THE COACH

It was a lonely part of the country, far north, where the summer nights are pale and light and scant of shade. This summer night there was no moon, and yet it was not dark. For hours the flat, deprecating earth had lain prone under a storm of wind and rain. Its patient surface was drenched, blanched, smitten into blindness. The tumbled waters of the Firth splashed on the edges of the plain, their wild commotion dwarfed by the noise of the wind-driven showers, whose gloomy drops tapped the waters into sullen acquiescence. Half a mile inland the road to the north was laid. Clear and straight it ran, with never a house or homestead to break it, viscous with clay here, shining with quartz there, uncompromising, exact, like the lists of old, dressed for a tourney. Its sides were bare, scantily garnished with grass. This was nearly a hedgeless country. In places the undeviating line of it passed through a little coppice or clump of gnarled, ill-conditioned, nameless trees. They seemed to lean forward vindictively on either side, snapping their horny fingers at each other, waving their cantankerous branches as the gusts took them, broke them, and whirled the fragments of their ruin far away and out of ken, like a flapping, unruly kite which a child has allowed to pass beyond his control. The broad white surface of the road was not suffered to be blotted for a single moment. Nothing could rest for the play of the intriguing air-currents, surging backwards and forwards, blind, stupid and swelled with pride, till they had got completely out of hand and defied the archers of the middle sky. They staggered hither and thither like ineffectual giants; they buffeted all impartially; they instigated the hapless branches at their mercy to wild lashings of each other, to useless accesses of the spirit of self-destruction. Bending slavishly under the heavy gusts, each shabby blade of grass by the roadside rose again and was on the qui vive after the rustling tyrant had passed.

It was then, in the succeeding moments of comparative peace, when the directors of the passionate aerial revolt had managed to call their panting rabble off for the time, that great perpendicular sheets of rain, like stage films slung evenly from heavenly temples, descended and began moving continuously sideways, like a wall, across the level track. A sheet of whole water, blotting out the tangled borders of herbage that grew sparsely round the heaps of stones with which the margin was set at intervals, placed there ready for breaking. When the slab of rain had moved on again, the broad road, shining out sturdily with its embedded quartz and milky kneaded clay, lay clear once more. Calm, ordered and tranquil in the midst of tumult and discord, it pursued its appointed course, edging off from its evenly bevelled sides the noisy moorland streams, that had come jostling each other in their haste to reach it, only to be relegated, noisily complaining, to the swollen, unrecognizable gutter.

At a certain point on the line of way, a tall, spare, respectable-looking man in a well-fitting grey frock coat stood waiting. The rain ran down the back of his coat collar, and dripped off the rim of his tall hat. His attitude suggested some weary foredone clerk waiting at the corner of the city street for the omnibus that was to carry him home to his slippered comfort and sober pipe of peace. He wore no muffler, but then it was summer—St. John’s Eve. He leaned on an ivory-headed ebony stick of which he seemed fond, and peered, not very eagerly, along the road, which now lay in dazzling rain-washed clarity under the struggling moon. There was a lull in the storm. He had no luggage, no umbrella, yet his grey coat looked neat, and his hat shiny.

Far in the distance, from the south, a black clumsy object appeared, labouring slowly along. It was a coach, of heavy and antique pattern. As soon as he had sighted it, the passenger’s faint interest seemed diminished. With a bored air of fulfilment, he dropped his eyes and looked down disapprovingly at the clayey mud at his feet, although, indeed, the sticky substance did not appear to have marred the exquisite polish of his shoes. His palm settled composedly on the ivory knob of his trusty stick, as though it were the hand of an old friend.

With all the signs of difficult going, but no noise of straining or grinding, the coach at last drew up in front of the expectant passenger. He looked up quietly, and recognized it as the vehicle wherein it was appointed that he should travel in this unsuitable weather for a stage or two, maybe. All was correct, the coachman, grave, business-like, headless as of usage, the horses long-tailed, black, conventional.…

The door opened noiselessly, and the step was let down. The passenger shook his head as he delicately put his foot on to it, and observed for the benefit, doubtless, of the person or persons inside—

“I see old Joe on the box in his official trim. Rather unnecessary, all this ceremony, I venture to think! A few yokels and old women to impress, if indeed, any one not positively obliged is abroad on a night like this! For form’s sake, I suppose!”

He took his seat next the window. There were four occupants of the coach beside himself. They all nodded formally, but not unkindly. He returned their salutations with old-fashioned courtesy, though unacquainted seemingly with any of them.

Sitting next to him was a woman evidently of fashion. Her heavy and valuable furs were negligently cast on one side, to show a plastron covered with jewels. She wore at least two enamelled and jewel-encrusted watches pinned to her bosom as a mark for thieves to covet. It was foolish of her. So at least thought the man in the grey frock coat. Her yellow wig was much awry. Her eyes were weak, strained, and fearful, and she aided their vision with a diamond-beset pince-nez. Now and again she glanced over her left shoulder as if in some alarm, and at such times she always grasped her gold-net reticule feverishly. She was obviously a rich woman in the world, a first-class train-de-luxe passenger.

The woman opposite her belonged as unmistakably to the people. She was hard-featured, worn with a life of sordid toil and calculation, but withal stout and motherly, a figure to inspire the fullest confidence. She wore a black bonnet with strings, and black silk gloves heavily darned. Round her sunken white collar, a golden gleam of watch-chain was now and then discernible.

At the other end of the coach, squeezed up into the corner where the vacillating light of the lamp hung from the roof least penetrated, a neat, sharp-featured man nestled and hid. His forehead retreated, and his bowler hat was set unnecessarily far back, lending him an air of folly and congenital weakness which his long, cold, clever nose could not dissipate. He was white as old enamel.

But the man whom the gentleman in the frock coat took to among his casual fellow-travellers was the one sitting directly opposite him, a rough, hearty creature, who alone of all the taciturn coachful seemed disposed to enter into a casual conversation, which might go some way to enliven the dreariness entailed by this somewhat old-fashioned mode of travelling. Gay talk might help to drown the dashing of the waters of the Firth lying close on the right hand of the section of road they were even now traversing, and the ugly roar of the wind and rain against the windows. This—by comparison—cheerful fellow was dressed like a working man, in a shabby suit of corduroys. He wore no collar, but a twisted red cotton handkerchief was wound tightly round his thick squat neck. His little mean eyes, swinish, but twinkling good-humouredly, stared enviously at the neat gentleman’s stiff collar and the delicate grey tones of his suiting. Crossing and uncrossing his creasy legs, in the unusual effort of an attempt at conviviality, the man in corduroys addressed the man in the frock coat awkwardly enough, but still civilly.

“Well, mate! They’ve chosen a rare rough night to shift us on! Orders from headquarters, I suppose? I’ve been here nigh on a year and never set eyes on my boss!”

“We used to call him God the Father,” said the elder man slowly.… “But whoever it is that orders our ways here, there is no earthly sense in questioning His arrangements, we can only fall in with them. As you admit, you are fairly new, and perhaps you do not as yet conceive fully of the silent impelling force that sways us. It is the same in the world we have left, only that there we were only concerned with the titles and standing of our ‘boss,’ as you call Him, and obeyed His laws not a whit. I must say I consider this particular system of soul transference that we have to submit to, very unsettling and productive of restlessness among us—a mere survival and tiresome superstition, to my mind. It has one merit; one sees something of the under world, travelling about as we do, and meeting chance, perhaps kindred spirits on the road. One realizes, too, that Hades is not quite as grey, shall I say, as it is painted! But perhaps,” he added, with a slight touch of class hauteur, “you do not quite follow me?”

“Oh yes, Master, I do,” eagerly replied the fellow-traveller to whom he chose to address his monologue. “Since I’ve been dead, I have learned the meaning of many things. I turn up my nose at nothing these days. I always neglected my schooling, but now I tell you I try to make up for lost time. From a rough sort of fellow that I was, with not an idea in my head beyond my beer and my prog, I have come to take my part in the whole of knowledge. It was all mine before, so to speak, but I didn’t trouble to put my hand out for it. Didn’t care, didn’t listen to Miss that taught me, or to Parson, either. He had some good ideas too, as I’ve come to know, though Vice isn’t Vice exactly with us here, now, in a manner of speaking. If God Almighty made us, why did He make us, even in parts, bad? That’s what I want to know, and I’ll know that when I’ve been dead a bit longer. Why did He give me rotten teeth so that I couldn’t chew properly and didn’t care for my food and liked drink better? It’s dirt and digestion makes drinking and devilry, I say.”

The smart woman interrupted him with a kind of languid eagerness, exclaiming—

“I must say I agree with you. Since the pestle fell on my shoulder in that lonely villa at Monte, I have realized what the dreadful gambling fever may lead to. It had made those two who treated me so ill, quite inhuman. They had become wild beasts. I ought never to have accepted their treacherous invitation to luncheon, never tempted them with my outrageous display of jewels! And look here, I was tarred with the same stick, I gambled too——”

She rummaged in her reticule and fished out a ticket for the rooms at Monte Carlo.

“I always call that the ticket for my execution. Though my executioners were rather unnecessarily brutal. They will attain unto this place more easily than I did. Hardly any pain. The hand of the law is gentle, compared with the methods of——”

The man in the grey frock coat raised his finger warningly. “No names, I beg. One of our conventions… !”

“Have a drop?” said the calm motherly woman to the excited fine lady. “Your wound is recent, isn’t it? Yours was a very severe case! A bloody murder, I call it, if ever there was one, and clumsy at that! And you only passive, which is always so much harder, they say! I can’t tell, for I was what you may call an active party. They don’t seem to mind mixing, they that look after us here! They lump us all together—travelling, at any rate! Though when I think of what I was actually turned off for, well—the way I look at it, what I did was a positive benefit to Society, and some sections of Society knew it, too, and would have liked to preserve my life.”

“But what, Madam, if I may ask, was your little difficulty?”

“It is called, I believe, Baby Farming,” she replied off-handedly, receiving her flask back from the smart woman and stowing it away in a capacious pocket. As she spoke, a shudder like a transitory ripple on a rain-swept stream passed over her hearers, with the exception of the thin man in the far corner, who preserved his serenity. Raising his sunken chin, he observed the last speaker with some slight show of interest.

The man in grey apologized.

“Excuse us, Madam. A remnant of old-world squeamishness, uncontrollable by us for the moment. Though perhaps, if you will, you might a little dissipate our preconceived notions of your profession, by explaining clearly your point of view.”

“Delighted, I’m sure,” she answered. “Funny, though, how seriously you all take it, even here! The feeling against my profession seems absurdly strong below as well as above. I was hooted as I left the court, I recollect. It annoyed me then considerably. I thought that those that hooted had more need to be grateful to me if all was known and paid for. I saved their pockets for them and their lovely honour too. They knew they owed all that to me. For the rest, they did not care. They went on, bless ’em, raising up seed for me to mow down as soon as its head came above ground, and welcome! Sly dogs, no thanks from them! But those shivering, shrinking women that came to me, some of them hardly out of their teens, some of them so delicate they had no right to have a baby at all!—Ah, if only I hadn’t let myself take their money it would have been a work of pure philanthropy. But I had to live, then! Now that that tax has been taken off, one has time to think it out all round. But Lord!—Society, to cry shame on me for it! They might as well hang any other useful public servant, like dustmen, rat-catchers, and such-like ridders of pests. Good old Herod, that I used to hear about at school, knew what he was doing when he cleared off all those useless Innocents! He was the first baby farmer, I guess.”

“You take large ground, Madam,” said the man in the frock coat, a trifle huffily.

“And I have the right,” said she, her large determined chin emerging from its rolls of fat in her eagerness. “You men ought to know it, and you do well enough, when you’re honest. I was only the ’scapegoat, and took on me the little sins of the race. It’s an easy job enough, what I did, but there’s few have the stomach for it, even then. You couldn’t call it dirty work either. You just stand by and leave ’em alone—to girn and bleat and squinny and die.”

“No blood, eh?” the man in the corner said suddenly. “I like blood.”

“What a fine night it has turned!” said the man in the grey frock coat, raising the sash and putting his head out of the window.… “Something rather uncanny, eh, about that man?” he remarked under his breath, half to himself, half to the man in brown corduroys.

“Take your head in,” said the latter, almost affectionately, “or you’ll be catching cold, and you’ve a nasty scar on your neck that I could see as you leaned forward, and which you oughtn’t to go getting the cold into.”

“Oh, that!” said the other complacently, sitting down again, but averting his gaze carefully from the man in the corner, for whom he seemed to feel a repulsion as marked as was his preference for his cheerful vis-à-vis. “That! That’s actually the scar of the blow that killed me. A fearful gash! He was a powerful man that dealt it. He got me, of course, from behind. I never even saw him. I was drafted off here at once, his hand had been so sure.” He felt nervously in his pockets. “I have a foulard somewhere, but I am apt to mislay it.”

“You should do like me, have a good strong handkercher and knot it round your neck firm. I’ve got a mark of sorts on my neck too, but it isn’t an open wound—never was,” the bluff man sniggered. “It is sheer vanity with me, but I don’t care to have it seen. It goes well all round, mine does—done by a rope, eh!”

He paused and nodded slyly. “For killing a toff. Nice old gentleman he seemed, too, but I hadn’t much time to look at him. Had to get to work——”

He was rudely interrupted by a screech from the baby farmer.

“Lord!” she cried, “do I see another conveyance coming on this lonely road? I do ’ope so. I’m one for seeing plenty of people. I always like a crowd, and I must tell you, this sort of humdrum jogging along was beginning to get on my nerves.”

They all jerked themselves round, and peered through the glass panes behind them. The taciturn man alone reserved his attention.

Sure enough, a dark object, plainly outlined in the strong moonlight which now lit up the heavens, where heavy masses of cloud had until now obscured its effulgence, was plainly visible. It blotted the ribbon of white that lay in front of them.… Nearer and nearer it came. All heads were at the windows of the coach.… Now it was seen to be a high-hung dog-cart, of the most modern pattern, drawn by a smart little mettled pony, and containing two slight young girls.… The one that drove held the ribbons in hands that were covered with white dog-skin gloves, and which looked immense in the pallid moonshine.

“What an excitement!” said the stout woman. “We shall pass them. Some member of one of the country families about here, I suppose.”

“I hope—for all things considering, I’m not a blood-thirsty man,” the man in corduroys muttered anxiously under his breath, “that we’re not a-going to give them a shock! Bound to, when we meet them plumb like this! ’Orses can’t abide the sight of us, mostly, no more than they could those nasty motors when they first came in. And we’re worse than motors—they seem to smell us out at once for what we are!”

“If you do really think that pony is likely to swerve,” said the man in the grey suit, anxiously, “would it be of any use our asking old Diggory to drive more slowly and humour them?”

“Couldn’t go no slower than we are!” replied the man in corduroys. “Besides, it’s not the pace that kills! I’ll bet you that pony’s all of a sweat already!”

The dog-cart approached. The faces of the two young women were discernible. They were white—blanched with fear, or it may have been the effect of the strong moonlight. There was no doubt that they were disturbed, and that the girl who was driving fully realized the necessity of controlling the horse, whose nostrils were quivering, and on whose sides foam was already appearing in white swathes.…

“It won’t pass us!” said the man in the corner, speaking suddenly. He rubbed his hands slowly one over the other. “There will be blood!”

“For goodness’ sake stop gloating like that!” said the stout woman. “It turns my stomach to hear you. Wherever can you have come from, I wonder? ’Tisn’t manners.… I say, can’t we hail them?” she inquired of the man in grey. “All give them one big shout?”

“They wouldn’t be able to hear us,” he replied, shaking his head sadly. “You must not forget that we are ghosts. We are not really here.”

“Ay, and that’s what the beasts know!” cried the man in corduroys. He jumped about. “That ’oss won’t be able to stand it. The kid’ll not be able to hold him in.…”

“They’re on us!” screamed the smart woman. “Oh, my God! Do we have to sit still and see it?” She covered her eyes with her hand.

“Yes, Missus, I reckon you have, and what’s more, run away after like any shoffer that’s killed his man and left him lying in the roadside. Old Diggory’s got his orders.”

The snorting of the pony was now audible. The coachful of ghosts distinctly saw the lather of foam dropping from its jaws. They were able, some of them, to realize the agonized tension of one girl’s hands, pulling for all she was worth, and the scared sideways twist of her forcedly inactive companion. Alone the face of the yellow carriage-lamp glared, immovable.…

Then it flew down, and was extinguished. There was a crash, a convulsion—and the great road to the north lay clear again.

The Coach of Death rolled on remorselessly past a black heap that filled the ditch on one side. It lay quite still, after that almost human leap and heave.…

The smart woman fainted, or appeared to do so. The baby farmer sat silent.

“It’s iniquitous!” exclaimed the man in grey, turning round from the window—his eyes wet, “to leave them behind like that without a word of inquiry, when it’s our conveyance has done all the mischief!”

He groaned and fidgeted.…

The man in corduroys tried to soothe him. “We ain’t to blame, Sir, don’t you think it!” he repeated. “As you said before to the lady, we aren’t really here!”

“That is little consolation to a man of honour,” the old man said sadly. “Still, as you say, we are but tools——”

He devoted himself to the smart woman, who revived a little under his civil ministrations.

“After all,” she said, “aren’t we somehow or other all in the same boat? I shouldn’t be surprised if those two nice girls didn’t join us at the next stage. If they do, we’ll make them tell us how they felt, when they first saw the coachful of ghosts coming down on them. They’re certainly dead, for they were both pitched into the ditch with the cart and horse on top of them. Did anybody see what became of the horse? No.… Well, we must settle down to dulness again, I am afraid, or, suppose, to while away the time we all started to tell each other the story of how we came to be here? A lively tale might cheer us all up, after the accident.”

“Agreed, Madam, heartily for my part,” said the man in grey, “though my own story is very humdrum, and not in the least amusing. You want, of course, an account of the particular accident that sent me here. Very well! But, ladies first! Will not you begin, Madam?”

She tossed her head, with an affected air.

“My story, perhaps,” she insinuated with modesty, “might not be very new to you. It was in all the papers so recently.”

“That will not affect me,” he answered, “for if, as I presume, it was a murder case, I never read them.”

“I read yours then, Missus, I expect,” said the man in corduroys. “I generally get the wife to read them out to me—anything spicy.”

“And yet the people that did it are not hanged yet, if, indeed, they ever are, poor souls! I am quite anxious,” said the smart woman, “to see how it goes. If the pair are really sent here, I suppose I shall be running up against them some night or other, on one of these transference parties. It will be very interesting. But”—she leaned across to the baby farmer—“could we not persuade you to give us some of your—nursery experiences, Madam?”

“There’s not much story about the drowning of a litter of squalling puppies or whining kittens,” said that lady shortly, “we want something livelier—more personal, if I may say so. From a remark that gentleman in the corner let drop a while ago, I fancy his reminiscences would be quite worth hearing, as good as a shilling shocker.”

“My story,” replied the individual thus pointedly addressed, “is impossible, frankly impossible.”

“Indecent, do you mean?” The smart woman’s eyes shone. “Oh, let us have it. You can veil it, can’t you?”

“Have you ever heard of mental degenerates?” he asked her compassionately. “I was one. I was called mad—a simple way of expressing it. I was a chemist. I dissected neatly enough, too, like a regular butcher. They did quite right to exterminate me.”

His head dropped. He seemed disinclined to say more. Still the smart woman persisted.

“But the details——?”

“Are purely medical, Ma’am. Not without a physiological interest, I may say. Interesting to men of science, pathologically. The”—he named a daily paper much in vogue at that time, “made a good deal of the strong sense of artistry—of contrast—the morbid warp inherent in the executant——”

His head sank again on his chest.

“I do believe,” said the baby farmer, nudging the smart woman, “that we shall find he’s the man who killed his sweetheart and then carefully tied her poor inside all into true lover’s knots with sky-blue ribbon. Artist, indeed! They’re quite common colours—blue and red——”

“Disgusting!” The delicate lady from Monte Carlo shuddered, and turning coldly away, joined in the petition proffered by the other ghosts to the breezy man in corduroys, to relate his experiences.

“Oh, I’ll tell you how I came to join you and welcome!” he said, rolling his huge neck about in its setting of red cotton. “Well, to begin with, I was drunk. Equally, of course, I was hard up. My missus—she’s married again, by the way, blast her!—was always nagging me to do something for her and the kids. I did. Nation’s taking care of them now, along of what I did. Work, she meant, but that was only by the way. I did choose to take on a job, though, on a rich man’s estate, building some kind of Folly, lots of glass and that, working away day and night by naphtha flares, you know. He was one of those men, you know the sort, that has more money than a man can properly spend, and feels quite sick about it, and says so, in interviews and so on, in the papers a working man reads. That’s the mischief. He was always giving away chunks of money to charities and libraries and that sort of useless lumber, but none of it ever seemed to come the way of those that were in real need of it. They said the money had got on his nerves, and would not let him sleep o’ nights, and that he was afraid by day and went about with a loaded stick and I don’t know what all. And he was looked after by detectives, at one time, so the papers said—again the papers, putting things in people’s heads, as it’s their way. So one blessed evening I was very low—funds and all, and my missus and the kids hollering and complaining as they always do when luck’s bad. Lord bless them, they never thought as they were ’citing their man to murder. Women never do think. And going out with their snivelling in my ears, I passed the station where he landed every evening after his day in town, and I happened to see him come out of the train and send away his motor that was a-waiting for him all regular, and start out to walk ’ome alone by a short cut across a little plantation there was, very thick and dark, just the place for a murder. Well—I told you I was half drunk—I raced home and got something to do it with—a meat chopper—to be particular——”

The old man opposite put his hand nervously to the back of his neck.

“Ay, Mister, it takes you just there, does it? You look a regular bundle of nerves, you do. Well, as I was saying, I went round by a short cut that I happened to know of, and got in front of him and hid in the hedge. Ten mortal minutes I waited for my man to come by. Lord, how my hand did tremble! I’d have knocked off for two pence. I was as nervous as a cat, but all the same, it didn’t prevent me from striking out for wife and children with a will when my chance came. I caught him behind with my chopper, and he fell like a log. Never lifted a hand to defend himself—hadn’t got any grit. Ladies, I don’t suppose I hurt him much, for he never even cried out when I struck or groaned when it was done. Then I looked him over, turned out his pockets and collared his watch and season ticket and seals and money. Money—hah!—I had been fairly done over that. Would you believe it of a rich fellow like him, he hadn’t got more than the change of a sovereign on him.”

“Shame!” ejaculated the taciturn man in the corner.

“I admit it was hard on you,” the man in grey observed kindly. “Very hard, for I believe the retribution came all too quickly. You foolishly left your chopper about to identify you, and were apprehended at once by our excellent rural police. Yet the law is so dilatory that you lay in gaol a whole year before you were free to join your victim here?”

“Right you are, mate. Yes, I swung for it, sure enough. Short and sweet it was once I stood on the drop, but it still makes my poor old throat ache to think of it.”

He wriggled and twisted his neck in its ruddy cincture.…

“Now, governor, I’m done, and if you’ve no objection we’d all like to hear how you came by that ugly gash of yours? It wasn’t no rope did that. Common or garden murder, I’ll be bound.”

“Certainly, my man, it was a murder—a murder most apropos. The circumstances were peculiar. I have often longed to get the ear of the jury who tried a man for relieving me of my light purse and intolerably heavy life, and tell them—the whole hard-working, conscientious twelve of them, trying their best to bring in an honest verdict and avenge my wrongs—my own proper feelings, surely no negligible factor in the case! They could not guess, these ignorant living men, whose eyes had not yet been opened by death to a due sense of the proportions of things—that I bore the poor creature no malice, but instead was actually grateful for his skilful surgery that had severed the life-cord that bored me, so neatly and completely.”

“It isn’t every one would take it like that!” remarked the smart woman. “Yet that is, more or less, how I feel about these things myself. Only in my case it is impossible to speak of skilful surgery! I was disgracefully cut up. I couldn’t possibly have worn a low dress again!”

“Have you ever heard?” said the man in grey thoughtfully, “of the Greek story of the Gold of Rhampsinitos, and the inviolable cellar he built to store it in? According to the modern system, my gold was hoarded in my brain, where fat assets and sordid securities bred and bred all day long. The laws that govern wealth are hard. You must give it, devise it, you must not allow it to be taken. But for my part I would have welcomed the two sons of the master builder who broke into the Greek King’s Treasure House. In the strong-room of my brain it lodged. With one careless calculation, one stroke of a pen, I could make money breed money there to madden me. I was lonely, too. I had no wife to divide my responsibilities. She might even have enjoyed them. But I dared approach no woman in the way of love—I did not choose to be loved for my cheque-signing powers. I was not loved at all. I was hated. Unrighteous things were done in my name, by the greedy husbandmen of my load of money. Then I was told that I went in danger of my life, and I condescended to take care of that—for a time—only for a time!

“One dark winter evening—I forget what had happened during the day, what fresh instance of turpitude or greed had come before me—I was so revolted that I kicked away all the puling safeguards by which my agents guarded their best asset of all, and gave the rein to my instinct. I disregarded precautions of every sort—with the exception of my faithful loaded stick, and the carrying of that had come to be a mere matter of habit with me—and I walked home from the station alone and unattended, up to my big house and good dinner which I hoped—nay, I almost knew—that I should not be alive to eat. And indeed, as luck would have it, on that night of all nights the trap was set for me. The appointed death-dealer was waiting—he took me on at once. I got my desire—kind, speedy, merciful, violent death. I never even saw the face of my deliverer.”

“By George!” softly swore the man in corduroys. “This beats all. Are you sure you aren’t kidding us?”

“No indeed, that is exactly how I felt about it, and if I had known of knowledge, as I knew of instinct, what was going to happen, I would have thought to realize some of my wealth before setting out to walk through that wood, and made it more worth the honest fellow’s while. But as you are aware, a millionaire does not carry portable gold about with him, and my cheque-book which I had on me would, of course, be of no use to him. Alas, all the poor devil got for his pains was exactly nineteen shillings and eleven pence. I had changed a sovereign at the book-stall to buy a paper, and out of habit, had waited for the change.”

The man in corduroys was by this time in a considerable state of excitement. He had rent the red handkerchief fiercely from his neck, and now made as if to tear it across his knee.…

“Why, governor!” he exclaimed passionately, “do you mean to say it was through you that I got this here”—he put both hands behind his head and interlocked them, “in return for giving you that there cut at the back of your neck? Well, how things do come about, to be sure!”

“Gently, gently! my man,” the elder soothed him. “Don’t be so melodramatic about a very ordinary coincidence. See, the ladies are quite upset. It doesn’t do to allow oneself to get excited here—it’s not in the rules. If I had made the little discovery you have done, I don’t think—no, I really don’t think I would have made it public. This undue exhibition of emotion of yours strikes me as belonging to the vulgar world we have all left. But since you have allowed it to come out, and every one is now aware of the peculiar relation in which we stand to each other, you must let me tender you my best thanks, as to a most skilful and firm operator, and believe me to be truly grateful to you for your services in the past.”

“Quite the old school!” said the smart woman.

“I must say, Sir,—I consider you the real gentleman,” said the baby farmer.

“I am a gentleman.”

“And a fairly accommodating one!” said the rough man, wiping his brow where, however, no sweat was. “It isn’t every man as would give thanks for being scragged!”

“Every man isn’t a millionaire,” said his victim calmly.

The smart woman, leaning forward, tapped the old gentleman amiably with her jewelled pince-nez.

“But we belong to the same world, I perceive,” she said, “and I am quite able to understand your refined feeling. It is as I said in my own case. Indeed if those two good people, who shall be nameless, had only dealt with me a little more gently, I don’t know that I should not forgive them absolutely. I shall at any rate be perfectly civil when I do meet them—only perhaps a little distant. But that Monte Carlo existence I was leading when they interrupted it, was really becoming intolerable! No one who hasn’t done it, thoroughly can realize what it is. Glare, noise, glitter, fever—that heartless, blue, laughing sea they talk of in the railway advertisements——”

The baby farmer, left out in this elegant discussion, obviously took no pleasure in it, but staring straight before her, muttered sulkily—

“Cote d’Azur and Pentonville! There’s some little difference, isn’t there, between one life and the other? Yet I enjoyed my life, I did, and as for gratitude, I can’t say as I see all those blessed infants a-coming up to me, and slobbering me for what I did for ’em. I may meet them, but they’ll not notice me. It isn’t in human nature. Their mothers’ thanks was all I got, and they thanked me beforehand in hard cash for what I was a-going to do. Lord, what’s a ricketty baby more or less? I say, we’re slowing up! Going to stop perhaps, and a good thing too!”

“Yes,” said the man in the grey frock coat, still enouncing his curt sentences to the unheeding listeners, “I am able to cordially thank the man who rid me with one clean scientific blow of my wretched life and all its tedious accessories. A skilled workman is worthy of his hire.”

“Mercy!” muttered the baby farmer. “Is he never going to stop? If it was for nothing else, he ought to have got scragged for being a bore!”

But being fully wound up, though in the excitement of arriving at the depôt no one was attending, the man in grey continued, “Suicide I had thought of, but abhorred, though on my soul I had nearly come to that, and then it was merely a question of courage—you spoke truly, Sir. Mine was a thin, pusillanimous nature, as you said. You came by, a kind Samaritan, and sacrificed your own good life freely to rid me of my wretched one. I think I told you that when you were being tried, I followed urgently all the details of the trial, and made interest with the authorities here to allow me to appear to the judge in his sleep, say, and instil into his mind some inkling of the true state of my feelings towards you. I do not know, however, if you would have thanked me, for life may have been no sweeter to you than it was to me—you spoke of an uncongenial helpmate, I think? Still one never knows. I might have been the means of procuring you some good years yet, in the full exercise of your undeniable vigour and remarkable decision of character. But it was apparently not to be. You followed me here, after a long interval of waiting, and now we have met, face to face. The introduction on that dark night was worth nothing. I like your face. We shall probably never meet again—their ways are dark and devious here, so I am the more glad of this opportunity of opening my mind to you on a delicate subject, perhaps, but one that has always been very near my heart. By the way”—he lifted his stick with its shining ivory crown into view. “Did you notice this? You read the papers, you said, and they told you it was heavily weighted and that I carried it always as a precaution. Well, on that eventful night for both of us—perhaps you were too hurried to notice?—but I never used it. Accept it now, will you not, as a memento? … I think, from sundry truly unearthly bumpings, that we seem to have come at last to our journey’s end.… I am right, the coachman has got down from his perch and taken his head under his arm.… We part. Mesdames, I salute you. Again, Sir——” He addressed himself more particularly to the shamefaced man in corduroys—“Farewell. Very pleased to have met you!”

One by one, the passengers faded away into the distance. The polite old man paused in the semblance of an inn yard where the coach had drawn up. A pale proud woman’s face, shining up by the step, had touched him. She was an intending passenger, and she was alone. She wore white dog-skin gloves, but no hat. Unusual, he fancied, in a woman of her class. On looking closer, he saw that she had a hat, but that it hung disregarded over her shoulder by an elastic, and was much battered and destroyed. He decided to speak to her.

“You are the lady we killed, I think?” he asked gently.

She acknowledged with a bow that it was so.

“We could none of us do anything,” he apologized, “or I hope you will believe——”

“Certainly, Sir, it was no fault of yours, or indeed of the company’s, I am sure. The accident was inevitable!” so she assured him, smiling faintly. He looked at her kindly. There was blood on the hair, he was able to convince himself.… “But Rory—our pony—never can pass things, at the best of times, and the look of your conveyance was certainly rather unusual. And at that time of night we rarely meet anything at all on the Great North Road. We choose that time on purpose, my sister and I—we had been staying away for a week with friends, and we were going home. When we saw you coming, Lucy said, half in jest—she is older than I—‘Suppose that thing in front were the Coach of Death the foolish country people talk about? They say it travels this way once a year, with its cargo of souls, on St. John’s Eve.’ I bade her not be superstitious, but I confess I thought the vehicle looked odd myself, and I did wonder how Rory would stand it. When it came nearer I saw distinctly that the coachman was headless, and I laughingly told my sister so. She bade me not disturb her, for death coach or live coach, she meant to do her best to get Rory past it. She failed——”

The man in grey looked nervously around. He was alone with the young lady in the dull inn yard. The headless coachman was preparing to ascend to the box seat again.…

“Where is your sister now?” he inquired.

“She lies at the bottom of the ditch. Rory has galloped home. She fell on her head, but she is alive still. When they find her in the morning, she will be dead, I know that. For now I know all things. I am at peace… you need have no care for me.…”

“Let me at least put you into the coach,” he begged. “And you will prefer the corner seat?” …

She took it; he went on—

“It looks, however, as if you were going to have all the accommodation to yourself, for this stage at all events.”

He raised his hat; she bowed.

“I am grieved that I cannot have the pleasure—that I cannot offer to accompany you, but I have my marching orders.…”

He raised his hat again.… The coach moved on out of the yard. Soon it was lost in the mists.… The summer dawn was just breaking.