Laid up in Lavender Part 8

"I will," the tall gentleman answered. He was still quiet, but there was a glitter in his eyes. "I have already outlined my story, now I must ask Dr. Partridge to hear it more at length. Many years ago there was a young man, almost a boy, employed in the offices of a great firm in Liverpool--a poor boy, very poor, but of a good and an old family."

Woolley's smile of derision became fixed, so to speak. But he did not interrupt, and the other after a pause went on. "This lad made the acquaintance of a medical student a little older than himself, and was led by him--I think he was weak and sensitive and easily led--into gambling. He lost more than he could pay. His mother was a widow, almost without means. To meet the debt, small as it was, would have ruined her."

The stranger paused again, overcome, it seemed, by painful memories.

There was a flush on Woolley's brow. The girl sitting in the window, her hands clasped on her knees, turned so as to see more of the room.

"Now listen," the speaker continued, "to what happened. One day this clerk's friend, to whom the greater part of the money was due, came to the office at the luncheon hour and pressed him to pay. The other clerks were out. The two were alone together, and while they were alone there came in a client of the firm to pay some money. The lad took the money and gave a receipt. He had power to do so. The man left again, after telling them that he was starting to South America that evening. When he was gone"--here his voice sank a little--"the friend made a suggestion. I think you know what it was."

No one spoke.

"He suggested to the clerk to take this money and pay his debts with it--to steal it. The boy resisted for a time, but in the end, still telling himself he did not intend to steal it, he put it away in his desk and locked it up, and gave in no account of it. After that the issue was certain. A day came when, the other still pressing him and tempting him, he took the money and used it, and became a thief."

The silence in the little room was deep indeed. On Woolley a spell had fallen. He would have interrupted the man, but he could not.

"Immediately after this," the speaker continued, "those two parted.

Within a week--for the man had not gone to South America--the theft was discovered. The boy's employers were merciful--G.o.d reward them!

They declined to prosecute; nay, they kept the matter secret, or as secret as it could be kept, and even found him work in their foreign office. He did not forget. He served them faithfully, and in the course of years he repaid the money with interest. Then--G.o.d's ways are not our ways--strange news reached this clerk. Three distant kinsmen whom he had never seen had died within three months, and the last of them had left him a large property. The name and the honour"--for the first time the tall gentleman's voice faltered--"of a great family had fallen upon his shoulders to wear and to uphold! And he was a thief!"

"_You_," he went on--and from this point he directly addressed the man who gazed at him from beyond the table--"_you_ cannot enter into his feelings, nor understand them! It were folly to tell _you_ that the remembrance that he had stained the honour and disgraced the name of his family poisoned his whole life. He tried--G.o.d knows he did--to make amends by a life of integrity, and while his mother lived he led that life. But he found no comfort in it. She died, and he lived on alone in the house of his family, and it may be"--again his voice shook--"that he brooded overmuch on this matter, and came to take too morbid a view of it, to let it stand always between him and the sun."

He stopped, and looked uncertainly about him.

"Yes, yes!" the doctor said. Pleasance had turned to the window, and was weeping softly. "He did, indeed!"

"Be that as it may, he met one day the manager of the firm he had robbed, and he read in the man's eyes that he remembered. And if he, why not others? He went out then, and he formed a resolution. You can guess what that was. It was a wild, mad, perhaps a wicked resolution.

But such as it was--an ancestor in sterner times, writing in a book which this man possessed, had said, 'Blood washes out shame!'--such as it was he made it, and Heaven used it, and frustrated it in its own time. The lad, now a man, following blind chance, as he thought, was brought within a mile of this house--this one lonely house, of all others in England, in which you live. But it was not chance which led him, but Heaven's own guiding, to the end that his, Valentine Walton's life, might be spared, and that you might be punished."

Woolley struggled to reply. But the thought which the other's words expressed was in his mind also, and held him dumb. How had Walton been led to this house of all houses? Why had this forgotten sin risen up now? He stood awhile speechless, glaring at Walton; aware, bitterly aware, of what the listeners were thinking, and yet unable to say a word in his defence. Then with an effort he became himself again.

"That is your version, is it?" he said, with a jeering laugh which failed to hide the effect the story had produced upon him. "You say you are a thief? It is not worth my while to contradict you. And now, if you please, we will descend from play-acting to business. You have been very kind in arranging this little scene, Dr. Partridge, and I am greatly obliged to you. I need only say that I shall take care to repay you to the last penny."

"First," the doctor said mildly, yet with dignity, "I should repay you what I owe you--if you really want your money now, that is."

"Want it? Of course I do!" was the fierce rejoinder. The man's nature was recovering from the shock, and in the rebound pa.s.sion was getting the upper hand.

"Very well," said the doctor firmly. "Then here it is." He pushed aside a paper, and disclosed a small packet of notes and a pile of gold and silver. "You will find the amount on that piece of paper, and it includes your salary for the next quarter in lieu of notice. When you have seen that it is correct I shall be glad to have your receipt, and we will close our connection."

The trapped man had one wish--to see them dead before him. But wishes go for little, and in his rage and chagrin he clung to a shred of pride. He would not own that he had been outgeneralled. He sat down and wrote the quittance. The first pen--it was a quill--would not write. He jabbed it violently on the table, and flung it with an oath into the fireplace. But the next served him.

"You have lent this money, I suppose," he said, looking at Walton as he rose. "More fool you! You will never be repaid."

He did not turn to Pleasance or look at her. He had come into the room hoping to win her in spite of all. He went out--a stranger. Not even their eyes had met. He had lost her, and revenge, and everything, save his money.

CHAPTER IV

Within doors a bedroom, littered and dismantled, showed a pile of luggage stacked in the middle of the floor. Without was a grey cloudy sky, such as we sometimes have in June, and a nipping east wind that blew roughly; a wind almost visible to the man moodily gnawing his nails at the window. He found no comfort within or without, in the past or the future. Behind him he had a retrospect of humiliation, of vain hopes and ambitions; before him no prospect but that dreary one of starting afresh in a new place among new people, unfriended, save by three thousand and odd pounds. It had come to this.

"D----n him!" he whispered between his clenched teeth. It was no formal expletive. He meant it--every letter of it.

By and by he turned from the window, and his eyes fell on a small article lying on the dressing-table. It was almost the only thing, save a stout walking-stick, which he had not packed up. It was a pistol. He had hit on it the day before in a dark nook behind the medicine bottles in the surgery; and finding it in good condition, with one barrel of the two undischarged, he had had no difficulty in conjecturing whose it was and how it came there. No doubt it was Walton's, the pistol with which he had shot himself--as indeed it was.

Nickson had brought it to the doctor, and the latter with a natural distaste had thrust it into the first out-of-the-way place which lay ready to his hand.

This piece of evidence Woolley presently put in his pocket, and taking his stick left the room; leaving it, as he knew, for good, and not without a last bitter glance round the place where he had slept, and schemed, and hoped for two years. He went down the stairs, and through the house to the back door, seeing no one except Daniel, who was rubbing down the mare in the yard. To the surgeon's fancy the house, as he pa.s.sed through it, seemed abnormally still; as if in the hush and silence which fall upon a house in the afternoon it awaited something--as if it knew that something strange was in the air, and all the stones were saying "Hist!"

Shaking off this feeling, the surgeon took a back path, which, pa.s.sing through the shrubbery, came into the main drive near the white gate.

From that point the track mounted between the bracken-covered flanks of the ravine until it emerged on the crown of the moor. In one place both path and glen turned at a sharp angle, and Woolley at this corner happened to lift his eyes. He stopped short with an exclamation.

Before him, strolling slowly along in the same direction as himself, with his hands behind him and his eyes on the path, was the tall gentleman--Walton.

"Ah!" Woolley whispered to himself, hating the other the more for falling in his way now, "the devil take you for a mooning lunatic! I would like to give you in charge here, and this minute, and swear you were going to try it again!"

He laughed grimly at this, his first thought; a natural thought enough, since his intention at starting had been to swear an information against Walton, and get him locked up if possible; at any rate, to cause him as much vexation as he could. But that first natural thought led to another which drove the blood from his cheek and kindled an unholy fire in his eyes. That revenge was a poor one.

But was there not another within his grasp? What if Walton were found lying on the path shot and dead, his own pistol beside him?

Ah! what then? What would people say? Would they not say--would not Nickson be ready to swear that the madman had done it again, and with more thoroughness? Woolley's hand closed convulsively on the b.u.t.t of the weapon in his pocket. One barrel of it was still loaded. No one had seen him take it. No one knew that he knew of its existence. Would not even the doctor conclude that Walton had repossessed himself of it, and in some temporary return of his moody aberration had used it--this time with fatal effect?

The perspiration stood on the tempted man's brow. Though the wind was blowing keenly, and a wrack of white clouds was sweeping over his head, the glen seemed to grow close and confined, roofed in by a leaden sky. "It is a devil's thought!" he muttered, his eyes on the figure before him, "a devil's thought!" At that moment there could be no question with him of the existence of a devil. He felt him at his elbow tempting him, promising revenge and impunity.

"No! Not that!" He rather gasped the words than said them, yet gasped them aloud, the more thoroughly to convince himself that he did reject the idea. "Not that!"

No, not that. Yet he began to walk on at a pace which must bring him up with the other. His brain too dwelt on the ease and safety with which he might carry out the scheme. He remembered that before he turned the corner he had looked back and seen no one. Therefore for some minutes he was secure from interruption from behind. All round the ravine he could command the sky-line. There was one no visible. He and Walton were alone. And he was overtaking Walton.

The latter heard him walking behind him, and turned and stopped. He showed no surprise on discovering who his follower was, but spoke as if he had eyes in his back, and had watched him drawing gradually nearer. "I have been waiting for you, Woolley," he said. "I thought I should meet you."

"Did you?" Woolley said softly, eying him in a curious fashion, and himself very pale.

"Yes, I wanted to say this to you." There the tall gentleman paused and looked down, prodding the turf with his stick. He seemed to find a difficulty in going on. "It is this," he continued at last. "I have done you a mischief here, acting honestly, and doing only what seemed to me to be right. But I have harmed you--that is the fact--and I am anxious to know that you will not leave here a hardened man--a worse man than I found you."

"Thank you," the other said. His lips were dry, and he moistened them with his tongue. But he did not take his eyes from Walton's face.

"If you will let me know," the tall gentleman continued haltingly--he was still intent upon the ground--"what your plans are, I will see if I can further them. Until lately I thought you had spoiled my life, and I bore you malice for it. I would have done you what harm I could.

Now----"

"Yes?"

"I think--I trust it may not be so. I have dwelt too much on that old affair. I hope to begin a new life now."

"With her?"

The tall gentleman looked up, as if the other had struck him. There was menace in the tone, and menace more dreadful in the face and gleaming eyes which he found confronting him. "You fool!" Woolley hissed--pa.s.sion in the calmness of his voice--and he took a step nearer to the other. "You fool, to come and tell me this!--to come and taunt me! _You_ help me! _You_ pardon me! _You_ will not leave me worse than you found me! Ay, but you will!" His voice rose. A wicked smile nickered on his lips. His eyes still dwelling on the other's face, he drew the pistol slowly from his pocket and levelled it at Walton's head. "You will, for I--am going--to kill you."

Walton heard the click of the hammer as it rose. For a second, during which his tongue refused obedience, he tasted of the bitterness of the cup which he had held to his own lips. It flashed across him, as his heart gave a bound and stood still, that this was his punishment. Then he recovered himself.

"Not before that child!" he said coolly. He forced his eyes to quit the dark muzzle which threatened him and to glance aside.

There was no one there, but Woolley turned to look, and in an instant Walton sprang upon him, and, knocking up the pistol with his stick, closed with him. The one loaded barrel exploded in the air, and the men went writhing and stumbling to and fro, Woolley striking savagely at the other's face with the muzzle of the pistol. The taller man contented himself with parrying these attacks, while he clutched Woolley's left wrist with his disengaged hand.

Presently they were down in a heap together. Then they rose and drew apart, breathless and dishevelled, but there remained unnoticed on the ground between them a tiny white object, a small packet about the size of a letter. It was very light, for in the twinkling of an eye the wind turned it over and over, and carried it three or four paces away.

"You villain!" Walton gasped, trembling with excitement. His nerves were shaken as much by the narrowness of his escape as by the struggle. "You would have murdered me!"