, "nothing of that kind! It is necessary that Lady Perivale should be publicly insulted, in order that she may be publicly justified. Nothing short of the appearance of the woman who was mistaken for her ladyship can give the lie direct to the scandal. I must beg, therefore, that the writer of the libel may be held secure from personal violence."

Haldane was silent. His fingers were itching for a stout malacca and for a scoundrel's back upon which to exercise it. He would have given so much to focus the malignant slander that had followed the woman he loved, and had made even him, her adoring lover, begin to doubt her, with a wavering faith of which he was now so deeply ashamed.

Oh, to have some one to punish with sharp physical pain, some craven hound to offer up as a sacrifice to his own remorse!

CHAPTER XII.

"In the mute August afternoon They trembled to some undertune Of music in the silver air; Great pleasure was it to be there Till green turned duskier and the moon Coloured the corn-sheaves like gold hair."

The atmosphere of Grace Perivale's life was changed. John Faunce's keen eye for character had not erred in this particular case. Lady Perivale at Runnymede Grange was not the same woman the detective had conversed with in Grosvenor Square.

Happy love leaves no room for troubled thoughts in a woman's mind; and from the hour when Grace learnt that Arthur Haldane was her trusting and devoted lover, she began to forget the frivolous friends whose desertion she had so deeply resented. She forgot to be angry, because she had ceased to care. That outer world, the world of Mayfair and Belgravia, with its sordid interests and petty ambitions, the world of South African millionaires and new-made nobility, the world in which every smart personage was living in some other smart personage's house, and everybody who wasn't accredited with millions was suspected of being on the brink of insolvency; that élite, over-civilized and decadent world—dazzling and alluring in the phosphorescent radiance of decay—seemed so remote from all that makes happiness, that it could not be worth thinking about.

Her world now lay within so narrow a circle. Her world began and ended in a poet, critic, and romancer, whose dreams, thoughts, opinions, and aspirations, filled her mind to overflowing. He was her world, Arthur Haldane, the man of letters, to whom she was to be married as soon as this preposterous scandal was swept into the world's great ragbag of forgotten things.

The words had been spoken at last, words that had been in his heart two years ago, when Grace Perivale's beauty first flashed like sudden sunshine into the level grey of his life, and when he discovered that behind the beauty there was a brain and a heart.

He had held himself in check then, had courted her society under a mask of indifference, for more than one reason. First, because she was rich, and a much-talked-of prize in the matrimonial market; next, because of his jealous fear that Rannock's showy accomplishments and charm of manner had won her heart.

"How could I hope to prevail—a dry-as-dust scribbler—against a man who had been called irresistible?" he asked, when Grace reproached him for his aloofness in that first year of their acquaintance.

"A dry-as-dust scribbler who had written the most pathetic story of the last half century. Every tear I shed over 'Mary Deane' was a link that bound me to the man who wrote the book. Of course I don't pretend that if the man had been fat and elderly—like Richardson—I should have fallen in love with him. But even then I should have valued him, as the young women of those days valued the fat little printer. I should have courted his society, and hung upon his words."

"It is not every novelist who is so lucky," said Haldane. "I think I am the first, since Balzac, whose book has won him the love that crowns a life."

What fairer Eden could there be than that reach of the Thames in a fine August? Other men were turning their faces northward with dogs and guns, ready for havoc on "the twelfth," or waiting impatiently for "the first." But Arthur Haldane, who was no mean shot, and had invitations to half a dozen country houses, behaved like a man who had never lifted a gun to his shoulder. The veriest cockney could not have been happier in that river idlesse, in which a punt-pole was his most strenuous exertion, and to boil a tea-kettle his most exciting sport. The summer days, the golden evenings were never too long, and the crimson of the sunset seemed always a surprise.

"I know you must be wanting to kill things," Grace said one evening; "and you must hate me keeping you dawdling here. I am glad you are not grouse-shooting, for I have always dreaded the moors since my poor Hector caught his death in the ceaseless downpour of one dreadful August day. But why do you not go to your Norfolk friends for the partridge-shooting?"

"You are very kind and thoughtful, but my Norfolk friends were always a trifle boring, and they would be intolerable now, if they kept me away from you."

"That is very flattering to my vanity. But I will not have you tied to my apron-string."

"I will tell you if ever the string galls. Come what may, I am not going to leave the neighbourhood of London till your lawsuit has been settled."

They hoped that everything would be over before the late autumn, so that they could start for Cairo at the right season; and from Cairo they might go on to India. They were of a humour to ramble over the world together; but in the mean time life was so sweet in the Thames backwaters, among flowering rushes and under dipping willows, and on the lawn at Runnymede Grange, that they seldom went as much as a mile afield. Lovers are like children at play in a garden, who dream of the days when they will be grown up and sail through blue skies in a balloon, to find where the world leaves off.

Grace looked back, in many a happy reverie, and recalled that year before the beginning of the scandal, when the man who was now her impassioned lover had seemed to her cold and distant. Only by his seriousness in seeking her society, his grave pleasure in ministering to her love of books, and bringing her in touch with the choicest things in contemporary literature, could Lady Perivale discover that his friendship was any more than the admiring regard which every intelligent man must needs feel for a young and beautiful woman who is also intelligent. Much as Haldane admired beauty—from its spiritual essence in a picture by Burne-Jones, to its earthliest form in a Roman flower-girl on the steps below the Church of the Trinity—his affections would never have been taken captive by beauty allied with silliness. He was a man to whom community of thought was an essential element in love. And, in Grace Perivale, he had discovered mind and imagination in sympathy with his own thoughts and dreams; and he was completely happy in her company, happy to be her friend, yet hesitating to become her lover, till, in some future day, her intimate knowledge of his character might make it impossible for her to misread his motives.

And then had come the bitter blow, when he, who had tortured himself with jealous apprehensions of her liking for Colonel Rannock, heard the story of those chance meetings in the South.

He had been vehement in his denunciation of the slander. If the story were so far true that she was the person who had been seen with Rannock, could any one who knew her doubt for a moment that he had a legal right to her company, that they had been quietly married, and, for some reason of their own, chose to delay the publication of their marriage.

He was laughed at for his vehemence, and for his simplicity.

"Did you never hear of a woman throwing her cap over the mill?" asked his friend. "Have you lived so long in a civilized world, and don't you know that women are always doing the most unexpected things? Have you known no delicately-reared woman take to the gin-bottle and drink herself to death? Have you never heard of the household angel—the devoted wife and mother—who, after twenty years of honourable wedlock, went off with her daughter's Italian singing-master? And these rich women are the very sort who go wrong. Their opulence demoralizes them. They are petty Cleopatras, and pine for the fierce passion of a Cæsar or a Marc Antony."

There was not much stirring in London in the early part of that season, and the scandal about Lady Perivale was dinned into Haldane's ears wherever he went. Young women talked about it, in allusive speech, with a pretence of naïveté. What was the story? They pretended not to know what it all meant; but they knew their mothers were not going to call upon her ever again; so they opined that it must be something very dreadful, considering the sort of people their mothers went on visiting and entertaining season after season. It must be something worse than the things that were said about Lady Such-and-Such, or even about Mrs. So-and-So.

Haldane heard, and the iron entered into his soul; and he held himself aloof from the woman he loved, fearing, doubting, waiting.

"If that man appears upon the scene I shall know it's all over," he thought.

He walked from his rooms in Jermyn Street to Grosvenor Square every night, and paced the pavements within view of Lady Perivale's windows, steering clear of the houses where there were parties, with awnings, and blocks of bystanders, and policemen, and linkmen. He saw the lighted windows of the morning-room, and sometimes saw a graceful shadow flit across the blind, and knew that she was there, and alone. No masculine form ever passed between the lamp and the windows. Susan Rodney appeared there once or twice a week, and he sometimes saw her driven away in a humble four-wheeler, on the stroke of eleven. But the figure he feared to see never crossed the threshold.

And then a man at his club told him that Rannock had not been in London that season. He had gone under. He was said to be in America, but that was as might be. He had come to the end of his tether.

It had been a time of agonizing doubt, expiated by almost as agonizing remorse. But it was over now, and life was a dream of bliss—a dream of the fast coming days when Grace Perivale would be his wife, when the evening shadows would bring no parting, the night no loneliness.

Susan Rodney was an ideal third for a pair of lovers, as she had plenty of interests and occupations of her own, spending all her leisure in the composition of a light opera which she had been engaged upon for years, with only a faint hope of ever getting it produced; perhaps in Brussels, perhaps in Frankfort, she dared hardly think of London.

Absorbed in the thrilling delight of a quintette, or a chorus, Sue only gave the lovers her company when they wanted it, which they very often did, as her bright and cheerful spirit harmonized with their own happiness. They both liked her, and were both very sure of her sympathy.

In one of their garden têtes-à-tête, their talk having drifted on to Haldane's famous novel, the one work of fiction which had made his reputation with the general reader, he confessed to having nearly finished a second story.

"I only began it in May," he said, "during a fit of insomnia. My mind was full of scorpions, like Macbeth's, and I think I should have gone mad if I had not summoned those shadows from the unseen world, and set myself to anatomize them. It is a bitter book, a story of Fate's worst irony; and in a better period of English literature—in the day of Scott, or Dickens and Thackeray—it would have stood no chance of being widely read. But we have changed all that. This is the day of cruel books. Most of us have turned our pens into scalpels. And I think this story of mine is cruel enough to hit the public taste."

"There is nothing that touches your life or mine in it?" Grace asked, with a touch of alarm.

"No, no, no; not one thought. I wrote it while I was trying to forget you—and trying still harder to forget myself. The shadows that move in it bear not the faintest resemblance to you or me. It is a sordid book, a study of human meanness, and the misery that dull minds make for themselves: pale-grey miseries that gradually draw to a focus and deepen to blood-red tragedy. But it has one redeeming feature—one really good man—a city missionary, humbly born, plain, self-educated, but a Christ-like character. I should have burnt the book unfinished but for him. He came to my relief when my story and I were sinking into a slough of despond."

"You talk as if the web were not of your weaving, as if you had no power over the figures that move in it."

"I have no such power, Grace. They come to me as mysteriously as the shadows in a dream, and their spell is strong. I cannot create them; and I cannot change them."

She wanted him to read his story to her before it was printed; but this was just the one thing he could not do. He could not imagine himself reading his own words.

"It would make me hate my work," he said. "Every clumsy phrase, every banal word, would leap out of the page and gibber at me as I read. I will bring you the first copy fresh from the press, and when you have read it you shall tell me afterwards whether I am ever to write another story."

"You shall write another, and another, and go on writing," she answered gaily. "You will give me a second world, a world peopled with strange or lovely creatures—villains as colossal as Milton's Satan, heroines as innocent as his Eve. My life in the world of your imagining will be almost as intense as your own. You will give me a second existence, better than the everyday world. You will tell me about your dream-people, won't you, Arthur, as they spring into life?"

"The fear is that I shan't be able to refrain from talking of them, to the other half of my soul."

"You cannot weary the other half by much talking."

"Do you think not? I can imagine a husband's art becoming an unspeakable bore to his wife."

"Not if she loves him and loves his art."

"Ah, there's the rub."

Lady Perivale was recalled from the shadow-world of the novelist by the substantial apparition of John Faunce, who arrived unannounced on a sultry afternoon, and found her sitting in the garden with Mr. Haldane and Miss Rodney, at a table strewn with all the new magazines and some of the old poets, in those miniature editions that so lend themselves to being carried about and not read.

"I thought I might venture to call without notice," said Faunce, "as I have some rather important news for your ladyship."

"Indeed!"

"A libel—a most audacious libel," said Faunce, taking a paper from his pocket.

"Where? where? What paper?" Grace and Sue exclaimed excitedly.

"Strange to say, in a society paper of most respectable character, though of a somewhat limited circulation," replied Faunce; "a paper which, to my knowledge, has never offended in this manner until now—the Bon Ton and Cricket Review, a journal printed at Kennington, and mostly circulated in the South of London."

He handed the paper to Lady Perivale, who turned the leaves hurriedly, too agitated to read a line for the first few minutes.

It was an eminently proper paper—a paper that told of dances at Tooting, private theatricals at Norwood, and At Homes at Tulse Hill, a paper that described dresses and millinery, and gave receipts for cornflower creams and jellies made without wine, for cleaning kid gloves and making golden hair-dye. Pages were devoted to the Oval, and other pages to school cricket. There was the usual short story of the ultra-smart world. There was a Denmark Hill celebrity at home. There was everything nice and proper that a Society paper should have; and there, amidst all this respectability—like a hideous wen upon a handsome face—appeared three atrocious paragraphs about Lady Perivale's tête-à-tête tour with Colonel Rannock; the first setting forth the surprise of the lady's friends on meeting her travelling alone with a man of dubious character; the second debating whether the freedom of fin-de-siècle manners would not permit of any lady travelling with any gentleman without causing scandal; the third, of a somewhat grosser tone, winding up with a couplet from Pope:

"Nor Cæsar's empress would I deign to prove, No, make me mistress to the man I love."

"It's abominable!" cried Grace, flushing crimson, and throwing down the paper in a rage.

"And you tell me I'm not to horsewhip the scoundrel who wrote that!" said Haldane, who had read the paragraphs over her shoulder.

"I do—most decidedly," answered Faunce, edging away from him with an involuntary movement. "We wanted a libel—a gross libel—and we've got it. We are going to bring an action against the proprietor of the Bon Ton, but we are not going to put ourselves in the wrong by assaulting him first. No, sir, we shall proceed against the proprietor, editor, and printer of the Bon Ton, and we shall ask for exemplary damages."

"Damages!" exclaimed Grace. "Do you suppose I want the loathsome creature's money?"

"Why not make it a criminal suit, and send him to prison?" asked Haldane.

"I think not, sir. Her ladyship's solicitors, Messrs. Harding, have gone into the matter with me, and we are agreed that a criminal action is not advisable."

"How does this thing happen to appear so long after the circulation of the scandal?"

"Ah! that's the question," said Faunce, blandly. "You see, fashionable gossip takes a considerable time to cross the Thames and filter down to Tooting. The proprietor—and editor—lives at Tooting, and I dare say, to his mind, the slander appeared a novelty. I'm glad he didn't get hold of it sooner, for we should not have been prepared to deal with the case as we are now."

Miss Rodney had picked up the Bon Ton, and was reading the paragraphs with a frowning brow.

"How can you look at that atrocious stuff?" cried Grace, snatching the paper from her and rolling it into a ball for her poodle, who rushed across the lawn with it and then laid himself down and proceeded to tear it into shreds with his paws and teeth.

"It's lucky that isn't the only copy in existence, Lady Perivale," said Faunce.

CHAPTER XIII.

"They draw a nourishment Out of defamings, grow upon disgraces; And, when they see a virtue fortified Strongly above the battery of their tongues, Oh, how they cast to sink it!"

One of the most interesting cases in the Law Courts that winter was Perivale v. Brown Smith, a claim of £10,000 damages on account of a gross libel published in a paper of which the defendant was editor and proprietor.

Brown Smith pleaded justification, and it was said that he was going to make a good fight, and that he would produce witnesses who had met the lady and gentleman on their travels as Mr. and Mrs. Randall.

The case came on late in November, when there were a good many people in town, staying for the weeks before Christmas, or passing through; and the court was packed with smart clothes and well-known faces. Conspicuous among these curious impertinents were two well-known figures in the little world of Belgravia and Mayfair: Lady Morningside, whose ample person, clothed in black satin and chinchilla, filled a considerable space on the privileged seats; and the spare and wiry form of "the most honourable," her husband, a man whose weather-beaten countenance, trim whiskers and keen eye, cut-away coat and Bedford cords, indicated the indomitable sportsman.

Eye-glasses and opera-glasses glittered across the fog, and the point to which they were chiefly directed was the figure of Lady Perivale, in a neat black gown, with cape and toque of Russian sable, seated in the well of the court, with Arthur Haldane sitting beside her.

There was much whispering among the eye-glasses about the lady and her companion.

"She is as handsome as ever," said one; "I was told she had gone off dreadfully. Rather audacious to bring this action, ain't it?"

"Rather a dangerous move, I should think."

"Oh! she's got Sir Joseph Jalland. He always wins when there's a pretty woman to orate about. You'll see, he'll make the jury shed tears."

"What odds will you give me against that fat man in the corner being the first to weep?"

"Hush! It's going to begin."

Mr. Waltham, Sir Joseph's junior, opened the pleadings in an undertone, which sent all the picture-hats distracted. They thought they were losing the fun. And then a thrill ran round the Court as Sir Joseph Jalland rose in his might, adjusted his pince-nez, trifled with the leaves of his brief, and then slowly began to unfold his case. The deep, grave voice made all the aigrets shiver, and every lorgnette and binocular was turned to him.

"This greatly injured lady—this lady, whose life of blameless purity, life spent in an exalted sphere—in the sheltered haven of a congenial marriage, this lady whose spotless character should have shielded her from the lightest breath of slander, has been made a target for the salaried traducer of a venomous rag that calls itself a newspaper, and has been allowed to drivel its poisonous paragraphs week after week, secure in its insignificance, and a disgrace to the Press to which it pretends to belong," flinging down the South London Bon Ton on the desk before him, with a movement of unutterable loathing, as if his hand recoiled instinctively from the foul contact. "She has been made the subject of a slander so futile, so preposterous, that one marvels less at the malice of the writer than at his imbecility. A woman of gentle birth and exalted position, hemmed round and protected by all those ceremonial ramparts that are at once the restraint and privilege of wealth and social status, is supposed to have roamed the Continent with her paramour, braving public opinion with the brazen hardihood of the trained courtesan."

This and much more, in its proper place and sequence, did Sir Joseph's deep voice give to the listening ears of the Court, before he summoned his first witness, in the person of the plaintiff, Grace Perivale.

Her evidence was given in a steady voice and with perfect self-control.

"Did you ever travel on the Continent with Colonel Rannock?"

"Never."

"Were you in Corsica in the January of this year?"

"No."

"Or in Algiers in February?"

"No."

"Will you be so good as to say where you were living during January and February last?"

"I was at my villa near Porto Maurizio from November last year until the beginning of April in this year."

Sir Joseph had no more questions to ask. The defendant's counsel exercised his right to cross-examine the witness, who stood facing the Court, calm and proud, but deadly pale.

"Were these paragraphs in the—er"—looking at his brief—"Bon Ton, the first you had heard of a scandal associating your name with Colonel Rannock's, Lady Perivale?" he asked blandly.

"It was the first time such a scandal had appeared in print."

"But the scandal was not unfamiliar to you?"

"No."

"You had heard of it before?"

"Yes."

"On several occasions?"

"I was told that such a thing had been said."

"And that your friends believed it?"

"Not one!" the witness answered indignantly. "No friend of mine believed one word of the story!"

She flushed and paled again as she spoke. She shot one involuntary glance towards the man who was so much more than a friend, and who had almost believed that slander.

"You will admit, I think, Lady Perivale, that the story had been common talk for a long time before this society journal got hold of it?"

"I know nothing about common talk."

"That will do, Lady Perivale," said the counsel.

Lady Perivale's butler and maid were the next witnesses.

They had been with their mistress at Porto Maurizio from November to April, during which period she had never been absent from the villa for twenty-four hours.

The defendant's counsel cross-examined both witnesses, and made a praiseworthy—but unsuccessful—attempt to cast ridicule and doubt upon the two old servants, whom he tried hard to place before the jury as overpaid and venal hirelings, willing to perjure themselves to any extent for their employer. He gratified his professional vanity by letting off two or three forensic bon-mots, and succeeded in raising a laugh or two at the expense of the country-bred Abigail and the dignified London butler; but the endeavour to weaken their testimony was an ignominious failure.

"That, my lord, would complete my case," said Sir Joseph Jalland, "were it not essential that the falsehood and the folly of the slander in this scurrilous rag," striking the Bon Ton with his open hand, "should be stamped out at once and for ever; and in order that this may be effectually done—to prove indubitably that Lady Perivale was not with Colonel Rannock during his Continental wanderings last winter, I shall produce the person who was with him."

Miss Kate Delmaine stepped into the box, admirably dressed, like Lady Perivale, in a black cloth gown, and wearing a sable toque almost of the same fashion. A murmur of surprise ran round the Court, an excited whispering and twittering, which the usher hastened to suppress.

Seen in that November gloom, the witness looked like Grace Perivale's double.

Kate Delmaine! There were some among the wigs and gowns, and some among the smart audience who remembered her in her brief career, a girl of startling beauty, whose dazzling smile had beamed across the footlights at the Spectacular Theatre for a season or two. They had seen, admired, and forgotten her. She rose before them like the ghost of their youth.

"Will you tell me where you were living last February, Miss Delmaine?" Sir Joseph began quietly, when her carmine lips had hovered over the Book: "from the 7th to the 25th?"

"I was at the Mecca Hotel, in Algiers."

"Alone?"

"No. Colonel Rannock was with me."

"You were in Corsica and in Sardinia before that, I believe?"

"Yes."

"Also with Colonel Rannock?"

"Yes."

"In what capacity were you travelling with him?"

The phrase produced a faint titter, and the younger of the smart young ladies became suddenly occupied with their muffs and lace handkerchiefs.

"We were travelling as Mr. and Mrs. Randall, if that's what you want to know!" Miss Delmaine replied, with a look that challenged the Court to think the worst of her.

"That is precisely what I want to know. You were going about with Colonel Rannock as his wife—under the nom de guerre of Randall?"

"Yes."

"Good! Pray, Miss Delmaine, can you tell me where Colonel Rannock is at this present time?"

The witness had given her evidence in an agitated and angry manner from the beginning. The bloom on her cheeks was hectic, and not rouge, as the smart young women thought. Her eyes were unnaturally bright, splendid eyes, that flashed angry fire. She had stood up boldly in her place, defying the world's contempt; but it seemed as if the effort had been too much for her. She looked distractedly round the court, turned white as ashes, and fell in a dead faint, before she had answered the counsel's question, which was irrelevant, and might not have been allowed.

There was the usual rush with glasses of water and smelling-salts, and the witness was carried out of court.

The Court then adjourned for luncheon. The picture-hats all waited, sniffed salts and eau de Cologne, nibbled chocolates, hungry, and yawning for want of air, but determined to see it out.

There was bitter disappointment for the curious impertinents when, on the judge returning to his seat, Sir Joseph Jalland informed his lordship that Mr. Brown Smith had offered an ample apology for the offensive article in his paper, and that his client had no desire to continue the action in a vindictive manner.

The judge highly approved of this course.

"If Lady Perivale brought this action in order to clear her character of a most unmerited aspersion, she has been completely successful, and can afford to be lenient," said his lordship, with feeling.

The defendant was to publish his apology, both in his own paper and such other papers as Sir Joseph should name. He was to destroy every number of his paper still unsold, and to call in any numbers remaining in the hands of the retail trade, and was further to give one hundred guineas to any charitable institution selected by the plaintiff.

Only to Lady Perivale's solicitors and to Mr. Faunce was it known that the defendant would not be out of pocket either by this hundred guineas, or for the costs of the action, against which a considerable sum had been paid into his banking account by Mr. Faunce, before the libel—written by that very Faunce, in collaboration with one of the ladies who did the Bon Ton gossip—appeared in Mr. Brown Smith's popular journal.

Faunce had said there would be a libel when it was wanted, and Faunce, who was an old friend of Brown Smith's, had produced the libel. Nobody was any the worse, and Society was deeply humiliated at discovering how cruelly it had misjudged a charming member of its own privileged body. Lady Morningside and her husband made their way to Lady Perivale directly the judge left his seat, and the old Marquis, with an old-fashioned gallantry that recalled "Cupid" Palmerston, bent over Grace's ungloved hand and kissed it: a demonstration that thrilled the smart hats and eye-glasses.

Cards and letters of friendly congratulation poured in upon Lady Perivale at Grosvenor Square that evening—letters from the people who had cut her, making believe that the aloofness had been all on her side.

"And now, dear, after this plucky assertion of yourself, I hope you are not going to shut yourself from your old friends any more. It has been so sad to see No. 101 empty all the season, and not even to know where you were to be found," concluded one of those false friends.

Grace flung the letters into her waste-paper basket with angry scorn.

"To think people can dare to pretend they did not know I was in town, when I drove in the park nearly every day!" she exclaimed.

"I hope you are satisfied, madam," said Faunce, when he called upon Lady Perivale the day after the trial.

No one had seen Faunce in court, though Faunce had seen and heard all that happened there. His work had been finished before the case came on, and the family solicitors in Bedford Row took all the credit of the successful result, and congratulated Lady Perivale upon their acumen in retaining Sir Joseph Jalland.

"I hope you are satisfied, madam," Faunce said modestly, when he called in Grosvenor Square, in response to Lady Perivale's request.

"I am more than satisfied with your cleverness in bringing the wretched business to an issue," she said; "and now all I hope is that I may be able to forget it, and that I shall never hear Colonel Rannock's name again."

"I hope you will not, madam—not in any unpleasant connection," Faunce answered gravely.

"I must refer you for your professional charges to my lawyers, Mr. Faunce," pursued Grace. "But I must beg you to accept the enclosed as a token of my sincere gratitude for the trouble you have taken, and as a souvenir of your success." She handed him an envelope.

"I assure you, Lady Perivale, I do not require anything beyond the ordinary payment for my time and trouble."

"Oh, but you must take this, to please me," she answered. "I want you to remember that I value your services at more than their professional price."

She gave him her hand at parting, as she had given it at the end of their first interview, and he thought more of that cordial handshake than of her present, which he found to be a cheque for £500.

In the third week in December there was a very quiet wedding at St. George's, Hanover Square, a marriage which was celebrated at half-past eight o'clock in the morning, and at which the only witnesses were Susan Rodney and Mr. George Howard, newly returned from Pekin—a wedding so early and so quiet as to escape the most invincible of the society paragraphists, the insatiable pens that had been writing about this very marriage as an imminent event.

The bride's dark-grey cloth gown, sable-bordered travelling-cloak, and black chip hat offered no suggestion of wedding raiment. The breakfast was a parti carré in the dining-room at Grosvenor Square; and the married lovers were able to leave Charing Cross at eleven by the Continental Express without provoking any more notice from the crowd than the appearance of a beautiful woman, perfectly dressed for the business in hand, and leading the most perfect thing in brown poodles, must inevitably attract. The honeymooners were established at their hotel in Cairo before the paragraphists had wind of the marriage.

CHAPTER XIV.

"But now with lights reverse the old hours retire, And the last hour is shod with fire from hell. This is the end of every man's desire."

During the four months which had elapsed since Faunce's first visit to Kate Delmaine, alias Mrs. Randall, the detective had contrived to keep an observant eye upon the lady; but he had not succeeded in arriving on a more friendly footing with her, although he had obliged her on several occasions with a small advance on account of the promised reward.

He had called three or four times at the lodging-house in the dingy street near the Thames, and she had received him civilly. He had detected a lurking anxiety under the assumed lightness of her manner—a carking care, that seemed to him of some deeper nature than the need of money, or the sense of having fallen upon evil days. He would not have been surprised to see her depressed and out of spirits; but he was at a loss to understand that ever-present anxiety, and that nervous irritability which seemed allied with fear.

He remarked to her, in a friendly way, on the state of her nerves, and advised her to see a doctor. He urged her to live well, and to take the utmost care of herself, to which end he was liberal with those ten-pound notes on account.

"I want you to look your best when you appear in court," he said, "to show that you are every bit as handsome a woman as Lady Perivale."

"He always said I was," she answered, with a sigh.

"Colonel Rannock? He knew and admired you before he ever saw Lady Perivale, didn't he, now?" asked Faunce, who, for reasons of his own, was very anxious to make her talk of Rannock; but she answered curtly—

"Whether he did or whether he didn't, it's no business of yours."

The gloomy look had come back to her face; and Faunce was more and more convinced that, whatever her anxiety was, it was in some way connected with Colonel Rannock.

He had brought Rannock's name into the conversation whenever he could, and with an artful persistence, and the name had always a depressing influence. She spoke of him reluctantly, and she seldom spoke of him dry-eyed. Once she spoke of him in a past tense. It could be no common fate that had left such aching memories.

Without actually "shadowing" the lady during this interval, he had contrived to keep acquainted with her movements and associations, and he had discovered that almost her only visitor was the man whom he had seen on that first day—the man who had opened the door, glanced into the room, and hurried away at sight of a stranger. Even this person was not a frequent visitor, but he called at irregular hours, which indicated a friendly footing.

It had not taken Faunce very long to identify this person as an individual well-known to the patrons of the prize-ring—a pugilist called Bolisco, who had been one of Sir Hubert Withernsea's protégés, and had often sat at meat and drink in the very much mixed society in the Abbey Road. Bolisco had been at the zenith of his renown ten years ago, when Withernsea was burning that brief candle of his days which had guttered into the grave before he was thirty; but the pugilist's reputation had considerably declined since then. He had been beaten ignominiously in three or four public encounters, had seen his star go down before younger and steadier men, and was no longer good for anything better than a glove-fight at a second-rate tavern. One of those glove-fights had ended fatally for Bolisco's opponent; and there had been some among the lookers-on who accused him of brutal roughness towards a weaker man, which had resulted in death. No blame had attached to Bolisco in the opinion of the coroner's jury; but the patrons of the Fancy had given him the cold shoulder since that unlucky accident, which had happened more than a year ago.

In the course of that semi-shadowing Faunce had found out some details of Kate Delmaine's life during the last half-year. He found that she had occupied the shabby first-floor in Selburne Street since the beginning of March, that she had come there straight from "abroad," and that her trunks were covered with foreign labels—Ajaccio, Algiers, Marseilles, Paris, Calais. She had arrived with a great load of personal luggage, fine clothes, and other portable property, the greater part of which had been gradually made away with. She would go out in a cab with a large cardboard box, and come home half an hour afterwards on foot, having left box and contents at a pawnbroker's in the King's Road.

Betsy, the sixteen-year-old maid-of-all-work, from whom Faunce derived most of his information, had been a close observer of the first-floor lodger, and was pleased to impart her knowledge and her impressions to the amiable Faunce.

Mrs. Randall was very down-hearted, Betsy told him, and would sit and cry for the hour together. Did she drink? Well, only a brandy-and-soda now and then, but she used to stick a needle into her arm that made her sleepy, and she would lie on the sofa all the afternoon and evening sometimes, like a dead thing. The girl had heard her moan and groan in her sleep when she took her a cup of tea in the morning, and she would wake with a frightened look, and stare about her "wild-like," as if she didn't know where she was.

Had she many visitors?

None, except the dark gentleman with the broken nose; and he did not come very often, or stay long. They had words sometimes—very high words—and once, in one of their quarrels, she went into hysterics, and was "regular bad," and screamed at him like a lunatic. The missus had been obliged to go upstairs to her, and tell her she wouldn't stand such goings-on any longer. She'd have to clear out if she couldn't behave like a lady.

All this to hear did Mr. Faunce seriously incline; and he now began to do a little shadowing on Mr. Bolisco's account.

He knew that in all probability he was wasting his time; but the old hunter's instinct of the Scotland Yard days was upon him, and he wanted to know what ailed Kate Delmaine over and above the natural depression of a woman of her class out of luck.

He had provided for her comfort, had been to her as a guardian angel, as the time for her appearance in Court drew near. He had advised her how to dress the part, and had ascertained what Lady Perivale was going to wear, in order that Mrs. Randall's costume should in some degree resemble hers. He had gone to Regent Street on the day before the case came on, and bought a fur toque, after the fashion of Lady Perivale's sable.

"It is only a paltry bit of skunk," Mrs. Randall declared contemptuously, after she had blown the fur about and examined it with a depreciatory scrutiny; but when she put it on before the cloudy looking-glass in her parlour she owned to being pleased with herself.

"I wonder if you believe I was once a handsome woman," she said to Faunce.

"I know you are a handsome woman now, and that you've only to take a little more care of yourself to be as handsome as ever you were," he answered gravely, being a kind-hearted man and really sorry for her.

"That's skittles!" she answered. "I've come to the end of my tether. I've nothing to live for, and I'm sick of wishing I was dead, for it don't come off. And I don't want to kill myself; that's too cheap. I hate the idea of an inquest, and 'The deceased was once known as this,' and 'The deceased was once t'other.' I'm a lady, Mr. Faunce, and I loathe being magged about in the newspapers."

Now that Lady Perivale's action had ceased to be a nine days' wonder, and the lady herself was a happy wife, travelling by easy stages towards the land of ancient monuments and modern amusements, pyramids and golf links, Sphinxes and croquet, colossal sepulchres of unknown Pharaohs, and monster hotels with unknown tariffs; now that he had accomplished his task and had been handsomely rewarded, it might seem that John Faunce's interest in Grace Perivale's double would cease and determine. Strange to say that interest grew rather than diminished, and he contrived to see his little friend, the lodging-house slavey, once or twice a week, and so to be informed of all Mrs. Randall's proceedings; indeed, his love of detail led him to ask Betsy for an old blotting-book of the first-floor lodger's, which had been flung upon the dustheap, and which the girl had retrieved from that foul receptacle for the sake of its picture cover.

"Most people collect something," he told Betsy; "my fancy is old blotting-paper."

"Well, I never did!" exclaimed the damsel. "I know many as collecks postage-stamps, but I never heerd as blotting-paper was valuable!"

"It is, Betsy—sometimes," in token of which Mr. Faunce gave her a crown piece for the ragged book, with its inky impress of Mrs. Randall's sprawling penmanship.

Faunce had paid his witness the balance of the promised reward, £120, in bank-notes, the evening after the trial, and he was prepared to hear she had taken wing.

Surely with a sum of money in hand she would leave that dismal street, and hurry away to some more attractive locality. To Paris, perhaps, to buy fine clothes, and flaunt her recovered beauty in the Bois; or to Monte Carlo, to try her luck at the tables. It was in the character of such a woman to squander her last hundred pounds as freely as if she had an unlimited capital behind it.

She had talked of leaving her lodgings, the little handmaiden Betsy told him, but it hadn't come off. She had given a week's notice, and then had cut up rough when the missus took a lady and gentleman to look at the rooms. She wasn't going to be chucked out like a stray dog, she'd go when she wanted, and not before.

"I don't believe she'll never go," Betsy said, with a wise air. "She ain't got it in her to make up her mind about nothink. She sits in the easy-chair all day, smokin' cigarettes and readin' a novel, or lays on the sofa, and seems only half awake. And of a evening she gets dreadful low. She says she hates the house, and won't sleep another night in it, and yet when morning comes she don't offer to go. And then, she's that under his thumb that if he say she's not to leave, go she won't."

"You mean the dark gentleman?" said Faunce.

"Of course I do. There ain't any other as I knows on."

"Do you think she is—attached—to the dark gentleman?"

"I know she's afraid of him. I've seen her turn white at his step on the stairs, and she's always upset after he's been to our place, and sits and cries as if her heart was breaking. There, I do feel sorry for her! She's a real good sort. She give me this here hat," added the slavey, tossing her beplumed and bejewelled head. "It was bought in the Harcade, and it ain't been worn above half a dozen times, only the sea-water damaged it a bit when she was travelling."

So sincere and deep-rooted was Faunce's interest in Mrs. Randall, that he took considerable pains to follow the movements of her friend Mr. Bolisco, whom he tracked to his lair in a sporting public-house at Battersea—an old, tumble-down building in a shabby street close to the river, a house that had once been a respectable roadside inn, and had once been in the country.

Faunce took some note of the famous prize-fighter's habits, which were idle and dissolute, and of his associates, who belonged to the lowest order, the ragged fringe of rascality that hangs upon the edge of the sporting world. It was sad to think that so disreputable an acquaintance could dominate the life of a fine, high-spirited creature like Kate Delmaine. But, much as he was interested in a beautiful woman, who was travelling on that dismal journey which is called "going to the dogs," Mr. Faunce felt that his evening walks with Betsy, and his occasional look in at the Gamecock at Battersea—that sporting rendezvous where Mr. Bolisco had his "diggings,"—were so much dilettante trifling, and mere waste of time. His work in relation to Kate Delmaine was finished; and whatever mystery there might be in her life, mystery involving even a crime, it was no business of his to investigate it.

Somewhat reluctantly, therefore, like a baffled hunter who turns from the dubious trail of the beast he has been pursuing, Mr. Faunce discontinued his visits to Chelsea, and went no more, in his character of a well-to-do idler interested in the prize-ring, to the public-house across Battersea Bridge.

"I must be getting a regular amateur," he told himself, "if I can't have done with a case when my work is finished."

Christmas came as a pleasant diversion, and during that jovial season Faunce deserted his rooms in Essex Street, forgot that he was a detective, and remembered that he was a citizen and a husband. The turkey and beef, the pudding and mince-pies did credit to Mrs. Faunce's judgment, and the skill of an unpretentious cook, who did not scorn to bare her robust arms to the elbow, and hearthstone the doorstep before she fried the morning rasher.

The catering had been Mr. Faunce's own work. It was his falcon glance that had detected the finest Norfolk turkey in a row of eighteen-pounders, the ripest York ham out of a score of good ones. The champagne which he bought for his guests, the ten-year-old Scotch whisky which he drank himself, were all of the best, and the villa at Putney had the air of plenteous comfort in a small space which pervades a well-found ship.

With his wife sitting opposite to him, and an old friend on either side, Faunce enjoyed the harmless pleasures of social intercourse, and cleared his mind of crime and mystery, and did not go back to his office in Essex Street until the general holiday was over, and the flavour of Christmas had faded out of the atmosphere.

It was on the day after his return to everyday life that Faunce received a message from Scotland Yard, bidding him go there immediately on important business, a summons that he made haste to obey, since many of those cases which had afforded him profitable occupation within the last few years had come to him by the recommendation of his old chiefs in the Criminal Investigation Department.

He found one of those chiefs seated in his private room, engaged in conversation with a short, stout gentleman of middle age and pleasing countenance, who looked like a soldier—fair-haired, intelligent, and fussy.

"This is Mr. Faunce, Major Towgood," said the chief.

"Delighted to make your acquaintance, Faunce!" exclaimed the Major, in a breathless way, bouncing up from his chair, wanting to shake hands with Faunce, and suppressing the desire with a backward jerk; "and if Mr. Faunce," turning to the chief, "can do anything to set my poor mother-in-law's mind at rest about that scapegrace of hers, I shall be very grateful—on my wife's account, don't you know. Personally, I shouldn't be sorry to know he had gone under for good."

"Major Towgood is interested in the fate of a Colonel Rannock, his connection by marriage, who has not been heard of for some time."

"Not since last March, early in the month—sold his sticks—and started for the Yukon River," interjected Major Towgood again breathlessly, and with his eyes opened very wide.

"Colonel Rannock's disappearance—if it can be called a disappearance—has caused considerable anxiety to his widowed mother——"

"Women are such forgiving creatures, don't you know," interrupted the Major. "Talk of seventy times seven! There ain't any combination of figures that will express a mother's forgiveness of a prodigal son."

"And I have told Major Towgood," pursued the chief, with a shade of weariness, "that I can highly recommend you for an inquiry of that sort, and that if Colonel Rannock is to be found above ground—or under ground—you will find him."

"I'll do my best, sir."

"And now, my dear Towgood, I don't think I can do any more for you."

Major Towgood jumped up and bustled towards the door. But he wasn't gone yet. His gratitude was overpowering; and the chief had to back him out of the room, politely, but decisively.

"You are just the man we want, Faunce," said the Major, as they walked down a long corridor that led to the staircase. "Your Chief has told me all about you—you were in the Bank of England case, he said, and the Lady Kingsbury case—and—ever so many more sensation trials—and now you're on your own hook—which just suits us. The Chief and I were at Sandhurst together, don't you know, and he'd do anything for me. But he's a busy man, a very busy man; and I always respect a man's business, pull myself up short, don't you know, wouldn't waste his time or bore him, on any account."

"They haven't much time to spare in this building, sir," assented Faunce.

"Of course not. Magnificent building—splendid institution—fine body of men the police—but there ought to be three times as many of 'em. Eh, Faunce, that's your opinion, ain't it?"

"No doubt, sir, there ought to be more of them, if it would run to it."

"But it won't, no, of course it won't. Another penny on the income-tax this year! We shall see it a shilling before we've done with it."

"We should see it half a crown, sir, if everything was done as it ought to be done."

"True, true, Faunce. A social Utopia, and the taxpayer with hardly bread to eat. Well, I want to take you straight to my mother-in-law, who will tell you all about her worthless son—a bad egg, Faunce, a bitter bad egg, and not worth a ha'porth of the anxiety that poor old lady has been feeling about him. She lives at Buckingham Gate. Shall we walk?"

"By all means, sir. May I ask what particular circumstances have caused this uneasiness on Mrs. Rannock's part—and from what period her anxiety dates?"

"Well, you see, Faunce, Rannock left England in March—late in March—to go to Klondyke—a wild-cat scheme, like most of his schemes—and from that day to this nobody who knows him—so far as we can discover—has received any communication from him."

"Is that so strange, sir? I shouldn't think that when a man was digging for gold among a few thousand other adventurers, at the risk of being frozen to death, or murdered if he was lucky, he would be likely to trouble himself much about family correspondence?"

"Well, no doubt it's a rough-and-tumble life, but still, I'm told they do get the mails, and do keep somehow in touch with the civilized world; and, blackguard as Rannock is, he has been in the habit of writing to his mother three or four times a year, and oftener. I believe there is a soft spot in his heart for her. But you'll see the old lady, and she'll tell you her troubles," concluded Major Towgood, "so I needn't say any more about it."

In spite of which remark he talked without intermission all the way to Buckingham Gate.

CHAPTER XV.

"Happy he With such a mother! faith in womankind Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high Comes easy to him, and tho' he trip and fall He shall not blind his soul with clay."

The Honourable Mrs. Rannock, widow of Captain Rannock, second son of Lord Kirkmichael, lived in a narrow-fronted Queen Anne house facing Wellington Barracks. It was one of the smallest houses to be found in a fashionable quarter, and the rent was the only thing big about it; but Mrs. Rannock had lived at Court for the greater part of her life, having begun as a maid-of-honour when she and her Royal mistress were young, and she could hardly have existed out of that rarefied atmosphere. Refinement and elegance were as necessary to her as air and water are to the common herd; she would have pined to death in a vulgar neighbourhood; her personal wants were of the smallest, but her surroundings had to be the surroundings of a lady.

Everything in the house was perfect of its kind. It was furnished with family relics, Sheraton and Chippendale furniture that had been made to order by those famous cabinet-makers for the Rannocks of the eighteenth century, a buhl cabinet that had come straight from the Faubourg St. Germain in the Red Terror, when Paris was running with innocent blood, and the ci-devants were flying from ruin and death.

The street door was painted sky-blue, the hall and staircase were white, the rich colouring of the wall-papers made a vivid background to the sober tones of the old furniture, and in the dainty drawing-room, with its apple-blossom chintz and exquisite Chelsea china, the daintiest thing was old Mrs. Rannock, with her pink-and-white complexion, silvery hair, patrician features and bearing, tall and slender figure, rich brocade gown, and Honiton cap with lappets that fell almost to her waist.

She was an ideal old lady, grande dame in every detail. She had been painted by Hayter and sketched by D'Orsay. The semi-transparent hand, which lay on the arm of her chair, had been modelled by sculptors of renown, had been carved in marble and in ivory, when she was the beautiful Mary Rannock.

She was nearly eighty, and had been a widow for a quarter of a century, drifting placidly down the river of time, with very few pleasures and not many friends, having outlived most of them, and with only one trouble, the wrong-doing of the son she adored.

She had hoped so much for him, had burnt with ambition for him, had destined him for a high place in the world; and he had forfeited every friendship, missed every chance, disappointed every hope. And she loved him still, better than she loved her daughter and her daughter's children; better, perhaps, because his life had been an ignominious failure; better because of that boundless compassion which she felt for his ill-fortune.

"My poor Dick has never had any luck," she would say excusingly.

She received Mr. Faunce with pathetic eagerness, like a drowning man clutching at the first spar that floats within his reach.

"Pray, be seated," she said graciously. And then, turning to her son-in-law, she said, "I should like to have my talk with Mr. Faunce quite alone, Harry," at which Major Towgood bounded from his chair with a snort of vexation.

"But surely, my dear mother, since I know all the circumstances of the case, and as a man of the world, I can be of some use."

"Not while I am talking to Mr. Faunce, Harry. I want to keep my poor old head calm and cool."

"Well, dear, you are the best judge, but really——"

"Dear Harry, it will be so kind of you to leave us alone."

"Well, mother, if that's so——" and the impetuous little Major puffed and blew himself out of the room, and might have been heard fuming on the landing, before he went downstairs to console himself with a cigar in the dining-room.

"My son-in-law is an excellent creature, Mr. Faunce, but he talks too much," said Mrs. Rannock. "No doubt he has told you something of the circumstances in which I require your help."

"Yes, madam."

"And now ask me as many questions as you like. I will keep nothing from you. I am too anxious about my son's fate to have any reserve."

"May I ask, madam, in the first place, what reason you have for being anxious about Colonel Rannock?"

"His silence is a sufficient reason—his silence of nearly ten months. My son is a very good correspondent. I don't think he has ever before left me two months without a letter. He is a very good correspondent," she repeated earnestly, as if she were saying, "He is a very good son."

"But have you allowed for the rough life at Klondyke, madam, and the disinclination that a man feels—in a scene of that kind—to sit down and write a letter, dead beat, perhaps, after a day's toil?"

"Yes, I have allowed for that, but I cannot believe—if my son were living"—her eyes filled with irrepressible tears in spite of her struggle to be calm—"and in his right mind, with power to hold a pen—I cannot believe that he would so neglect me."

"And you have written to him, I conclude, madam?"

"I have written week after week. I have sent letters to the Post Office at San Francisco and at Dawson City, where my son told me to address him—letter after letter."

"Have you communicated with Colonel Rannock's late body-servant?"

"Chater? Yes, naturally. What do you know of Chater?"

"Very little, madam. I happened to hear of him from a gentleman who had also been making inquiries about your son."

"For what reason?"

"In Lady Perivale's interest. The gentleman has since married Lady Perivale."

"Mr. Haldane! Yes, I heard of the marriage. I was glad to hear of it. Lady Perivale had suffered a great injustice from her likeness to that wretched woman."

"Pardon me, madam. You know the saying—Cherchez la femme. If you can tell me anything about that woman, and Colonel Rannock's relations with her, it may help me in my search for him."

"Oh, it is a sad, sad story. My dear son began life so well, in his grandfather's regiment. There had been Rannocks in the Lanarkshire ever since Killicrankie. He was a fine soldier, and distinguished himself in Afghanistan, and it was only after he made that wretched woman's acquaintance that he began to go wrong—seriously wrong. He may have been a little wild even before then, but not more than many other young men. It was that woman and her surroundings that ruined him."

"I take it that happened about ten years ago."

"Ten years? Yes. How did you know that?"

"I had occasion to look into Miss Delmaine's past life, madam. Pray tell me all you can about her."

"It was an infatuation on my son's part. He saw her at the theatre, where people made a great fuss about her on account of her beauty, though she was no actress. She had a fine house in St. John's Wood, at the expense of a young man of large means—whom she ruined, and who died soon after. My son became a frequent visitor at the house. There were Sunday dinners, and suppers after the theatre, and my son was always there, madly in love with Miss Delmaine. Whether she was more to him than an acquaintance in those days I cannot say. Certainly he had no quarrel with Sir Hubert Withernsea. But after that unhappy young man's death Kate Delmaine's influence upon my son wrecked his career. He left the Army when the Lanarkshire was ordered to Burmah, rather than leave her, and not daring to take her with him. I don't know what kind of life he lived after that, although I saw him from time to time; but I know he was under a cloud, and there were only a few of his father's old friends who were civil to him, and asked him to their houses."

"Did you know of Colonel Rannock's courtship of Lady Perivale, madam?"

"Yes, indeed. It was my earnest hope that he would succeed in it."

"Did you know the lady, and know of her likeness to Miss Delmaine?"

"No. I go very little into society. I am an old woman, and only like to see old friends. And you must understand that I never saw Miss Delmaine."

"Do you think your son was in love with Lady Perivale?"

"Yes, I believe he was. Or it may be that he only liked her because of her resemblance to that woman."

"And was he very angry when she refused him?"

"Yes, I know he was wounded—and even angry."

"Do you think that disappointment, and other troubles, might have induced him to take his own life?"

"No, no, no; I couldn't believe that for one moment. My son has faced death too often—has risked his life in a good cause, and would never throw it away like a coward. I know how brave he is, what a strong will he has—a will strong enough to overcome difficulties. It was like him to think of Klondyke when he was ruined."

"Did you know that he was in Algiers with Miss Delmaine last February?"

"Not till I read the report of Lady Perivale's libel suit. I thought he had broken with her finally two years ago, and I believe at the time he had. I need not tell you that I did not obtain my knowledge of that unhappy connection from my son himself. You will understand a mother's keen anxiety, and that I had other sources of information."

"Yes, madam, I can understand. I do not think I need give you any further trouble to-day; but if you will oblige me with your son's photograph—a recent likeness—it may be of use in this matter."

"Yes, I can give you his photograph, taken last year."

Mrs. Rannock opened a velvet case on the table next her chair, and the wasted white hands trembled ever so faintly as she took out a cabinet photograph and gave it to Faunce.

"Thank you, madam. I shall wait upon you again directly I have any fresh information; but I must warn you that an inquiry of this kind is apt to be very slow; and I fear you can give me no suggestion as to where to look for Colonel Rannock in the event of his having changed his mind and not gone to Klondyke."

"No, no; I cannot think that he would change his mind. He was with me the day before he started, full of hope and excitement. He was enthusiastic about the wild life in Alaska, and would not listen to my fears and objections. Oh! Mr. Faunce, if anything evil has happened to him, these grey hairs will go down in sorrow to the grave."