Read Ebook: The great Skene mystery by Capes Bernard

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Ebook has 1696 lines and 76771 words, and 34 pages

I ended my scrutiny with an inward sigh, and turned it elsewhere. I had plentiful opportunity. No one addressed, or appeared even to consider me. Right opposite, Miss Christmas, who sat between Sir Maurice and Mr Dalston, was engaged in rallying her either neighbour charmingly. She was quite at her ease with both, confident of herself as the most attractive of social siderites--a star of unquestionable magnitude. And they responded, of course--men of the world, and quick in persiflage. They laughed at her butterfly sallies, and humoured them because she was pretty and an heiress They were patently captivated. "Ah!" I thought: "if you knew how this very morning she has been scrubbing my floor for me!"

No one would have thought it possible. She was gay as a fairy; flower-complexioned; her hair like a misty aureole. A string of pearls was round her throat, and pearls were in her ears--"wicked little shells for recording scandal, and answering to it with pearls of price, too," said Sir Maurice, after she had retorted upon some society calumny of his.

"O!" she cried; "to compare my poor ears to oysters!"

"Natives!" said Mr Dalston. "There are no oysters and no ears in all the world like our English breed."

She asked him seriously how he knew--if he had travelled much?

"Far and wide," he said, "and in all countries except Italy, I believe."

I wondered why he made, or had made, the reservation.

"A sentiment," he said, as if I had put the question to him. "I lost a dear friend there once."

Actually I found his eyes fixed on mine. They were a dark penetrating feature in his face, set under strong brows, and somehow quite at variance with the smiling good humour of his mouth. His hair, though almost white, was full and wavy as a boy's, and contrasted strangely with his jet-black mutton-chop whiskers, and those again with the strong white line of his teeth. He was tall and excellently compact, with broad shoulders and narrow hips, and had altogether the appearance of a man entirely at his ease with himself and the world.

"Do you know it--Italy?" he asked of me.

"I have never been from here but to school," I answered.

"Ah!" he said: "what visions! what a prospect! That emancipation from tutelage, and all the world to follow!"

He was interrupted by a quick shrill exclamation from his wife:

"Look! What has happened? What is the matter with him?"

She was on her feet, we were all on our feet, in an instant. Sir Maurice Carnac was fallen heaped back into his chair, his shapeless old face all wryed as if in an exhaustion of horrible laughter, incoherent sounds coming from his lips.

"Carnac!" cried Lord Skene.

"This is my business," said Mr Pugsley, in an agitated voice. All honour to his creed so far, for he was terribly unnerved.

The stricken man was carried upstairs by the servants, followed by the minister and his lordship. We all waited, huddled into a silence unbroken but for the whimpering of the women. Only Mrs Dalston remained quite passionless and unmoved. Once I saw her husband quietly offer to take her hand in his, and I saw her as quietly repulse him. His, according to the feminine persuasion, was an irresistible personality, all black and white and pink, and inevitably suggestive of past triumphs. She was the only one, I dare swear, who had ever been able to keep him at arm's length; and that, perhaps, was the secret of her hold over him.

Presently Lord Skene came down. His hand was shaking and his lips, as he spilt out a glass of wine and swallowed it.

"Pugsley asked him if he was saved," he stuttered, "and he answered that he'd be damned if he wasn't. There was no refuting that. Poor old Maurice!"

Presently he recollected himself, and begged his company to stand not upon the order of their going, but to acquit him of any suspicion that such an awful calamity had been imminent.

It was Mr Dalston who reassured and commiserated him in terms of the readiest and most delicate sympathy.

Sir Maurice Carnac died that night.

On the second morning after its seizure, the body of the old ex-governor was carried away in a hearse to Footover Station, thence to be conveyed to its London home. I had avoided the house in the interval, being jealous of the least suggestion of intrusion; but I hung about the drive on the day of the removal, and threw a little spray of thyme upon the hearse as it passed. So much for a beggar's remembrance! He had always accepted me fairly, old prosperous worldling as he was, on equal terms. Then I put him resolutely out of my thoughts, and went back to my hermitage, there to mature a little scheme of adventure which I had had in my mind ever since that moment when Mr Pugsley had confessed to me the theatre of a certain event in which I was interested.

An American humourist relates somewhere of a prisoner who had been confined for thirty years in a loathsome dungeon, when a bright idea struck him--he opened the window and got out. Now some such inspiration had seized me all in an instant. Why, in the name of perversity, was I eating my heart out in an aggrieved solitude, when simply at will I might be a traveller--a tentative explorer, at least--and be learning to ride my own destinies instead of being ridden by them? I had not yet sat, like the mythological gentleman, so long upon a rock that I had grown to it. I had means, and certainly at least a definite object in breaking into them. I would wing my test flight for that Clapham suburb which Pugsley had mentioned, and examine the ground there, at least, for subsequent exploiting.

A tingle of adventure was in this as well as a vengeful resolution. It would be something, after all, to breathe a novel air into my stagnant lungs. I had lived so long remote and self-contained, that the prospect of even a Cockney suburb was a prospect potential of romance to me. No one would note my absence, and, if anyone did, how would it concern me? I was free, and my own master.

And so, the very next morning, valise in hand, I strode away, walking determinedly, with no effort at concealment. I went out by the wicket, and took the road to Footover, and thence a train to Waterloo. I was young, green, gullible, no doubt; but a certain hardness of muscle and disposition was always at my service and that of others. Few minor mishaps of the way have befallen me through life, and I was early in expanding to the practical knowledge which overrides difficulties. I mention this merely to explain the ease with which my inexperience resolved these first small problems of self-dependence--my introduction to the roaring traffics of existence, to the wiles and hypocrisies of men. I spent that night at an hotel in the Waterloo Bridge Road; and my initiation into its ways profited me.

Early on the following day I walked through the seethe of the streets to the Victoria Station, and so, by the local service, reached Clapham Road. I will not say that I greeted this goal to my adventure, shapeless as that was, without a certain excitement and hurrying of the blood. Here, somehow and somewhere, had been enacted the prologue to my young unprofitable life. This same busy street, going up southward through a dull avenue of bricks and windows, had housed, perhaps, the germ of that secret, which, dark and poignant a one as it appeared to me, was nevertheless of the commonest breed of secrets all the world over. And, indeed, its setting here seemed prosy enough--monotonous, respectable, unlovely--houses built for the most part in the sober chocolate hue of a century earlier; staid rows of shops; moderate traffic of omnibuses passing back and forth--everything betokening a condition of decent prosperity.

But, coming presently into a sort of little open place or circus, where the single road split out into a fan of three, I was refreshingly struck by some more definite suggestion there of an atmosphere which had already thinly appealed to me. This atmosphere was faintly redolent of past coaching days. It breathed from the tavern doors of the old "Plough Inn," about which were congregated a half dozen or so of the very legitimate descendants of Tony Veller, but fallen, alas! upon degenerate times. The omnibuses, which they drove in these, stood ranked, yellow and green and red, by the kerb. When any one of the loiterers, detaching himself rubicundly from his fellows, would mount a box, and gather the greasy ribbons into his gloved hands, a whiff of Henry Alken, of his coachmen and stable-tubs and ostlers, would seem irresistibly borne into one's senses. So, too, the rows of white posts and rails, skirting that side of the common which made for Tooting , seemed to carry one into far perspectives of dead and past adventure. It was this way--though I did not know it then--streamed the enormous traffic of the Derby week, a page snatched out of the Regency eld, and still keeping the gay characteristics of that reckless hard-drinking era. But now the road appeared peaceful enough--a sunny road skirting a great sunny common, where lazy gipsy men, of the true Romany Chal type, kept a paddock of donkeys for hire, and little rookeries of crazy tenements marked at intervals the camping-grounds of dead and gone squatters.

Suddenly the thought rushed into me, as if a plug had been taken out of my brain: "Gaskett! Was it, perhaps, after all, my mother's maiden name, and my dishonoured grandfather a publican?"

I drove open the door of the private bar and entered. There was no one there but, behind the counter, a plump short man of the conventional Boniface type. He was a bleary, rather unctuous-looking fellow, with a mole near his mouth like a faded patch, an obvious wig , and a snow-white apron bent about his portly form. He, also, it appeared, was in right succession from the Regency, though he might not have been more than sixty or so. I looked at him with a fearful speculation, as he lifted a pot or two to wipe the counter underneath. Was there a family likeness here? Who could say? Lady Skene was a teetotaller.

"Richard Gaskett," I murmured, hardly articulate.

"That's me," he said, going on with his work.

He glanced up a moment.

"O!" he said. "Then that makes three of us."

"Three?"

"My name, your name--and the other chap's," said he. "I shouldn't a' thought it in reason, and all to happen here. But it seems it is. Now, sir?"

The last was an invitation to me to order something. He drew me my beer from an engine whose handle was worn from his oozy grip.

"Why not?" he said, and crossed his legs and leaned one elbow on the counter, like a pottle-bodied Leicester Square Shakespeare.

"Who was christened?" I asked.

"The other one," he answered. "Let me think now."

He crossed and tapped together ruminative the fat forefinger of each hand, as if he were numbering up a score of notches in his memory.

"I misremember the exact date," he said suddenly: "but the old lady she stands as clear as a Pepper's Ghost in my mind. Mother Carey they called her; and she lived in White Square down there; and every morning, reg'lar as the postman, she'd come in here at eleven o'clock for her gill of gin and peppermint, like a very particler old duchess. She'd been on the stage in her time, I understood, and wasn't to be put off with anything lower than the genuine London Old Tom. God bless me! How she comes back!"

He basked a little, in a glow of memory, before he continued luminously:

"I recollect the very day she bought it of me--just as plain I do as if it was print."

"Bought what?" I ventured.

"My name, sir," he said. "She come in here, as excited as Punch; and we got talking together. 'Mr Gaskett,' she says, 'I want a name.' 'Well,' I answers, 'there's plenty agoing for choice. What do you want it for?' 'For a babby,' she says, 'as hasn't got one of his own.' 'O-ho!' I says: 'that's the game is it? Well, shall I sell you mine for a pint?' 'Done,' she says; and done it was. She'd a superstition, she said, about giving him one that wasn't his by right of birth or purchase, and that settled the matter. I don't know if he was christened that way. If he was, you're the third; and that makes it funny."

Not so odd, nevertheless, I thought, by two-thirds of its oddity, if the tremendous suspicion sprung suddenly into my mind were justified. But anyhow it was a certain relief to find that this beery Amphitryon was not my grandfather.

"And you--you never saw your godson, so to call him?" I asked.

I detected a sudden insolent curiosity in his eye. To be sure, what with my age and inquisitiveness, there seemed a certain coincidence here. But I kept my nerve, and put his question aside with another.

"Down yonder," he said coolly--"off the High Street. But she won't be living there now."

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