THE THREE IMPOSTORS
\
The Three Impostors
or The Transmutations
by Arthur Machen
TRANSLATOR OF « I/HEPTAMERON * AND
«LE MOYEN DE PARVENIR * } AUTHOR
OF <THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY*
AND 'THE GREAT GOD PAN'
Boston: Roberts Bros., 1895 London: John Lane, Vigo St.
Copyright, 1895, BY ROBERTS BROTHERS.
All Rights Reserved.
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SSnitoersttg
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PROLOGUE 7
ADVENTURE OF THE GOLD TIBERIUS 12
THE ENCOUNTER OF THE PAVEMENT ' . 23
NOVEL OF THE DARK VALLEY 28
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER 53
NOVEL OF THE BLACK SEAL 65
INCIDENT OF THE PRIVATE BAR 122
THE DECORATIVE IMAGINATION 137
NOVEL OF THE IRON MAID 140
THE RECLUSE OF BAYSWATER 148
NOVEL OF THE WHITE POWDER 155
STRANGE OCCURENCE IN CLERKENWELL 182
HISTORY OF THE YOUNG MAN WITH SPECTACLES . 190
ADVENTURE OF THE DESERTED RESIDENCE 2OQ
THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
PKOLOGUE.
Mr. Joseph Walters is going to stay the night? " said the smooth clean-shaven man to his companion, an individual not of the most charming appearance, who had chosen to make his ginger- colored mustache merge into a pair of short chin- whiskers.
The two stood at the hall door, grinning evilly at each other ; and presently a girl ran quickly down the stairs, and joined them. She was quite young, with a quaint and piquant rather than a beautiful face, and her eyes were of a shining hazel. She held a neat paper parcel in one hand, and laughed with her friends.
"Leave the door open," said the smooth man to
the other, as they were going out. "Yes, by ,"
he went on with an ugly oath. "We'll leave the front door on the jar. He may like to see company, you know."
The other man looked doubtfully about him. "Is it quite prudent do you think, "Davies?" he said, pausing with his hand on the mouldering knocker. "I don't think Lipsius would like it. What do you say, Helen?"
8 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
"I agree with Davies. Davies is an artist, and you are commonplace, Richmond, and a bit of a coward. Let the door stand open, of course. But what a pity Lipsius had to go away! He would have enjoyed himself."
"Yes," replied the smooth Mr. Davies, "that summons to the west was very hard on the doctor."
The three passed out, leaving the hall door, cracked and riven with frost and wet, half open, and they stood silent for a moment under the ruinous shelter of the porch.
"Well," said the girl, "it is done at last. We shall hurry no more on the track of the young man with spectacles."
" We owe a great deal to you, " said Mr. Davies politely; "the doctor said so before he left. But have we not all three some farewells to make? I, , for my part, propose to say good-by , here, before this picturesque but mouldy residence, to my friend Mr. Burton, dealer in the antique and curious, " and the man lifted his hat with an exaggerated bow.
"And I," said Eichmond, "bid adieu to Mr. Wilkins, the private secretary, whose company has, I confess, become a little tedious."
"Farewell to Miss Lally, and to Miss Leicester also," said the girl, making as she spoke a delicious courtesy. "Farewell to all occult adventure; the farce is played."
Mr. Davies and the lady seemed full of grim enjoyment, but Richmond tugged at his whiskers nervously.
"I feel a bit shaken up," he said. "I 've seen rougher things in the States, but that crying noise
PROLOGUE. 9
he made gave me a sickish feeling. And then the smell — But my stomach was never very strong." The three friends moved away from the door, and began to walk slowly up and down what had been a gravel path, but now lay green and pulpy with damp mosses. It was a fine autumn evening, and a faint sunlight shone on the yellow walls of the old deserted house, and showed the patches of gan- grenous decay, and all the stains, the black drift of rain from the broken pipes, the scabrous blots where the bare bricks were exposed, the green weeping of a gaunt laburnum that stood beside the porch, and ragged marks near the ground where the reeking clay was gaining on the worn foundations. It was a queer rambling old place, the centre per- haps two hundred years old, with dormer windows sloping from the tiled roof, and on each side there were Georgian wings ; bow windows had been car- ried up to the first floor, and two dome-like cupolas that had once been painted a bright green were now gray and neutral. Broken urns lay upon the path, and a heavy mist seemed to rise from the unctuous clay; the neglected shrubberies, grown all tangled and unshapen, smelt dank and evil, and there was an atmosphere all about the deserted mansion that proposed thoughts of an opened grave. The three friends looked dismally at the rough grasses and the nettles that grew thick over lawn and flower- beds ; and at the sad water-pool in the midst of the weeds. There, above green and oily scum instead of lilies, stood a rusting Triton on the rocks, sound- ing a dirge through a shattered horn; and beyond, beyond the sunk fence and the far meadows, the
10 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
sun slid down and shone red through the bars of the elm trees.
Richmond shivered and stamped his foot. " We had better be going soon," he said; "there is noth- ing else to be done here."
"No," said Davies, "it is finished at last. I thought for some time we should never get hold of the gentleman with the spectacles. He was a clever fellow, but, Lord! he broke up badly at last. I can tell you he looked white at me when I touched him on the arm in the bar. But where could he have hidden the thing? We can all swear it was not on him."
The girl laughed, and they turned away, when Richmond gave a violent start. " Ah ! " he cried, turning to the girl, "what have you got there? Look, Davies, look! it's all oozing and dripping."
The young woman glanced down at the little par- cel she was carrying, and partially unfolded the paper.
"Yes, look both of you," she said; "it's my own 'idea. Don't you think it will do nicely for the ^doctor's museum? It comes from the right hand, the hand that took the gold Tiberius."
Mr. Davies nodded with a good deal of approba- tion, and Richmond lifted his ugly high-crowned bowler, and wiped his forehead with a dingy hand- kerchief.
"I'm going," he said; "you two can stay if you like."
The three went round by the stable path, past the withered wilderness of the old kitchen garden, and struck off by a hedge at the back, making for
PROLOGUE. 11
a particular point in the road. About five minutes later two gentlemen, whom idleness had led to explore these forgotten outskirts of London, came sauntering up the shadowy carriage drive. They had spied the deserted house from the road, and as' they observed all the heavy desolation of the place they began to moralize in the great style, with considerable debts to Jeremy Taylor.
"Look, Dyson," said the one as they drew nearer, " look at those upper windows ; the sun is setting, and though the panes are dusty, yet
'* The grimy sash an oriel burns."
"Phillipps," replied the elder and (it must be said) the more pompous of the two, "I yield to fantasy, I cannot withstand the influence of the grotesque. Here, where all is falling into dimness and dissolution, and we walk in cedarn gloom, and the very air of heaven goes mouldering to the lungs, I cannot remain commonp]ace. I look at that deep glow on the panes, and the house lies all enchanted; that very room, I tell you, is within all blood and fire."
ADVENTURE OF THE GOLD TIBERIUS.
THE acquaintance between Mr. Dyson and Mr. Charles Phillipps arose from one of those myriad chances which are every day doing their work in the streets of London. Mr. Dyson was a man of letters, and an unhappy instance of talents misap- plied. With gifts that might have placed him in the flower of his youth among the most favored of Bentley's favorite novelists, he had chosen to be perverse; he was, it is true, familiar with scholas- tic logic, but he knew nothing of the logic of life, and he flattered himself with the title of artist, when he was in fact but an idle and curious spec- tator of other men's endeavors. Amongst many delusions, he cherished one most fondly, that he was a strenuous worker; and it was with a gesture of supreme weariness that he would enter his favorite resort, a small tobacco shop in Great Queen Street, and proclaim to any one who cared to listen that he had seen the rising and setting of two suc- cessive suns. The proprietor of the shop, a middle- aged man of singular civility, tolerated Dyson partly out of good nature, and partly because he was a regular customer; he was allowed to sit on an empty cask, and to express his sentiments on
.ADVENTURE OF THE GOLD TIBERIUS. 13
literary and artistic matters till he was tired or the time for closing came; and if no fresh customers were attracted, it is believed that none were turned away by his eloquence. Dyson was addicted to wild experiments in tobacQo; he never wearied of trying new combinations, and one evening he had just entered the shop and given utterance to his last preposterous formula, when a young fellow, of about his own age, who had come in a moment later, asked the shopman to duplicate the order on his account, smiling politely, as he spoke, to Mr. Dyson's address. Dyson felt profoundly flattered, and after a few phrases the two entered into con- versation, and in an hour's time the tobacconist saw the new friends sitting side by side on a couple of casks, deep in talk.
"My dear sir," said Dyson, "I will give you the task of the literary man in a phrase. He has got to do simply this : to invent a wonderful story, and to tell it in a wonderful manner."
" I will grant you that, " said Mr. Phillipps , " but you will allow me to insist that in the hands of the true artist in words all stories are marvellous, and every circumstance has its peculiar wonder. The matter is of little consequence, the manner is every- thing. Indeed, the highest skill is shown in taking matter apparently commonplace and transmuting it by the high alchemy of style into the pure gold of art."
"That is indeed a proof of great skill, but it is great skill exerted foolishly , or at least unadvisedly. It is as if a great violinist were to show us what marvellous harmonies he could draw from a child's banjo. "
14 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
"No, no, you are really wrong. I see you take a radically mistaken view of life. But we must thresh this out. Come to my rooms ; I live not far from here."
It was thus that Mr. Dyson became the associate of Mr. Charles Phillipps, who lived in a quiet square not far from Holborn. Thenceforth they haunted each other's rooms at intervals, sometimes regular, and occasionally the reverse, and made appoint- ments to meet at the shop in Queen Street, where their talk robbed the tobacconist's profit of half its charm. There was a constant jarring of literary formulas, Dyson exalting the claims of the pure imagination, while Phillipps, who was a student of physical science and something of an ethnologist, insisted that all literature ought to have a scientific basis. By the mistaken benevolence of deceased relatives both young men were placed out of reach of hunger, and so, meditating high achievements, idled their time pleasantly away, and revelled in the careless joys of a Bohemianism devoid of the sharp seasoning of adversity.
One night in June Mr. Phillipps was sitting in his room in the calm retirement of Red Lion Square. He had opened the window, and was smoking placidly, while he watched the movement of life below. The sky was clear, and the afterglow of sunset had lingered long about it; and the flushing twilight of a summer evening, vying with the gas- lamps in the square, had fashioned a chiaroscuro that had in it something unearthly; and the chil- dren, racing to and fro upon the pavement, the loun- ging idlers by the public, and the casual passers-by
I
ADVENTURE OF THE GOLD TIBERIUS. 15
rather flickered and hovered in the play of lights than stood out substantial things. By degrees in the houses opposite one window after another leaped out a square of light, now and again a figure would shape itself against a blind and vanish, and to all this semi-theatrical magic the runs and flourishes of brave Italian opera played a little distance off on a piano-organ seemed an appropriate accompani- ment, while the deep-muttered bass of the traffic of Holborn never ceased. Phillipps enjoyed the scene and its effects ; the light in the sky faded and turned to darkness, and the square gradually grew silent, and still he sat dreaming at the window, till the sharp peal of the house bell roused him, and looking at his watch he found that it was past ten o'clock. There was a knock at the door, and his friend Mr. Dyson entered, and, according to his custom, sat down in an armchair and began to smoke in silence.
"You know, Phillipps," he said at length, "that I have always battled for the marvellous. I remem- ber your maintaining in that chair that one has no business to make use of the wonderful, the improb- able, the odd coincidence in literature, and you took the ground that it was wrong to do so, because, as a matter of fact, the wonderful and the improb- able don't happen, and men's lives are not really shaped by odd coincidence. Now, mind you, if that were so, I would not grant your conclusion, because I think the " criticism-of-life " theory is all nonsense; but I deny your premise. A most sin- gular thing has happened to me to-night."
"Really, Dyson, I am very glad to hear it. Of
16 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
course* I oppose your argument, whatever it may be; but if you would be good enough to tell me of your adventure I should be delighted."
"Well, it came about like this. I have had a very hard day's work; indeed, I have scarcely moved from my old bureau since seven o'clock last night. I wanted to work out that idea we discussed last Tuesday, you know, the notion of the fetish- worshipper."
"Yes, I remember. Have you been able to do anything with it?"
"Yes; it came out better than I expected; but there were great difficulties, the usual agony be- tween the conception and the execution. Anyhow I got it done at about seven o'clock to-night, and I thought I should like a little of the fresh air. I went out and wandered rather aimlessly about the streets ; my head was full of my tale, and I didn't much notice where I was going. I got into those quiet places to the north of Oxford Street as you go west, the genteel residential neighborhood of stucco and prosperity. I turned east again without knowing it, and it was quite dark when I passed along a sombre little by-street, ill lighted and empty. I did not know at the time in the least where I was, but I found out afterwards that it was not very far from Tottenham Court Road. I strolled idly along, enjoying the stillness ; on one side there seemed to be the back premises of some great shop; tier after tier of dusty windows lifted up into the night, with gibbet-like contrivances for raising heavy goods, and below large doors, fast closed and bolted, all dark and desolate. Then there came a huge pan-
ADVENTURE OF THE GOLD TIBERIUS. 17
technicon warehouse; and over the way a grim blank wall, as forbidding as the wall of a jail, and then the headquarters of some volunteer regiment, and afterwards a passage leading to a court where wagons were standing to be hired. It was, one might almost say, a street devoid of inhabitants, and scarce a window showed the glimmer of a light. I was wondering at the strange peace and dimness there, where it must be close to some roaring main artery of London life, when suddenly I heard the noise of dashing feet tearing along the pavement at full speed, and from a narrow passage, a mews or something of that kind, a man was discharged as from a catapult under my very nose and rushed past me, flinging something from him as he ran. He was gone and down another street in an instant, almost before I knew what had happened, but I did n't much bother about him, I was watching something else. I told you he had thrown some- thing away; well, I watched what seemed a line of flame flash through the air and fly quivering over the pavement, and in spite of myself I could not help tearing after it. The impetus lessened, and I saw something like a bright half -penny roll slower and slower, and then deflect towards the gutter, hover for a moment on the edge, and dance down into a drain. I believe I cried out in positive despair, though I hadn't the least notion what I was hunting ; and then to my joy I saw that, instead of dropping into the sewer, it had fallen flat across two bars. I stooped down and picked it up and whipped it into my pocket, and I was just about to walk on when I heard again that sound of dashing
18 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
footsteps. I don't know why I did it, but as a matter of fact I dived down into the mews, or whatever it was, and stood as much in the shadow as possible. A man went by with a rush a few paces from where I was standing, and I felt uncommonly pleased that I was in hiding. I could n't make out much fea- ture, but I saw his eyes gleaming, and his teeth showing, and he had an ugly-looking knife in one hand, and I thought things would be very un- pleasant for gentleman number one if the second robber, or robbed, or what 3rou like, caught him up. I can tell you, Phillipps, a fox hunt is excit- ing enough, when the horn blows clear on a winter morning, and the hounds give tongue, and the red- coats charge away, but it 's nothing to a man hunt, and that 's what I had a slight glimpse of to-night. There was murder in the fellow's eyes as he went by, and I don't think there was much more than fifty seconds between the two. I only hope it was enough."
Dyson leant back in his armchair and relit his pipe, and puffed thoughtfully. Phillipps began to walk up and down the room, musing over the story of violent death fleeting in chase along the pave- ment, the knife shining in the lamplight, the fury of the pursuer, and the terror of the pursued.
"Well," he said at last, uand what was it, after all, that you rescued from the gutter? "
Dyson jumped up, evidently quite startled. "I really have n't a notion. I didn't think of looking. But we shall see."
He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket and drew out a small and shining object, and laid it on the table.
ADVENTURE OF THE GOLD TIBERIUS. 19
It glowed there beneath the lamp with the radiant glory of rare old gold; and the image and the let- ters stood out in high relief, clear and sharp, as if it had but left the mint a month before. The two men bent over it, and Phillipps took it up and examined it closely.
"Imp. Tiberius Caesar Augustus," he read the legend, and then, looking at the reverse of the coin, he stared in amazement, and at last turned to Dyson with a look of exultation.
"Do you know what you have found?" he said.
"Apparently a gold coin of some antiquity," said Dyson, coolly.
"Quite so, a gold Tiberius. No, that is wrong. You have found the gold Tiberius. Look at the reverse."
Dyson looked and saw the coin was stamped with the figure of a faun standing amidst reeds and flow- ing water. The features, minute as they were, stood out in delicate outline; it was a face lovely and yet terrible, and Dyson thought of the well- known passage of the lad's playmate, gradually growing with his growth and increasing with his stature, till the air was filled with the rank fume of the goat.
"Yes," he said, "it is a curious coin. Do you know it?"
" I know about it. It is one of the comparatively few historical objects in existence; it is all storied like those jewels we have read of. A whole cycle of legend has gathered round the thing; the tale goes that it formed part of an issue struck by Tiberius to commemorate an infamous excess. You
20 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
see the legend on the reverse : f Victoria. ' Tt is said that by an extraordinary accident the whole issue was thrown into the melting pot, and that only this one coin escaped. It glints through history and legend, appearing and disappearing, with intervals of a hundred years in time and continents in place. It was ' discovered ' by an Italian humanist, and lost and rediscovered. It has not been heard of since 1727, when Sir Joshua Byrde, a Turkey mer- chant, brought it home from Aleppo, and vanished with it a month after he had shown it to the virtuosi, no man knew or knows where. And here it is!"
"Put it into your pocket, Dyson," he said, after a pause. " I would not let any one have a glimpse of the thing, if I were you. I would not talk about it. Did either of the men you saw see you?"
"Well, I think not. I don't think the first man, the man who was vomited out of the dark passage, saw anything at all ; and I am sure that the second could not have seen me."
"And you did n't really see them. You could n't recognize either the one or the other if you met him in the street to-morrow?"
"No, I don't think I could. The street, as I said, was dimly lighted, and they ran like mad- men."
The two men sat silent for some time, each weav- ing his own fancies of the story; but lust of the marvellous was slowly overpowering Dyson's more sober thoughts.
"It is all more strange than I fancied," he said at last. "It was queer enough what I saw; a man
ADVENTURE OF THE GOLD TIBERIUS. 21
is sauntering along a quiet, sober, every-day London street, a street of gray houses and blank walls, and there, for a moment, a veil seems drawn aside, and the very fume of the pit steams up through the flagstones, the ground glows, red-hot, beneath his feet, and he seems to hear the hiss of the infer- nal caldron. A man flying in mad terror for his life, and furious hate pressing hot on his steps with knife drawn ready; here indeed is horror. But what is all that to what you have told me? I tell you, Phillipps, I see the plot thicken; our steps will henceforth be dogged with mystery, and the most ordinary incidents will teem with significance. You may stand out against it , and shut your eyes , but they will be forced open; mark my words, you will have to yield to the inevitable. A clue, tangled if you like, has been placed by chance in our hands ; it will be our business to follow it up. As for the guilty person or persons in this strange case , they will be unable to escape us, our nets will be spread far and wide over this great city, and suddenly, in the streets and places of public resort, we shall in some way or other be made aware that we are in touch with the unknown criminal. Indeed, I almost fancy I see him slowly approaching this quiet square of yours; he is loitering at street corners, wandering, apparently without aim, down far-reaching thoroughfares, but all the while com- ing nearer and nearer, drawn by an irresistible magnetism, as ships were drawn to the Loadstone Rock in the Eastern tale."
"I certainly think," replied Phillipps, "that, if you pull out that coin and flourish it under people's
22 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
noses as you are doing at the present moment, you will very probably find yourself in touch with the criminal, or a criminal. You will undoubtedly be robbed with violence. Otherwise, I see no reason why either of us should be troubled. No one saw you secure the coin, and no one knows you have it. I, for my part, shall sleep peacefully, and go about my business with a sense of security and a firm dependence on the natural order of things. The events of the evening, the adventure in the street, have been odd, I grant you, but I resolutely decline to have any more to do with the matter, and, if necessary, I shall consult the police. I will not be enslaved by a gold Tiberius, even though it swims into my ken in a manner which is somewhat melo- dramatic."
" And I for my part, " said Dyson, " go forth like a knight-errant in search of adventure. Not that I shall need to seek; rather adventure will seek me; I shall be like a spider in the midst of his web, responsive to every movement, and ever on the alert."
Shortly afterwards Dyson took his leave, and Mr. Phillipps spent the rest of the night in examining some flint arrow-heads which he had purchased. He had every reason to believe that they were the work of a modern and not a palaeolithic man, still he was far from gratified when a close scrutiny showed him that his suspicions were well founded. In his anger at the turpitude which would impose on an ethnologist, he completely forgot Dyson and the gold Tiberius; and when he went to bed at first sunlight, the whole tale had faded utterly from his thoughts.
THE ENCOUNTER OF THE PAVEMENT.
MB. Drsoisr, walking leisurely along Oxford Street, and staring with bland inquiry at whatever caught his attention, enjoyed in all its rare flavors the sen- sation that he was really very hard at work. His observation of mankind, the traffic, and the shop- windows tickled his faculties with an exquisite bouquet; he looked serious, as one looks on whom charges of weight and moment are laid, and he was attentive in his glances to right and left, for fear lest he should miss some circumstance of more acute significance. He had narrowly escaped being run over at a crossing by a charging van, for he hated to hurry his steps, and indeed the afternoon was warm ; and he had just halted by a place of popular refreshment, when the astounding gestures of a well dressed individual on the opposite pave- ment held him enchanted and gasping like a fish. A treble line of hansoms, carriages, vans, cabs, and omnibuses, was tearing east and west, and not the most daring adventurer of the crossings would have cared to try his fortune; but the person who' had attracted Dyson's attention seemed to rage on the very edge of the pavement, now and then dart- ing forward at the hazard of instant death, and at each repulse absolutely dancing with excitement,
24 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
to the rich amusement of the passers-by. At last, a gap that would have tried the courage of a street- boy appeared between the serried lines of vehicles, and the man rushed across in a frenzy, and escaping by a hair's breadth pounced upon Dyson as a tiger pounces on her prey. "I saw you looking about you," he said, sputtering out his words in his in- tense eagerness; "would you mind telling me this? Was the man who came out of the Aerated Bread Shop and jumped into the hansom three minutes ago a youngish looking man with dark whiskers and spectacles? Can't you speak, man? For Heaven's sake can't you speak? Answer me; it's a matter of life and death."
The words bubbled and boiled out of the man's mouth in the fury of his emotion, his face went from red to white, and the beads of sweat stood out on his forehead, and he stamped his feet as he spoke and tore with his hand at his coat, as if something swelled and choked him, stopping the passage of his breath.
" My dear sir, " said Dyson , " I always like to be accurate. Your observation was perfectly correct. . As you say, a youngish man, a man, I should say , of somewhat timid bearing, ran rapidly out of the shop here, and bounced into a hansom that must have been waiting for him, as it went eastwards at once. Your friend also wore spectacles , as you say. Perhaps you would like me to call a hansom for you to follow the gentleman?"
"No, thank you; it would be waste of time." The man gulped down something which appeared to rise in his throat, and Dyson was alarmed to see
THE ENCOUNTER OF THE PAVEMENT. 25
him shaking with hysterical laughter, and he clung hard to a lamp-post and swayed and staggered like a ship in a heavy gale.
"How shall I face the doctor?" he murmured to himself. "It is too hard to fail at the last moment." Then he seemed to recollect himself, and stood straight again, and looked quietly at Dyson. "I owe you an apology for my violence," he said at last. "Many men would not be so patient as you have been. Would you mind add- ing to your kindness by walking with me a little way? 1 feel a little sick; I think it 's the sun."
Dyson nodded assent, and devoted himself to a quiet scrutiny of this strange personage as they moved on together. The man was dressed in quiet taste, and the most scrupulous observer could find nothing amiss with the fashion or make of his clothes, yet, from his hat to his boots, everything seemed inappropriate. His silk hat, Dyson thought, should have been a high bowler of odious pattern worn with a baggy morning-coat, and an instinct told him that the fellow did not commonly carry a clean pocket-handkerchief. Tfye face was not of the most agreeable pattern, and was in no way im- proved by a pair of bulbous chin-whiskers of a ginger hue, into which mustaches of light color merged imperceptibly. Yet in spite of these sig- nals hung out by nature, Dyson felt that the individual beside him was something more than compact of vulgarity. He was struggling with himself, holding his feelings in check, but now and again passion would mount black to his face, and it was evidently by a supreme effort that he
26 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
kept himself from raging like a madman. Dyson found something curious and a little terrible in the spectacle of an occult emotion thus striving for the mastery, and threatening to break out at every instant with violence; and they had gone some dis- tance before the person whom he had met by so odd a hazard was able to speak quietly.
"You are really very good," he said. "I apolo- gize again; my rudeness was really most unjustifi- able. I feel my conduct demands an explanation, and I shall be happy to give it you. Do you happen to know of any place near here where one could sit down? I should really be very glad."
"My dear sir," said Dyson, solemnly, "the only cafe in London is close by. Pray do not consider yourself as bound to offer me any explanation, but at the same time I should be most happy to listen to you. Let us turn down here."
They walked down a sober street and turned into what seemed a narrow passage past an iron-barred gate thrown back. The passage was paved with flagstones, and decorated with handsome shrubs in pots on either side, and the shadow of the high walls made a coolness which was very agreeable after the hot breath of the sunny street. Pres- ently the passage opened out into a tiny square, a charming place, a morsel of France transplanted into the heart of London. High walls rose on either side, covered with glossy creepers, flower- beds beneath were gay with nasturtiums, geraniums, and marigolds, and odorous with mignonette, and in the centre of the square a fountain hidden by greenery sent a cool shower continually plashing
THE ENCOUNTER OF THE PAVEMENT. 27
into the basin beneath, and the very noise made this retreat delightful. Chairs and tables were disposed at convenient intervals, and at the other end of the court broad doors had been thrown back ; beyond was a long, dark room, and the turmoil of traffic had become a distant murmur. Within the room one or two men were sitting at the tables, writing and sipping, but the courtyard was empty.
" You see, we shall be quiet, " said Dyson. " Pray sit down here, Mr. ? "
"Wilkins. My name is Henry Wilkins."
"Sit here, Mr. Wilkins. I think you will find that a comfortable seat. I suppose you have not been here before? This is the quiet time; the place will be like a hive at six o'clock, and the chairs and tables will overflow into that little alley there."
A waiter came in response to the bell; and after Dyson had politely inquired after the health of M. Annibault, the proprietor, he ordered a bottle of the wine of Champigny.
"The wine of Champigny," he observed to Mr. Wilkins, who was evidently a good deal composed by the influence of the place, "is a Tourainian wine of great merit. Ah, here it is; let me fill your glass. How do you find it?"
"Indeed," said Mr. Wilkins, "I should have pro- nounced it a fine Burgundy. The bouquet is very exquisite. I am fortunate in lighting upon such a good Samaritan as yourself. I wonder you did not think me mad. But if you knew the terrors that assailed me, I am sure you would no longer be surprised at conduct which was certainly most unjustifiable."
28 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
He sipped his wine, and leant back in his chair, relishing the drip and trickle of the fountain, and the cool greenness that hedged in this little port of refuge.
"Yes," he said at last, "that is indeed an admirable wine. Thank you; you will allow me to offer you another bottle?"
The waiter was summoned, and descended through a trap-door in the floor of the dark apartment, and brought up the wine. Mr. Wilkins lit a cigarette, and Dyson pulled out his pipe.
"Now," said Mr. Wilkins, "I promised to give you an explanation of my strange behavior. It is rather a long story, but I see, sir, that you are no mere cold observer of the ebb and flow of life. You take, I think, a warm and an intelligent interest in the chances of your fellow-creatures, and I believe you will find what I have to tell not devoid of interest."
Mr. Dyson signified his assent to these proposi- tions, and though he thought Mr. Wilkins's diction a little pompous, prepared to interest himself in his tale. The other, who had so raged with pas- sion half an hour before, was now perfectly cool, and when he had smoked out his cigarette, he began in an even voice to relate the
NOVEL OF THE DARK VALLEY.
I am the son of a poor but learned clergyman iu the West of England, — but I am forgetting, these details are not of special interest. I will briefly
THE ENCOUNTER OF THE PAVEMENT. 29
state, then, that my father, who was, as I have said, a learned man, had never learnt the specious arts by which the great are flattered, and would never condescend to the despicable pursuit of self- advertisement. Though his fondness for ancient ceremonies and quaint customs, combined with a kindness of heart that was unequalled and a primi- tive and fervent piety, endeared him to his moor- land parishioners, such were not the steps by which clergy then rose in the Church, and at sixty my 'father was still incumbent of the little benefice he had accepted in his thirtieth year. The income of the living was barely sufficient to support life in the decencies which are expected of the Anglican parson ; and when my father died a few years ago, I, his only child, found myself thrown upon the world with a slender capital of less than a hundred pounds, and all the problem of existence before me. I felt that there was nothing for me to do in the country, and as usually happens in such cases, London drew me like a magnet. One day in August, in the early morning, while the dew still glittered on the turf, and on the high green banks of the lane, a neighbor drove me to the railway station, and I bade good-bye to the land of the broad moors and unearthly battle- ments of the wild tors. It was six o'clock as we neared London; the faint sickly fume of the brick- fields about Acton came in puffs through the open window, and a mist was rising from the ground. Presently the brief view of successive streets, prim and uniform, struck me with a sense of monotony; the hot air seemed to grow hotter; and when we had rolled beneath the dismal and squalid houses,
30 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
whose dirty and neglected back yards border the line near Paddington, I felt as if I should be stifled in this fainting breath of London. I got a han- som and drove off, and every street increased my gloom ; gray houses with blinds drawn down, whole thoroughfares almost desolate, and the foot-pas- sengers who seemed to stagger wearily along rather than walk, all made me feel a sinking at heart. I put up for the night at a small hotel in a street leading from the Strand, where my father had stayed on his few brief visits to town; and when I went out after dinner, the real gayety and bustle of the Strand and Fleet Street could cheer me but little, for in all this great city there was no single human being whom I could claim even as an acquaint- ance. I will not weary you with the history of the next year, for the adventures of a man who sinks are too trite to be worth recalling. My money did not last me long; I found that I must be neatly dressed, or no one to whom I applied would so much as listen to me; and I must live in a street of decent reputation if I wished to be treated with common civility. I applied for various posts, for which, as I now see, I was completely devoid of qualification; I tried to become a clerk without having the smallest notion of business habits, and I found, to my cost, that a general knowledge of literature and an execrable style of penmanship are far from being looked upon with favor in com- mercial circles. I had read one of the most charm- ing of the works of a famous novelist of the present day, and I frequented the Fleet Street taverns in the hope of making literary friends, and so getting
THE ENCOUNTER OF THE PAVEMENT. 31
the introductions which I understood were indispen- sable in the career of letters. I was disappointed; I once or twice ventured to address gentlemen who were sitting in adjoining boxes, and I was answered, politely indeed, but in a manner that told me my advances were unusual. Pound by pound, my small resources melted; I could no longer think of appearances; I migrated to a shy quarter, and my meals became mere observances. I went out at one and returned to my room at two, but nothing but a milk-cake had occurred in the interval. In short, I became acquainted with misfortune; and as I sat amidst slush and ice on a seat in Plyde Park, munching a piece of bread, I realized the bitterness of poverty , and the feelings of a gentleman reduced to something far below the condition of a vagrant. In spite of all discouragement I did not desist in my efforts to earn a living. I consulted advertise- ment columns, I kept my eyes open for a chance, I looked in at the windows of stationers' shops, but all in vain. One evening I was sitting in a Free Library, and I saw an advertisement in one of the papers. It was something like this: "Wanted by a gentleman a person of literary taste and abilities as secretary and amanuensis. Must not object to travel." Of course I knew that such an advertise- ment would have answers by the hundred, and I thought my own chances of securing the post ex- tremely small; however, I applied at the address given, and wrote to Mr. Smith, who was staying at a large hotel at the West End. I must confess that my heart gave a jump when I received a note a couple of days later, asking me to call at the
32 THE THKEE IMPOSTORS.
Cosmopole at my earliest convenience. I do not know, sir, what your experiences of life may have been, and so I cannot tell whether you have known such moments. A slight sickness, my heart beat- ing rather more rapidly than usual, a choking in the throat, and a difficulty of utterance ; such were my sensations as I walked to the Cosmopole. I had . to mention the name twice before the hall por- ter could understand me, and as I went upstairs my hands were wet. I was a good deal struck by Mr. Smith's appearance; he looked younger than I did, and there was something mild and hesitating about his expression. He was reading when I came in, and he looked up when I gave my name. " My dear sir," he said, "I am really delighted to see you. I have read very carefully the letter you were good enough to send me. Am I to understand that this document is in your own handwriting?" He showed me the letter I had written, and I told him I was not so fortunate as to be able to keep a secretary myself. " Then, sir," he went on, " the post I adver- tised is at your service. You have no objection to travel, I presume?" As you may imagine, I closed pretty eagerly with the offer he made, and thus I entered the service of Mr. Smith. For the first few weeks I had no special duties ; I had received a quarter's salary, and a handsome allowance was made me in lieu of board and lodging. One morn- ing, however, when I called at the hotel according to instructions, my master informed me that I must hold myself in readiness for a sea-voyage, and, to spare unnecessary detail, in the course of a fort- night we had landed at New York. Mr. Smith
THE ENCOUNTER OF THE PAVEMENT. 33
told me that he was engaged on a work of a special nature, in the compilation of which some peculiar researches had to be made; in short, I was given to understand that we were to travel to the far West.
After about a week had been spent in New York we took our seats in the cars, and began a journey tedious beyond all conception. Day after day, and night after night, the great train rolled on, thread- ing its way through cities the very names of which were strange to me, passing at slow speed over perilous viaducts, skirting mountain ranges and pine forests, and plunging into dense tracts of wood, where mile after mile and hour after hour the same monotonous growth of brushwood met the eye, and all along the continual clatter and rattle of the wheels upon the ill-laid lines made it diffi- cult to hear the voices of our fellow-passengers. We were a heterogeneous and ever-changing com- pany; often I woke up in the dead of night with the sudden grinding jar of the brakes, and looking out found that we had stopped in the shabby street of some frame-built town, lighted chiefly by the flaring windows of the saloon. A few rough -look- ing'fellows would often come out to stare at the cars, and sometimes passengers got down, and some- times there was a party of two or three waiting on the wooden sidewalk to get' on board. Many of the passengers were English; humble households torn up from the moorings of a thousand years, and bound for some problematical paradise in the alkali desert or the Rockies. I heard the men talking to one another of the great profits to be made on the virgin soil of America, and two or three, who were
3
34 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
mechanics, expatiated on the wonderful wages given to skilled labor on the railways and in the factories of the States. This talk usually fell dead after a few minutes, and I could see a sickness and dismay in the faces of these men as they looked at the ugly brush or at the desolate expanse of the prairie, dotted here and there with frame-houses, devoid of garden, or flowers or trees, standing all alone in what might have been a great gray sea frozen into stillness. Day after day the waving sky line, and the desolation of a land without form or color or variety, appalled the hearts of such of us as were Englishmen, and once in the night as I lay awake I heard a woman weeping and sobbing, and asking what she had done to come to such a place. Her husband tried to comfort her in the broad speech of Gloucestershire, telling her the ground was so rich that one had only to plough it up and it would grow sunflowers of itself, but she cried for her mother and their old cottage and the beehives, like a little child. The sadness of it all overwhelmed me, and I had no heart to think of other matters ; the ques- tion of what Mr. Smith could have to do in such 'a country, and of what manner of literary research could be carried on in the wilderness, hardly troubled me. Now and again my situation struck me as peculiar; I had been engaged as a literary assistant at a handsome salary, and yet my master was still almost a stranger to me; sometimes he would come to where I was sitting in the cars and make a few banal remarks about the country, but for the most part of the journey he sat by himself, not speaking to any one, and so far as I could judge, deep in his
THE ENCOUNTER OF THE PAVEMENT. 35
thoughts. It was I think on the fifth day from New York when I received the intimation that we should shortly leave the cars; I had been watching some distant mountains which rose wild and savage before us, and I was wondering if there were human beings so unhappy as to speak of home in connec- tion with those piles of lumbered rock, when Mr. Smith touched me lightly on the shoulder. " You will be glad to be done with the cars, I have no doubt, Mr. Wilkins," he said. "You were looking at the mountains, I think? Well, I hope we shall be there to-night. The train stops at Reading, and I dare say we shall manage to find our way.7'
A few hours later the brakeman brought the train to a standstill at the Heading depot and we got out. I noticed that the town, though of course built almost entirely of frame-houses, was larger and busier than any we had passed for the last two days. The depot was crowded, and as the bell and whistle sounded, I saw that a number of persons were preparing to leave the cars, while an even greater number were waiting to get on board. Besides the passengers, there was a pretty dense crowd of people, some of whom had come to meet or to see off their friends and relatives, while others were mere loafers. Several of our English fellow passengers got down at Eeading, but the confusion was so great that they were lost to my sight almost immediately. Mr. Smith beckoned to me to follow him, and we were soon in the thick of the mass ; and the continual ringing of bells, the hubbub of voices, the shrieking of whistles, and the hiss of escaping steam, confused my senses, and I wondered
36 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
dimly as I. struggled after my employer, where we were going, and how we should be able to find our way through an unknown country. Mr. Smith had put on a wide-brimmed hat, which he had sloped over his eyes, and as all the men wore hats of the same pattern, it was with some difficulty that I distinguished him in the crowd. We got free at last, and he struck down a side street, and made one or two sharp turns to right and left. It was getting dusk, and we seemed to be passing through a shy portion of the town, there were few people about in the ill-lighted streets, and these few were men of the most unprepossessing pattern. Sud- denly we stopped before a corner house, a man was standing at the door, apparently on the look-out for some one, and I noticed that he and Smith gave sharp glances one to the other.
"From New York City, I expect, mister?"
4 'From New York!"
"All right; they 're ready, and you can have 'em when you choose. I know my orders, you see, and I mean to run this business through."
" Very well, Mr. Evans, that is what we want. Our money is good, you know. Bring them round."
I had stood silent, listening to this dialogue, and wondering what it meant. Smith began to walk impatiently up and down the street, and the man Evans was still standing at his door. He had given a sharp whistle, and I saw him looking me over in a quiet leisurely way, as if to make sure of my face for another time. I was thinking what all this could mean, when an ugly, slouching lad came up a .side passage, leading two raw-boned horses.
THE ENCOUNTER OF THE PAVEMENT. 37
"Get up, Mr. Wilkins, and be quick about it," said Smith. "We ought to be on our way."
We rode off together info the gathering darkness, and before long I looked back and saw the far plain behind us, with the lights of the town glimmering faintly; and in front rose the mountains. Smith guided his horse on the rough track as surely as if he had been riding along Piccadilly, and I followed him as well as I could. I was weary and exhausted, and scarcely took note of anything; I felt that the track was a gradual ascent, and here and there I saw great boulders by the road. The ride made but little impression on me ; I have a faint recollection of passing through a dense black pine forest, where our horses had to pick their way among the rocks, and I remember the peculiar effect of the rarefied air as we kept still mounting higher and higher. I think I must have been half asleep for the latter half of the ride, and it was with a shock that I heard Smith saying —
" Here we are, Wilkins. This is Blue-Rock Park. You will enjoy the view to-morrow. To-night we will have something to eat, and then go to bed."
A man came out of a rough -looking house and took the horses, and we found some fried steak and coarse whiskey awaiting us inside. I had come to a strange place. There were three rooms, — the room in which we had supper, Smith's room and my own. The deaf old man who did the work slept in a sort of shed, and when I woke up the next morning and walked out I found that the house stood in a sort of hollow amongst the mountains; the clumps of pines and some enormous bluish-gray rocks that
38 THE THKEE IMPOSTORS.
stood here and there between the trees had given the place the name of Blue-Kock Park. On every side the snow-covered mountains surrounded us, the breath of the air was as wine, and when I climbed the slope and looked down, I could see that, so far as any human fellowship was concerned I might as well have been wrecked on some small island in mid-Pacific. The only trace of man I could see was the rough log-house where I had slept, and in my ignorance I did not know that there were sim- ilar houses within comparatively easy distance, as distance is reckoned in the Kockies. But at the moment, the utter, dreadful loneliness rushed upon me, and the thought of the great plain and the great sea that parted me from the world I knew, caught me by the throat, and I wondered if I should die there in that mountain hollow. It was a ter- rible instant, and I have not yet forgotten it. Of course I managed to conquer my horror; I said I should be all the stronger for the experience, and I made up my mind to make the best of everything. It was a rough life enough, and rough enough board and lodging. I was left entirely to myself. Smith I scarcely ever saw, nor did I know when he was in the house. I have often thought he was far away, and have been surprised to see him walking out of his room, locking the door behind him and putting the key in his pocket; and on several occasions when I fancied he was busy in his room, I have seen him come in with his boots covered with dust and dirt. So far as work went I enjoyed a com- plete sinecure; I had nothing to do but to walk about the valley, to eat, and to sleep. With one
THE ENCOUNTER OF THE PAVEMENT. 39
thing and another I grew accustomed to the life, and managed to make myself pretty comfortable, and by degrees I began to venture farther away from the house, and to explore the country. One day I had contrived to get into a neighboring valley, and suddenly I came upon a group of men sawing timber. I went up to them, hoping that perhaps some of them might be Englishmen; at all events they were human beings, and I should hear artic- ulate speech, for the old man I have mentioned, besides being half blind and stone deaf, was wholly dumb so far as 1 was concerned. I was prepared to be welcomed in a rough and ready fashion, without much of the forms of politeness, but the grim glances and the short gruff answers I received astonished me. I saw the men glancing oddly at each other, and one of them who had stopped work began fingering a gun, and I was obliged to return on my path uttering curses on the fate which had brought me into a land where men were more brutish than the very brutes. The solitude of the life began to oppress me as with a nightmare, and a few days later I determined to walk to a kind of station some miles distant, where a rough inn was kept for the accommodation of hunters and tourists. English gentlemen occasionally stopped there for the night, and I thought I might perhaps fall in with some one of better manners than the inhabitants of the country. I found as I had expected a group of men lounging about the door of the log-house that served as a hotel, and as I came nearer I could see that heads were put together and looks inter- changed, and when I walked up the six or seven
40 THE THREE IMPOSTOKS.
trappers stared at me in stony ferocity, and with something of the disgust that one eyes a loathsome and venomous snake. I felt that I could bear it no longer, and I called out : —
"Is there such a thing as an Englishman here, or any one with a little civilization? "
One of the men put his hand to his belt, but his neighbor checked him and answered me.
44 You '11 find we 've got some of the resources of civilization before very long, mister, and I expect you ;11 not fancy them extremely. But anyway, there }s an Englishman tarrying here, and I 've no doubt he '11 be glad to see you. There you are, that 's Mr. D'Aubernoun."
A young man, dressed like an English country squire, came and stood at the door, and looked at me. One of the men pointed to me and said: —
" That 's the individual we were talking about last night. Thought you might like to have a look at him, squire, and here he is."
The young fellow's good-natured English face clouded over, and he glanced sternly at me, and turned away with a gesture of contempt and aversion.
"Sir," I cried, "I do not know what I have done to be treated in this manner. You are my fellow- countryman, arid I expected some courtesy."
He gave me a black look and made as if he would go in, but he changed his mind, and faced me.
" You are rather imprudent, I think, to behave in this manner. You must be counting on a forbear- ance which cannot last very long; which may last a very short time, indeed. And let me tell you this,
THE ENCOUNTER OF THE PAVEMENT. 41
sir, you may call yourself an Englishman and drag the name of England through the dirt, but you need not count on any English influence to help you. If I were you, I would not stay here much longer."
He went into the inn, and the men quietly watched my face, as I stood there, wondering whether I was going mad. The woman of the house came out and stared at me as if I were a wild beast or a savage, and I turned to her, and spoke quietly.
" I am very hungry and thirsty, I have walked a long way. I have plenty of money. Will you give me something to eat and drink?"
"No, I won't," she said. "You had better quit this."
I crawled home like a wounded beast, and lay down on my bed. It was all a hopeless puzzle to me. I knew nothing but rage and shame and ter- ror, and I suffered little more when I passed by a house in an adjacent valley, and some children who were playing outside ran from me shrieking. I was forced to walk to find some occupation. I should have died if I had sat down quietly in Blue Rock Park and looked all day at the mountains; but wherever I saw a human being I saw the same glance of hatred and aversion, and once as I was crossing a thick brake I heard a shot, and the venomous hiss of a bullet close to my ear.
One day I heard a conversation which astounded me; I was sitting behind a rock resting, and two men came along the track and halted. One of them had got his feet entangled in some wild vines, and swore fiercely, but the other laughed, and said they were useful things sometimes.
42 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
" What the hell do you mean? "
"Oh, nothing much. But they're uncommon tough, these here vines, and sometimes rope is skerse and dear."
The man who had sworn chuckled at this, and I heard them sit down and light their pipes.
"Have you seen him lately?" asked the humorist.
"I sighted him the other day, but the darned bullet went high. He 's got his master's luck, I expect, sir, but it can't last much longer. You heard about him going to Jinks's and trying his brass, but the young Britisher downed him pretty considerable, I can tell you."
" What the devil is the meaning of it? "
"I don't know, but I believe it'll have to be finished, and done in the old style, too. You know how they fix the niggers? "
"Yes, sir, I've seen a little of that. A couple of gallons of kerosene '11 cost a dollar at Brown's store, but I should say it 's cheap anyway."
They moved off after this, and I lay still behind the rock, the sweat pouring down my face. I was so sick that I could barely stand, and I walked home as slowly as an old man, leaning on my stick. I knew that the two men had been talking about me, and I knew that some terrible death was in store for me. That night I could not sleep. I tossed on the rough bed and tortured myself to find out the meaning of it all. At last in the very dead of night I rose from the bed, and put on my clothes, and went out. I did not care where I went, but I felt that I must walk till I had tired myself out. It was a clear moonlight night, and in a couple of
THE ENCOUNTER OF THE PAVEMENT. 43
hours I found I was approaching a place of dismal reputation in the mountains, a deep cleft in the rocks, known as Black Gulf Canon. Many years before, an unfortunate party of Englishmen and Englishwomen had camped here and had been sur- rounded by Indians. They were captured, out- raged, and put to death with almost inconceivable tortures, and the roughest of the trappers or woods- men gave the canon a wide berth even in the day- time. As I crushed through the dense brushwood which grew above the canon, I heard voices, and wondering who could be in such a place at such a time, I went on, walking more carefully and mak- ing as little noise as possible. There was a great tree growing on the very edge of the rocks, and I lay down and looked out from behind the trunk. Black Gulf Canon was below me, the moonlight shining bright into its very depths from mid- heaven, and casting shadows as black as death from the pointed rock, and all the sheer rock on the other side, overhanging the canon, was in darkness. At intervals a light veil obscured the moonlight, as a filmy cloud fleeted across the moon; and a bitter wind blew shrill across the gulf. I looked down as I have said,, and saw twenty men standing in a semicircle round a rock; I counted them one by one, and knew most of them. They were the very vilest of the vile, more vile than any den in Lon- don could show, and there was murder and worse than murder on the heads of not a few. Facing them and me stood Mr. Smith with the rock before him, and on the rock was a great pair of scales, such as are used in the stores. I heard his voice
44 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
ringing down the canon as I lay beside the tree, and my heart turned cold as I heard it.
"Life for gold," he cried, "a life for gold. The blood and the life of an enemy for every pound of gold."
A man stepped out and raised one hand, and with the other flung a bright lump of something into the pan of the scales, which clanged down, and Smith muttered something in his ear. Then he cried again :
"Blood for gold; for a pound of gold, the life of an enemy. For every pound of gold upon the scales, a life."
One by one the men came forward, each lifting up his right hand ; and the gold was weighed in the scales, and each time Smith leaned forward and spoke to each man in his ear. Then he cried again : —
"Desire and lust, for gold on the scales. For every pound of gold, enjoyment of desire."
I saw the same thing happen as before; the up- lifted hand, and the metal weighed, and the mouth whispering, and black passion on every face.
Then, one by one, I saw the men again step up to Smith. A muttered conversation seemed to take place; I could see that Smith was explaining and directing, and I noticed that he gesticulated a little as one wjio points out the way, and once or twice he moved his hands quickly as if he would show that the path was clear and could not be missed. I kept my eyes so intently on his figure that I noted little else, and at last it was with a start that I realized that the canon was empty. A moment before I thought I had seen the group of villainous faces, and the two
THE ENCOUNTER OF THE PAVEMENT. 45
standing, a little apart by the rock; I had looked down a moment, and when I glanced again into the canon there was no one there. In dumb terror I made my way home, and I fell asleep in an instant from exhaustion. No doubt I should have slept on for many hours, but when I woke up, the sun was only rising, and the light shone in on my bed. I had started up from sleep with the sensation of having received a violent shock, and as I looked in confusion about me I saw to my amazement that there were three men in the room. One of them had his hand on my shoulder and spoke to me.
" Come, mister, wake up. Your time 9s up now, I reckon, and the boys are waiting for you outside, and they 're in a big hurry. Come on; you can put on your clothes, it 's kind of chi]ly this morning."
I saw the other two men smiling sourly at each other, but I understood nothing. I simply pulled on my clothes, and said I was ready.
"All right, come on then. You go first, Nichols, and Jim and I will give the gentleman an arm."
They took me out into the sunlight, and then I understood the meaning of a dull murmur that had vaguely perplexed me while I was dressing. There were about two hundred men waiting outside, and some women too, and when they saw me there was a low muttering growl. I did not know what I had done, but that noise made my heart beat and the sweat come out on my face. I saw confusedly, as through a veil, the tumult and tossing of the crowd, discordant voices were speaking, and amongst all those faces there was not one glance of mercy, but a fury of lust that I did not understand. I
46 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
found myself presently walking in a sort of proces- sion up the slope of the valley, and on every side of me there were men with revolvers in their hands. Now and then a voice struck me, and I heard words and sentences of which I could form no connected story. But I understood that there was one sen- tence of execration; I heard scraps of stories that seemed strange and improbable. Some one was talk- ing of men, lured by cunning devices from their homes and murdered with hideous tortures, found writhing like wounded snakes in dark and lonely places, only crying for some one to stab them to the heart, and so end their torments; and I heard another voice speaking of innocent girls who had vanished for a day or two, and then had come back and died, blushing red with shame even in the agonies of death. I wondered what it all meant, and what was to happen, but I was so weary that I walked on in a dream, scarcely longing for any- thing but sleep. At last we stopped. We had reached the summit of the hill, overlooking Blue Kock Valley, and I saw that I was standing beneath a clump of trees where I had often sat. I was in the midst of a ring of armed men, and I saw that two or three men were very busy with piles of wood, while others were fingering a rope. Then there was a stir in the crowd, and a man was pushed forward. His hands and feet were tightly bound with cord, and though his face was unutterably vil- lainous I pitied him for the agony that worked his features and twisted his lips. I knew him; he was amongst those that had gathered round Smith in Black Gulf Canon. In an instant he was unbound,
THE ENCOUNTER OF THE PAVEMENT. 47
and stripped naked, and borne beneath one of the trees, and his neck encircled by a noose that went around the trunk. A hoarse voice gave some kind of order; there was a rush of feet, and the rope tight- ened; and there before me I saw the blackened face and the writhing limbs and the shameful agony of death. One after another, half a dozen men, all of whom I had seen in the canon the night before, were strangled before me, and their bodies were flung forth on the ground. Then there was a pause, and the man who had roused me a short while before, came up to me and said: —
"Now, mister, it's your turn. We give you five minutes to cast up your accounts, and when that 's clocked, by the living God we will bum you alive at that tree."
It was then I awoke and understood. I cried out: —
"Why, what have I done? Why should you hurt me? I am a harmless man, I never did you any wrong." I covered my face with my hands; it seemed so pitiful, and it was such a terrible death.
" What have I done? " I cried again. " You must take me for some other man. You cannot know me."
"You black-hearted devil," said the man at my side, "we know you well enough. There's not a man within thirty miles of this that won't curse Jack Smith when you are burning in hell."
"My name is not Smith," I said, with some hope left in me. "My name is Wilkins. I was Mr. Smith's secretary, but I knew nothing of him." t "Hark at the black liar," said the man. "Secre-
48 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
tary be damned ! You were clever enough, I dare say, to slink out at night, and keep your face in the dark, but we 've tracked you out at last. But your time 's up. Come along."
I was dragged to the tree and bound to it with chains, and 1 saw the piles of wood heaped all about me, and shut my eyes. Then I felt myself drenched all over with some liquid, and looked again, and a woman grinned at me. She had just emptied a great can of petroleum over me and over the wood. A voice shouted, "Fire away," and I fainted and knew nothing more.
When I opened my eyes I was lying on a bed in a bare comfortless room. A doctor was holding some strong salts to my nostrils, and a gentleman stand- ing by the bed, whom I afterwards found to be the sheriff, addressed me : —
"Say, mister," he began, "you've had an uncom- mon narrow squeak for it. The boys were just about lighting up when I came along with the posse, and I had as much as I could do to bring you off, I can tell you. And, mind you, I don't blame them; they had made up their minds, you see, that you were the head of the Black Gulf gang, and at first nothing I could say would persuade them you were n't Jack Smith. Luckily, a man from here named Evans, that came along with us, allowed he had seen you with Jack Smith, and that you were yourself. So we brought you along and jailed you, but you can go if you like, when you 're through with this faint turn."
I got on the cars the next day, and in three weeks I was in London; again almost penniless.
THE ENCOUNTER OF THE PAVEMENT. 49
But from that time my fortune seemed to change. I made influential friends in all directions; bank directors courted my company, and editors posi- tively flung themselves into my arms. I had only to choose my career, and after a while I determined that I was meant by nature for a life of comparative leisure. With an ease that seemed almost ridicu- lous I obtained a well-paid position in connection with a prosperous political club. I have charming chambers in a central neighborhood close to the parks ; the club chef exerts himself when I lunch or dine, and the rarest vintages in the cellar are always at my disposal. Yet, since my return to London, I have never known a day's security or peace; I tremble when I awake lest Smith should be standing at my bed, and every step I take seems to bring me nearer to the edge of the precipice. Smith, I knew, had escaped free from the raid of the vigilantes, and I grew faint at the thought that he would in all probability return to London, and that suddenly and unprepared I should meet him face to face. Every morning as I left my house, I would peer up and down the street, expecting to see that dreaded figure awaiting me ; I have delayed at street corners, my heart in my mouth, sickening at the thought that a few quick steps might bring <us together; I could not bear to frequent the theatres or music halls, lest by some bizarre chance he should prove to be my neighbor. Sometimes, I have been forced, against my will, to walk out at night, and then in silent squares the shadows have made me shudder, and in the medley of meetings in the crowded thoroughfares, I have said to myself,
4
50
THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
"It must come sooner or later; he will surely return to town, and I shall see him when I feel most secure." I scanned the newspapers for hint or intimation of approaching danger, and no small type nor report of trivial interest was allowed to pass unread. Especially I read and re-read the advertisement columns, but without result. Months passed by and I was undisturbed till, though I felt far from safe, I no longer suffered from the intol- erable oppression of instant and ever present terror. This afternoon as I was walking quietly along Oxford Street, I raised my eyes, and looked across the road, and then at last I saw the man who had so long haunted my thoughts.
Mr. Wilkins finished his wine, and leaned back in his chair, looking sadly at Dyson; and then, as if a thought struck him, fished out of an inner pocket a leather letter case, and handed a news- paper cutting across the table.
Dyson glanced closely at the slip, and saw that it had been extracted from the columns of an evening paper. It ran as follows : —
WHOLESALE LYNCHING.
SHOCKING STORY.
A Dalziel telegram from Reading (Colorado) states that advices received there from Blue Eock Park report a frightful instance of popular ven- geance. For some time the neighborhood has been terrorized by the crimes of a gang of desperadoes, who, under the cover of a carefully planned organi- zation, have perpetrated the most infamous cruelties
THE ENCOUNTER OF THE PAVEMENT. 51
on men and women. A Vigilance Committee was formed, and it was found that the leader of the gang was a person named Smith, living in Blue Rock Park. Action was taken, and six of the worst in the band were summarily strangled in the presence of two or three hundred men and women. Smith is said to have escaped.
"This is a terrible story," said Dyson; "I can well believe that your days and nights are haunted by such fearful scenes as you have described. But surely you have no need to fear Smith? He has much more cause to fear you. Consider : you have only to lay your information before the police, arid a warrant would be immediately issued for his arrest. Besides, you will, I am sure, excuse me for what I am going to say."
"My dear sir," said Mr. Wilkins, "I hope you will speak to me with perfect freedom."
" Well, then, I must confess that my impression was that you were rather disappointed at not being able to stop the man before he drove off. I thought you seemed annoyed that you could not get across the street."
" Sir, I did not know what I was about. I caught sight of the man, but it was only for a moment, and the agony you witnessed was the agony of suspense. I was not perfectly certain of the face; and the horrible thought that Smith was again in London overwhelmed me. I shuddered at the idea of this incarnate fiend, whose soul is black with shocking crimes, mingling free and unobserved amongst the harmless crowds, meditating perhaps a new and
52 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
more fearful cycle of infamies. I tell you, sir , that an awful being stalks through the streets, a being before whom the sunlight itself should blacken, and the summer air grow chill and dank. Such thoughts as these rushed upon me with the force of a whirlwind; I lost my senses."
"I see. I partly understand your feelings, but I would impress on you that you have nothing really to fear. Depend upon it, Smith will not molest you in any way. You must remember he himself has had a warning; and indeed from the brief glance I had of him, he seemed to me to be a frightened-looking man. However, I see it is get- ting late, and if you will excuse me, Mr. Wilkins, I think I will be going. I dare say we shall often meet here."
Dyson walked off smartly, pondering the strange story chance had brought him, and finding on cool reflection that there was something a little strange in Mr. Wilkins's manner, for which not even so weird a catalogue of experiences could altogether account.
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER.
MR. CHARLES PHILLTPPS was, as has been hinted, a gentleman of pronounced scientific tastes. In his early days he had devoted himself with fond enthu- siasm to the agreeable study of biology, and a brief monograph on the Embryology of the Microscopic Holothuria had formed his first contribution to the belles lettres. Later, he had somewhat relaxed the severity of his pursuits, and had dabbled in the more frivolous subjects of palaeontology and ethnology; he had a cabinet in his sitting-room whose drawers were stuffed with rude flint imple- ments, and a charming fetish from the South Seas was the dominant note in the decorative scheme of the apartment. Flattering himself with the title of materialist, he was in truth one of the most credu- lous of men, but he required a marvel to be neatly draped in the robes of science before he would give it any credit, and the wildest dreams took solid shape to him if only the nomenclature were severe and irreproachable; he laughed at the witch, but quailed before the powers of the hypnotist, lift- ing his eyebrows when Christianity was mentioned, but adoring protyle and the ether. For the rest, he prided himself on a boundless scepticism; the
54 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
average tale of wonder he heard with nothing but contempt, and he would certainly not have credited a word or syllable of Dyson's story of the pursuer and pursued unless the gold coin had been produced as visible and tangible evidence. As it was he half suspected that Dyson had imposed on him ; he knew his friend's disordered fancies, and his habit of conjuring up the marvellous to account for the entirely commonplace; and on the whole he was inclined to think that the so-called facts in the odd adventure had been gravely distorted in the telling. Since the evening on which he had listened to the tale, he had paid Dyson a visit, and had delivered himself of some serious talk on the necessity of accurate observation, and the folly, as he put it, of using a kaleidoscope instead of a telescope in the view of things, to which remarks his friend had listened with a smile that was extremely sardonic. "My dear, fellow," Dyson had remarked at last, "you will allow me to tell you that I see your drift perfectly. However, you will be astonished to hear that I consider you to be the visionary, while I am a sober and serious spectator of human life. You have gone round the circle, and while you fancy yourself far in the golden land of new philoso- phies , you are in reality a dweller in a metaphori- cal Clapham; your scepticism has defeated itself and become a monstrous credulity; you are in fact in the position of the bat or owl, I forget which it was, who denied the existence of the sun at noon- day, and I shall be astonished if you do not one day come to me full of contrition for your manifold intellectual errors, with a humble resolution to see
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 55
things in their true light for the future." This tirade had left Mr. Phillipps unimpressed; he con- sidered Dyson as hopeless, and he went home to gloat over some primitive stone implements that a friend had sent him from India. He found that his landlady, seeing them displayed in all their rude formlessness upon the table, had removed the collection to the dustbin, and had replaced it by lunch; and the afternoon was spent in malodorous research. Mrs. Brown, hearing these stones spoken of as very valuable knives, had called him in his hearing "poor Mr. Phillipps," and between rage and evil odors he spent a sorry afternoon. It was four o'clock before he had completed his work of rescue ; and, overpowered with the flavors of decay- ing cabbage-leaves, Phillipps felt that he must have a walk to gain an appetite for the evening meal. Unlike Dyson, he walked fast, with his eyes on the pavement, absorbed in his thoughts and oblivious of the life around him ; and he could not have told by what streets he had passed, when- he suddenly lifted up his eyes and found himself in Leicester Square. The grass and flowers pleased him, and he welcomed the opportunity of resting for a few minutes, and glancing round, he saw a bench which had only one occupant, a lady, and as she was seated at one end, Phillipps took up a position at the other extremity, and began to pass in angry review the events of the afternoon. He had noticed as he came up to the bench that the person already there ' was neatly dressed, and to all appearance young; her face he could not see, as it was turned away in apparent contemplation of the shrubs, and
56 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
moreover shielded with her hand; but it would be doing wrong to Mr. Phillipps to imagine that his choice of a seat was dictated by any hopes of an affair of the heart; he had simply preferred the company of one lady to that of five dirty children, and having seated himself was immersed directly in thoughts of his misfortunes. Pie had meditated changing his lodgings ; but now, on a judicial review of the case in all its bearings, his calmer judgment told him that the race of landladies is like to the race of the leaves, and that there was but little to choose between them. He resolved, however, to talk to Mrs. Brown, the offender, very coolly and yet severely, to point out the extreme indiscretion of her conduct, and to express a hope for better things in the future. With this decision registered in his mind, Phillipps was about to get up from the seat and move off, when he was intensely annoyed to hear a stifled sob, evidently from the lady, who still continued her contemplation of the shrubs and flower-beds. He clutched his stick desperately, and in a moment would have been in full retreat, when the lady turned her face towards him, and with a mute entreaty bespoke his attention. She was a young girl with a quaint and piquant rather than a beautiful face, and she was evidently in the bit- terest distress, and Mr. Phillipps sat down again, and cursed his chances heartily. The young lady looked at him with a pair of charming eyes of a shining hazel, which showed no trace of tears, though a handkerchief was in her hand ; she bit her lip, and seemed to struggle with some overpowering grief, and her whole attitude was all beseeching
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 57
and imploring. Phillipps sat on the edge of the bench gazing awkwardly at her, and wondering what was to come next, and she looked at him still without speaking.
"Well, madam," he said at last, "I understood from your gesture that you wished to speak to me. Is there anything I can do for you? Though, if you will pardon me, I cannot help saying that that seems highly improbable."
"Ah, sir," she said in alow murmuring voice, "do not speak harshly to me. I am in sore straits, and I thought from your face that I could safely ask your sympathy, if not your help."
" Would you kindly tell me what is the matter? " said Phillipps. "Perhaps you would like some tea? "
"I knew I could not be mistaken," the lady replied. " That offer of refreshment bespeaks a gen- erous mind. But tea, alas ! is powerless to console me. If you will let me, I will endeavor to explain my trouble."
"I should be glad if you would."
" I will do so, and I will try and be brief, in spite of the numerous complications which have made me, young as I am, tremble before what seems the profound and terrible mystery of existence. Yet the grief which now racks my very soul is but too simple; I have lost my brother."
"Lost your brother! How on earth can that be?"
"I see I must trouble you with a few particulars. My brother, then, who is by some years my elder, is a tutor in a private school in the extreme north
58 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
of London. The want of means deprived him of the advantages of a University education; and lack- ing the stamp of a degree, he could not hope for that position which his scholarship and his talents entitled him to claim. He was thus forced to ac- cept the post of classical master at Dr. Saunderson's Highgate Academy for the sons of gentlemen, and he has performed his duties with perfect satisfac- tion to his principal for some years. My personal history need not trouble you; it' will be enough if I tell you that for the last month I have been governess in a family residing at Tooting. My brother and I have always cherished the warmest mutual affection; and though circumstances into which I need not enter have kept us apart for some time, yet we have never lost sight of one another. We made up our minds that unless one of us was absolutely unable to rise from a bed of sickness, we would never let a week pass by without meeting, and some time ago we chose this square as our ren- dezvous on account of its central position and its convenience of access. And indeed, after a week of distasteful toil, my brother felt little inclination for much walking, and we have often spent two or three hours on this bench, speaking of our prospects and of happier days, when we were children. In the early spring it was cold and chilly; still we enjoyed the short respite, and I think that we were often taken for a pair of lovers, as we sat close together, eagerly talking. Saturday after Saturday we have met each other here, and though the doctor told him it was madness, my brother would not allow the influenza to break the appointment. That
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 59
was some time ago; last Saturday we had a long and happy afternoon, and separated more cheerfully than usual, feeling that the coming week would be bearable, and resolving that our next meeting should be if possible still more pleasant. I arrived here at the time agreed upon, four o'clock, and sat down and watched for my brother, expecting every moment to see him advancing towards me from that gate at the north side of the square. Five minutes passed by, and he had not arrived; I thought he must have missed his train, and the idea that our interview would be cut short by twenty minutes, or perhaps half an hour, saddened me; I had hoped we should be so happy together to-day. Suddenly, moved by I know not what impulse, I turned abruptly round, and how can I describe to you my astonishment when I saw my brother advancing slowly towards me from the southern side of the square, accompanied by another person. My first thought, I remember, had in it something of resent- ment that this man, whoever he was, should intrude himself into our meeting; I wondered who it could possibly be, for my brother had, I may say, no inti- mate friends. Then as I looked still at the advan- cing figures, another feeling took possession of me; it was a sensation of bristling fear, the fear of the child in the dark, unreasonable and unreasoning, but terrible, clutching at my heart as with the cold grip of a dead man's hands. Yet I overcame the feeling, and looked steadily at my brother, waiting for him to speak, and more closely at his com- panion. Then I noticed that this man was leading my brother rather than walking arm-in-arm with
60 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
him ; he was a tall man, dressed in quite ordinary fashion. He wore a high bowler hat, and, in spite of the warmth of the day, a plain black overcoat, tightly buttoned, and I noticed his trousers, of a quiet black and gray stripe. The face was com- monplace too, and indeed I cannot recall any special features, or any trick of expression; for though I looked at him as he came near, curiously enough his face made no impression on me, it was as though I had seen a well-made mask. They passed in front of me, and to my unutterable astonishment I heard iny brother's voice speaking to me, though his lips did not move, nor his eyes look into mine. It was a voice I cannot describe, though I knew it, but the words came to my ears as if mingled with plashing water and the sound of a shallow brook flowing amidst stones. I heard, then, the words, * I cannot stay, ' and for a moment the heavens and the earth seemed to rush together with the sound of thunder, and I was thrust forth from the world into a black void without beginning and without end. For, as my brother passed me, I saw the hand that held him by the arm, and seemed to guide him, and in one moment of horror I realized that it was as a formless thing that has mouldered for many years in the grave. The flesh was peeled in strips from the bones, and hung apart dry and granu- lated, and the fingers that encircled my brother's arm were all unshapen, claw-like things, and one was but a stump from which the end had rotted off. When I recovered my senses I saw the two passing out by that gate. I paused for a moment, and then with a rush as of fire to my heart I knew that no
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 61
horror could stay me, but that I must follow my brother and save him, even though all hell rose up against me. I ran out and looked up the pavement, and saw the two figures walking amidst the crowd. I ran across the road, and saw them turn up that side street, and I reached the corner a moment later. In vain I looked to right and left, for neither my brother nor his strange guardian was in sight; two elderly men were coming down arm-in-arm, and a telegraph boy was walking lustily along whistling. I remained there a moment horror-struck, and then I bowed my head and returned to this seat, where you found me. Now, sir, do you wonder at my grief ? Oh, tell me what has happened to my brother, or I feel I shall go mad."
Mr. Phillipps, who had listened with exemplary patience to this tale, hesitated a moment before he spoke.
" My dear madam, " he said at length, " you have known how to engage me in your service, not only as a man, but as a student of science. As a fellow- creature I pity you most profoundly; you must have suffered extremely from what you saw, or rather from what you fancied you saw. For, as a scientific observer, it is my duty to tell you the plain truth, which, indeed, besides being true, must also console you. Allow me to ask you 'then to describe your brother."
"Certainly," said the lady, eagerly; "I can describe him accurately. My brother is a some- what young-looking man; he is pale, has small black whiskers, and wears spectacles. He has rather a timid, almost a frightened expression, and
62 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
looks about him nervously from side to side. Think, think! Surely you must have seen him. Perhaps you are an habitue of this engaging quarter; you may have met him on some previous Saturday. I may have been mistaken in supposing that he turned up that side street; he may have gone on, and you may have passed each other. Oh, tell me, sir, whether you have not seen him?"
" I am afraid I do not keep a very sharp lookout when I am walking," said Phillipps, who would have passed his mother unnoticed; "but I am sure your description is admirable. And now will you describe the person, who, you say, held your brother by the arm?"
"I cannot do so. I told you, his face seemed devoid of expression or salient feature. It was like a mask."
u Exactly; you cannot describe what you have never seen. I need hardly point out to you the conclusion to be drawn; you have been1 the victim of an hallucination. You expected to see your brother, you were alarmed because you did not see him, and unconsciously, no doubt, your brain went to work, and finally you saw a mere projection of your own morbid thoughts ; a vision of your absent brother, and a mere confusion of terrors incorpo- rated in a figure which you can't describe. Of course your brother has been in some way pre- vented from coming to meet you as usual. I expect you will hear from him in a day or two."
The lady looked seriously at Mr. Phillipps, and then for a second there seemed almost a twinkling as of mirth about her eyes, but her face clouded
ADVENTUKE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 63
sadly at the dogmatic conclusions to which the scientist was led so irresistibly.
"Ah," she said, "you do not know. I cannot doubt the evidence of my waking senses. Besides, perhaps I have had experiences even more terrible. I acknowledge the force of your arguments, but a woman has intuitions which never deceive her. Believe me, I am not hysterical} feel my pulse, it is quite regular."
She stretched out her hand with a dainty gesture, and a glance that enraptured Phillipps in spite of himself. The hand held out to him was soft and white and warm, and as, in some confusion, he placed his fingers on the purple vein, he felt pro- foundly touched by the spectacle of love and grief before him.
"No," he said, as he released her wrist, "as you say, you are evidently quite yourself. Still, you must be aware that living men do not possess dead hands. That sort of thing doesn't happen. It is, of course, barely possible that you did see your brother with another gentleman, and that impor- tant business prevented him from stopping. As for the wonderful hand, there may have been some deformity, a finger shot off by accident, or some- thing of that sort."
The lady shook her head mournfully.
"I see you are a determined rationalist," she said. "Did you not hear me say that I have had expe- riences even more terrible? I too was once a sceptic, but after what I have known I can no longer affect to doubt."
"Madam," replied Mr. Phillipps, "no one shall
64 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
make me deny my faith. I will never believe, nor will I pretend to believe, that two and two make five, nor will I on any pretences admit the existence of two-sided triangles."
"You are a little hasty," rejoined the lady. " But may I ask you if you ever heard the name of Professor Gregg, the authority on ethnology and kindred subjects?"
"I have done much more than merely hear of Professor Gregg," said Phillipps. "I always re- garded him as one of our most acute and clear- headed observers; and his last publication, the * Text-book of Ethnology, ' struck me as being quite admirable in its kind. Indeed, the book had but come into my hands when I heard of the terrible accident which cut short Gregg's career. He had, I think, taken a country house in the West of Eng- land for the summer, and is supposed to have fallen into a river. So far as I remember, his body was never recovered."
" Sir, I am sure that you are discreet. Your con- versation seems to declare as much, and the very title of that little work of yours which you men- tioned, assures me that you are no empty trifler. In a word, I feel that I may depend on you. You appear to be under the impression that Professor Gregg is dead; I have no reason to believe that that is the case."
"What?" cried Phillipps, astonished and per- turbed. "You do not hint that there was anything disgraceful? I cannot believe it. Gregg was a man of clearest character; his private life was one of great benevolence; and though I myself am free
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 65
from delusions, I believe him to have been a sincere and devout Christian. Surely you cannot mean to insinuate that some disreputable history forced him to flee the country?"
"Again you are in a hurry," replied the lady. "I said nothing of all this. Briefly, then, I .must tell you that Professor Gregg left his house one morning in full health both of mind and body. He never returned, but ,his watch and chain, a purse containing three sovereigns in gold and some loose silver, with a ring that he wore habitually, were found three days later on a wild and savage hill- side, many miles from the river. These articles were placed beside a limestone rock of fantastic form ; they had been wrapped into a parcel with a kind of rough parchment which was secured with gut. The parcel was opened, and the inner side of the parchment bore an inscription done with some red substance; the characters were undecipherable, but seemed to be a corrupt cuneiform."
"You interest me intensely," said Phillips. "Would you mind continuing your story? The circumstance you have mentioned seems to me of the most inexplicable character, and I thirst for an elucidation."
The young lady seemed to meditate for a moment, and she then proceeded to relate the
NOVEL OF THE BLACK SEAL.
I must now give you some fuller particulars of my history. I am the daughter of a civil engineer, Steven Lally by name, who was so unfortunate as
5
66 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
to die suddenly at the outset of his career, and before he had accumulated sufficient means to sup- port his wife and her two children. My mother contrived to keep the small household going on resources which must have been incredibly small; we lived in a remote country village, because most of the necessaries of life were cheaper than in a town, but even so we were brought up with the severest economy. My father was a clever and well-read man, and left behind him a small but select collection of books, containing the best Greek, Latin, and English classics, and these books were the only amusement we possessed. My brother, I remember, learned Latin out of Descartes' "Medita- tiones," and I, in place of the little tales which children are usually told to read, had nothing more charming than a translation of the "Gesta Eoma- norum." We grew up thus, quiet and studious chil- dren, and in course of time my brother provided for himself in the manner I have mentioned. I con- tinued to live at home ; my poor mother had become an invalid, and demanded my continual care, and about two years ago she died after many months of painful illness. My situation was a terrible one; the shabby furniture barely sufficed to pay the debts I had been forced to contract, and the books I despatched to my brother, knowing how he would value them. I was absolutely alone. I was aware how poorly my brother was paid; and though I came up to London in the hope of finding employ- ment, with the understanding that he would defray my expenses, I swore it should only be for a month, and that if I could not in that time find some work,
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 67
I would starve rather than deprive him of the few miserable pounds he had laid by for his day of trouble. I took a little room in a distant suburb, the cheapest that I could find. I lived on bread and tea, and I spent my time in vain answering of advertisements, and vainer walks to addresses I had noted. Day followed on day, and week on week, and still I was unsuccessful, till at last the term I had appointed drew to a close, and I saw before me the grim prospect of slowly dying of starvation. My landlady was good-natured in her way; she knew the slenderness of my means, and I am sure that she would not have turned me out of doors. It remained for me then to go away, and to try and die in some quiet place. It was winter then, and a thick white fog gathered in the early part of the afternoon, becoming more dense as the day wore on; it was a Sunday, I remember, and the people of the house were at chapel. At about three o'clock I crept out and walked away as quickly as I could, for I was weak from abstinence. The white mist wrapped all the streets in silence, and a hard frost had gathered thick upon the bare branches of the trees, and frost crystals glittered on the wooden fences, and on the cold cruel ground beneath my feet. I walked on, turning to right and left in utter haphazard, without caring to look up at the names of the streets, and all that I remember of my walk on that Sunday afternoon seems but the broken fragments of an evil dream. In a confused vision I stumbled on, through roads half town and half country; gray fields melting into the cloudy world of mist on one side of me, and on the other
68 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
comfortable villas with a glow of firelight flickering on the walls; but all unreal, red brick walls, and lighted windows, vague trees, and glimmering coun- try, gas-lamps beginning to star the white shadows, the vanishing perspectives of the railway line be- neath high embankments, the green and red of the signal lamps, — all these were but momentary pic- tures flashed on my tired brain and senses numbed by hunger. Now and then I would hear a quick step ringing on the iron road, and men would pass me well wrapped up, walking fast for the sake of warmth, and no doubt eagerly foretasting the pleasures of a glowing hearth, with curtains tightly drawn- about the frosted panes, and the welcomes of their friends ; but as the early evening darkened and night approached, foot-passengers got fewer and fewer, and I passed through street after street alone. In the white silence I stumbled on, as des- olate as if I trod the streets of a buried city; and as I grew more weak and exhausted, something of the horror of death was folding thickly round my heart. Suddenly, as I turned a corner, some one accosted me courteously beneath the lamp-post, and I heard a voice asking if I could kindly point the way to Avon Road. At the sudden shock of human accents I was prostrated and my strength gave way, and I fell all huddled on the side-walk and wept and sobbed and laughed in violent hysteria. I had gone out prepared to die, and as I stepped across the threshold that had sheltered me, I consciously bade adieu to all hopes and all remembrances ; the door clanged behind me with the noise of thunder, and I felt that an iron curtain had fallen on the
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 69
brief passages of my life, and that henceforth I was to walk a little way in a world of gloom and shadow; I entered on the stage of the first act of death. Then came my wandering in the mist, the white- ness wrapping all things, the void streets, and muffled silence, till when that voice spoke to me, it was as if I had died and life returned to me. In a few minutes I was able to compose my feel- ings, and as I rose I saw that I was confronted by a middle-aged gentleman of specious appearance, neatly and correctly dressed. He looked at me with an expression of great pity, but before I could stammer out my ignorance of the neighborhood, for indeed I had not the slightest notion of where I had wandered, he spoke.
" My dear madam, " he said, " you seem in some terrible distress. You cannot think how you alarmed me. But may I inquire the nature of your trouble? I assure you that you can safely confide in me."
"You are very kind," I replied; "but I fear there is nothing to be done. My condition seems a hope- less one."
" Oh, nonsense, nonsense ! You are too young to talk like that. Come, let us walk down here, and you must tell me your difficulty. Perhaps I may be able to help you."
There was something very soothing and persua- sive in his manner, and as we walked together, I gave him an outline of my story, and told of the despair that had oppressed me almost to death.
"You were wrong to give in so completely," he said, when I was silent. " A month is too short a
70 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
time in which to feel one's way in London. Lon- don, let me tell you, Miss Lally, does not lie open and undefended; it is a fortified place, fossed and double-moated with curious intricacies. As must always happen in large towns, the conditions of life have become hugely artificial; no mere simple palisade is run up to oppose the man or woman who would take the place by storm, but serried lines of subtle contrivances, mines, and pitfalls which it needs a strange skill to overcome. You, in your simplicity, fancied you had only to shout for these walls to sink into nothingness, but the time is gone for such startling victories as these. Take cour- age; you will learn the secret of success before very long."
44 Alas, sir," I replied, "I have no doubt your conclusions are correct, but at the present moment I seem to be in a fair way to die of starvation. You spoke of a secret; for heaven's sake, tell it me, if you have any pity for my distress."
He laughed genially. "There lies the strange- ness of it all. Those who know the secret cannot tell it if they would; it is positively as ineffable as the central doctrine of Freemasonry. But I may say this, that you yourself have penetrated at least the outer husk of the mystery," and he laughed again.
" Pray do not jest with me," I said. " What have I done, que sais-je? I am so far ignorant that I have not the slightest idea of how my next meal is to be provided."
"Excuse me. You ask what you have done? You have met me. Come, we will fence no longer.
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 71
I see you have self-education, the only education which is not infinitely pernicious, and 1 am in want of a governess for my two children. I have been a widower for some years; my name is Gregg. I offer you the post I have named, and shall we say a salary of a hundred a year?"
I could only stutter out my thanks, and slipping a card with his address and a bank-note by way of earnest into my hand, Mr. Gregg bade me good-bye, asking me to call in a day or two.
Such was my introduction to Professor Gregg, and can you wonder that the remembrance of despair and the cold blast that had blown from the gates of death upon me, made me regard him as a second father? Before the close of the week I was in- stalled in my new duties ; the professor had leased an old brick manor house in a western suburb of London, and here, surrounded by pleasant lawns and orchards, and soothed with the murmur of the ancient elms that rocked their boughs above the roof, the new chapter of my life began. Knowing as you do the nature of the professor's occupations, you will not be surprised to hear that the house teemed with books; and cabinets full of strange and even hideous objects lilled every available nook in the vast low rooms. Gregg was a man whose one thought was for knowledge, and I too before long caught something of his enthusiasm, and strove to enter into his passion for research. In a few months I was perhaps more his secretary than the governess of the two children, and many a night I have sat at the desk in the glow of the shaded lamp while he, pacing up and down in the rich gloom of
72 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
the firelight, dictated to me the substance of his "Text-book of Ethnology." But amidst these more sober and accurate studies I always detected a some- thing hidden, a longing and desire for some object to which he did not allude, and now and then he would break short in what he was saying and lapse into revery, entranced, as it seemed to me, by some distant prospect of adventurous discovery. The text-book was at last finished, and we began to receive proofs from the printers, which were in- trusted to me for a first reading, and then under- went the final revision of the professor. All the while nis weariness of the actual business he was engaged on increased, and it was with the joyous laugh of a schoolboy when term is over that he one day handed me a copy of the book. "There, "he said, "I have kept my word; I promised to write it, and it is done with. Now I shall be free to live for stranger things ; I confess it, Miss Lally, I covet the renown of Columbus. You will, I hope, see me play the part of an explorer."
"Surely," I said, "there is little left to explore. You have been born a few hundred years too late for that."
"I think you are wrong," he replied; "there are still, depend upon it, quaint undiscovered countries and continents of strange extent. Ah, Miss Lally, believe me, we stand amidst sacraments and mys- teries full of awe, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. Life, believe me, is no simple thing, no mass of gray matter and congeries of veins and muscles to be laid naked by the surgeon's knife; man is the secret which I am about to explore, and
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 73
before I can discover him I must cross over welter- ing seas indeed, and oceans and the mists of many thousand years. You know the myth of the lost Atlantis; what if it be true, and I am destined to be called the discoverer of that wonderful land? "
I could see excitement boiling beneath his words, and in his face was the heat of the hunter; before me stood a man who believed himself summoned to tourney with the unknown. A pang of joy pos- sessed me when I reflected that I was to be in a way associated with him in the adventure, and I too burned with the last of the chase, not paus- ing to consider that I knew not what we were to unshadow.
The next morning Professor Gregg took me into his inner study, where ranged against the wall stood a nest of pigeon-holes, every drawer neatly labelled, and the results of years of toil classified in a few feet of space.
"Here," he said, "is my life; here are all the facts which I have gathered together with so much pains, and yet it is all nothing. No, nothing to what I am about to attempt. Look at this;" and he took me to an old bureau, a piece fantastic and faded, which stood in a corner of the room. He unlocked the front and opened one of the drawers.
"A few scraps of paper," he went on, pointing to the drawer, " and a lump of black stone, rudely annotated with queer marks and scratches, — that is all that drawer holds. Here you see is an old envelope with the dark red stamp of twenty years ago, but I have pencilled a few lines at the back; here is a sheet of manuscript, and here some cut-
74 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
tings from obscure local journals. And if you ask me the subject matter of the collection, it will not seem extraordinary. A servant girl at a farm- house, who disappeared from her place and has never been heard of, a child supposed to have slipped down some old working on the mountains, some queer scribbling on a limestone rock, a man murdered with a blow from a strange weapon ; such is the scent I have to go upon. Yes, as you say, there is a ready explanation for all this ; the girl may have run away to London, or Liverpool, or New York; the child may be at the bottom of the disused shaft; and the letters on the rock may be the idle whims of some vagrant. Yes, yes, I admit all that ; but I know I hold the true key. Look ! " and he held me out a slip of yellow paper.
" Characters found inscribed on a limestone rock on the Gray Hills," I read, and then there was a word erased, presumably the name of a county, and a date some fifteen years back. Beneath was traced a number of uncouth characters, shaped somewhat like wedges or daggers, as strange and outlandish as the Hebrew alphabet.
"Now the seal," said Professor Gregg, and he handed me the black stone, a thing about two inches long, and something like an old-fashioned tobacco stopper, much enlarged.
I held it up to the light, and saw to my surprise the characters on the paper repeated on the seal.
"Yes," said the professor, "they are the same. And the marks on the limestone rock were made fifteen years ago, with some red substance. And the characters on the seal are four thousand years old at least. Perhaps much more."
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 7i3
"Is it a hoax?" I said.
" No, I anticipated that. I was not to be led to give rny life to a practical joke. I have tested the matter very carefully. Only one person besides myself knows of the mere existence of that black seal. Besides, there are other reasons which I cannot enter into now."
"But what does it all mean?" I said. "I cannot understand to what conclusion all this leads."
" My dear Miss Lally, that is a question I would rather leave unanswered for some little time. Per- haps I shall never be able to say what secrets are held here in solution; a few vague hints, the out- lines of village tragedies, a few marks done with red earth upon a rock, and an ancient seal. A queer set of data to go upon? Half-a-dozen pieces of evidence, and twenty years before even so much could be got together; and who knows what mirage or terra incognita may be beyond all this? I look across deep waters , Miss Lally, and the land beyond may be but a haze after all. But still I believe it is not so, and a few months will show whether I am right or wrong."
He left me, and alone I endeavored to fathom the mystery, wondering to what goal such eccentric odds and ends of evidence could lead. I myself am not wholly devoid of imagination, and I had reason to respect the professor's solidity of intellect; yet I saw in the contents of the drawer but the materials of fantasy, and vainly tried to conceive what theory could be founded on the fragments that had been placed before me. Indeed, I could discover in what I had heard and seen but the first chapter of an
76 THE THREE IMPOSTOES.
extravagant romance; and yet deep in my heart I burned with, curiosity, and day after day I looked eagerly in Professor Gregg's face for some hint of what was to happen.
It was one evening after dinner that the word came.
" I hope you can make your preparations without much trouble," he said suddenly to me. "We shall be leaving here in a week's time."
" Really ! " I said in astonishment. " Where are we going? "
"I have taken a country house in the west of England, not far from Caermaen, a quiet little town, once a city, and the headquarters of a Koman legion. It is very dull there, but the country is pretty, and the air is wholesome."
I detected a glint in his eyes, and guessed that this sudden move had some relation to our conver- sation of a few days before.
"I shall just take a few books with me," said Professor Gregg, " that is all. Everything else will remain here for 'our return. I have got a holiday," he went on, smiling at me, " and I shan't be sorry to be quit for a time of my old bones and stones and rubbish. Do you know," he went on, "I have been grinding away at facts for thirty years ; it is time for fancies."
The days passed quickly ; I could see that the pro- fessor was all quivering with suppressed excitement, and I could scarce credit the eager appetence of his glance as we left the old manor house behind us, and began our journey. We set out at mid-day, and it was in the dusk of the evening that we arrived
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 77
at a little country station. I was tired and excited, and the drive through, the lanes seems all a dream. First the deserted streets of a forgotten village, while I heard Professor Gregg's voice talking of the Augustan Legion and the clash of arms, and all the tremendous pomp that followed the eagles ; then the broad river swimming to full tide with the last afterglow glimmering duskily in the yellow water, the wide meadows, and the cornfields whiten- ing, and the deep lane winding on the slope between the hills and the water. At last we began to ascend, and the air grew rarer; I looked down and saw the pure white mist tracking the outline of the river like a shroud, and a vague and shadowy country, imaginations and fantasy of swelling hills and hang- ing woods, and half-shaped outlines of hills beyond, and in the distance the glare of the furnace fire on the mountain, growing by turns a pillar of shining flame, and fading to a dull point of red. We were slowly mounting a carriage drive, and then there came to me the cool breath and the scent of the great wood that was above us; I seemed to wan- der in its deepest depths, and there was the sound of trickling water, the scent of the green leaves, and the breath of the summer night. The carriage stopped at last, and I could scarcely distinguish the form of the house as I waited a moment at the pillared porch; and the rest of the evening seemed a dream of strange things bounded by the great silence of the wood and the valley and the river.
The next morning when I awoke and looked out of the bow window of the big old-fashioned bed- room, I saw under a gray sky a country that was
78 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
still all mystery. The long, lovely valley, with the river winding in and out below, crossed in mid vision by a mediaeval bridge of vaulted and but- tressed stone, the clear presence of the rising ground beyond, and the woods that I had only seen in shadow the night before, seemed tinged with enchantment, and the soft breath of air that sighed in at the opened pane was like no other wind. I looked across the valley, and beyond, hill followed on hill as wave on wave, and here a faint blue pillar of smoke rose still in the morning air from the chim- ney of an ancient gray farmhouse, there was a rugged height crowned with dark firs, and in the distance I saw the white streak of a road that climbed and vanished into some unimagined country. But the boundary of all was a great wall of mountain, vast in the west, and ending like a fortress with a steep ascent and a domed tumulus clear against the sky.
I saw Professor Gregg walking up and down the terrace path below the windows, and it was evident that he was revelling in the sense of liberty, and the thought that he had, for a while, bidden good- bye to task-work. When I joined him there was exultation in his voice as he pointed out the sweep of valley and the river that wound beneath the lovely hills.
" Yes, " he said, " it is a strangely beautiful coun- try; and to me, at least, it seems full of mystery. You have not forgotten the drawer I showed you, Miss Lally? No; and you have guessed that I have come here not merely for the sake of the children and the fresh air? "
"I think I have guessed as much as that," I
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 79
replied ; " but you must remember I do not know the mere nature of your investigations ; and as for the connection between the search and this wonderful valley, it is past my guessing."
He smiled queerly at me. "You must not think I am making a mystery for the sake of mystery," he said. " I do not speak out because, so far, there is nothing to be spoken, nothing definite I mean, nothing that can be set down in hard black and white, as dull and sure and irreproachable as any blue book. And then I have another reason : many years ago a chance paragraph in a newspaper caught my attention, and focussed in an instant the vagrant thoughts and half-formed fancies of many idle and speculative hours into a certain hypothesis. 1 saw at once that I was treading on a thin crust; my theor}7" was wild and fantastic in the extreme, and I would not for any consideration have written a hint of it for publication. But I thought that in the company of scientific men like myself, men who knew the course of discovery, and were aware that the gas that blazes and flares in the gin-palace was once a wild hypothesis; I thought that with such men as these I might hazard my dream — let us say Atlantis, -or the philosopher's stone, or what you like — without danger of ridicule. I found I was grossly mistaken ; my friends looked blankly at me and at one another, and I could see something of pity, and something also of insolent contempt, in the glances they exchanged. One of them called on me next day, and hinted that I must be suffering from overwork and brain exhaustion. * In plain terms, ' I said, ' you think I am going mad. I
80
THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
think not; ' and I showed him out with some little appearance of heat. Since that day I vowed that I would never whisper the nature of my theory to any living soul; to no one but yourself have I ever shown the contents of that drawer. After all, I may be following a rainbow; I may have been misled by the play of coincidence ; but as I stand here in this mystic hush and silence amidst the woods and wild hills, I am more than ever sure that I am hot on the scent. Come, it is time we went in."
To me in all this there was something both of wonder and excitement; I knew how in his ordinary work Professor Gregg moved step by step, testing every inch of the way, and never venturing on assertion without proof that was impregnable. Yet I divined more from his glance and the vehemence of his tone than from the spoken word that he had in his every thought the vision of the almost in- credible continually with him; and I, who was with some share of imagination no little of a sceptic, offended at a hint of the marvellous, could not help asking myself whether he was cherishing a mono- mania, and barring out from this one subject all the scientific method of his other life.
Yet, with this image of mystery haunting my thoughts, I surrendered wholly to the charm of the country. Above the faded house on the hillside began the great forest; a long dark line seen from the opposing hills, /stretching above the river for many a mile from north to south, and yielding in the north to even wilder country , barren and savage hills, and ragged common land, a territory all strange
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 81
and unvisited, and more unknown to Englishmen than the very heart of Africa. The space of a couple of steep fields alone separated the house from the wood, and the children were delighted to follow me up the long alleys of undergrowth, be- tween smooth pleached walls of shining beech, to the highest point in the wood, whence one looked on one side across the river and the rise and fall of the country to the great western mountain wall, and on the other, over the surge and dip of the myriad trees of the forest, over level meadows and the shining yellow sea to the faint coast beyond. I used to sit at this point on the warm sunlit turf which marked the track of the Roman Road, while the two children raced about hunting for the whin- berries that grew here and there on the banks. Here beneath the deep blue sky and the great clouds rolling, like olden galleons with sails full- bellied, from the sea to the hills, as I listened to the whispered charm of the great and ancient wood, I lived solely for delight, and only remembered strange things when we would return to the house, and find Professor Gregg either shut up in the little room he had made his study, or else pacing the terrace with the look, patient and enthusiastic, of the determined seeker.
One morning, some eight or nine days after our , arrival, I looked out of my window and saw the whole landscape transmuted before me. The clouds had dipped low and hidden the mountain in the west, and a southern wind was driving the rain in shifting pillars up the valley, and the little brooklet that burst the hill below the house now raged, a
6
82 THE THREE IMPOSTOES.
red torrent, down to the river. We were perforce obliged to keep snug within doors, and when I had attended to my pupils, I sat down in the morning- room where the ruins of a library still encumbered an old-fashioned bookcase. I had inspected the shelves once or twice, but their contents had failed to attract me; volumes of eighteenth century ser- mons, an old book on farriery, a collection of "Poems " by "persons of quality," Prideaux's "Con- nection," and an odd volume of Pope were the boundaries of the library, and there seemed little doubt that everything of interest or value had been removed. Now, however, in desperation, I began to re-examine the musty sheepskin and calf bind- ings, and found, much to my delight, a fine old quarto printed by the Stephani , containing the three books of Pomponius Mela, "De Situ Orbis," and other of the ancient geographers. I knew enough of Latin to steer my way through an ordinary sen- tence, and I soon became absorbed in the odd mix- ture of fact and fancy; light shining on a little of the space of the world, and beyond mist and shadow and awful forms. Glancing over the clear-printed pages, my attention was caught by the heading of a chapter in Solinus, and I read the words : —
MIKA DE INTIMIS GEN^IBUS LIBYAE, DE LAPIDE HEXECONTALITHO.
" The wonders of the people that inhabit the inner parts of Libya, and of the stone called Sixtystoue." The odd title attracted me and I read on : —
" Gens ista avia et secreta habitat, in montibus horrendis foeda mysteria celebrat. De hominibus nihil aliud illi prae-
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 83
fenmt quam figuram, ab humano ritu prorsus exulant, ode- runt deum lucis. Stridunt potius quam loquuntur; vox absona nee sine horrore auditur. Lapide quodam gloriantur, quern Hexecontalithon vocant; dicunt euim hunc lapidem sexaginta notas ostendere. Cujus lapidis noinen secretum ineflabile colunt : quod Ixaxar."
"This folk," I translated to myself, "dwells in remote and secret places, and celebrates foul mys- teries on savage hills. Nothing have they in com- mon with men save the face, and the customs of humanity are wholly strange to them; and they hate the sun. They hiss rather than speak; their voices are harsh, and not to be heard without fear. They boast of a certain stone, which they call Sixtystone ; for they say that it displays sixty char- acters. And this stone has a secret unspeakable name; which is Ixaxar."
I laughed at the queer inconsequence of all this, and thought it fit for Sinbad the Sailor or other of the supplementary Nights. When 1 saw Professor Gregg in the course of the day, I told him of my find in the bookcase, and the fantastic rubbish I had been reading. To my surprise, he looked up at me with an expression of great interest.
"That is really very curious," he said. "I have never thought it worth while to look into the old geographers, and I daresay I have missed a good deal. Ah, that is the passage, is it. It seems a shame to rob you of your entertainment, but I really think I must carry off the book."
The next day the professor called to me to come to the study. I found him sitting at a table in the full light of the window, scrutinizing something very attentively with a magnify ing-glass.
84 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
" Ah, Miss Lally," he began, "I want to use your eyes. This glass is pretty good, but not like my old one that I left in town. Would you mind examining the thing yourself, and telling me how many characters are cut on it? "
He handed me the object in his hand, and I saw that it was the black seal he had shown me in Lon- don, and my heart began to beat with the thought that I was presently to know something. I took the seal, and holding it up to the light checked off the grotesque dagger-shaped characters one by one.
"I make sixty -two," I said at last.
"Sixty -two? Nonsense; it ''s impossible. Ah, I see what you have done, you have counted that and that," and he pointed to two marks which I had certainly taken as letters with the rest.
"Yes, yes," Professor Gregg went on; "but those are obvious scratches, done accidentally ; I saw that at once. Yes, then that 's quite right. Thank you very much, Miss Lally."
I was going away, rather disappointed at my having been called in merely to count a number of marks on the black seal, when suddenly there flashed into my mind what I had read in the morning.
"But, Professor Gregg," I cried, breathless, "the seal, the seal. Why, it is the stone Hexecontali- thos that Solinus writes of; it is Ixaxar."
"Yes," he said, "I suppose it is. Or it may be a mere coincidence. It never does to be too sure, you know, in these matters. Coincidence killed the professor."
I went away puzzled by what I had heard, and as
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 85
much, as ever at a loss to find the ruling clew in this maze of strange evidence. For three days the bad weather lasted, changing from driving rain to a dense mist, fine and dripping, and we seemed to be shut up in a white cloud that veiled all the world away from us. All the while Professor Gregg was darkling in his room, unwilling, it appeared, to dis- pense confidences or talk of any kind, and I heard him walking to and fro with a quick, impatient step, as if he were in some way wearied of inaction. The fourth morning was fine, and at breakfast the professor said briskly : —
"We want some extra help about the house; a boy of fifteen or sixteen, you know. There are a lot of little odd jobs that take up the maids' time, which a boy could do much better."
"The girls have not complained to me in any way," I replied. "Indeed, Anne said there was much less work than in London, owing to there being so little dust."
"Ah, yes, they are very good girls. But I think we shall do much better with a boy. In fact, that is what has been bothering me for the last two days."
"Bothering you?" I said in astonishment, for as a matter of fact the professor never took the slightest interest in the affairs of the house.
"Yes," he said, "the weather, you know. I really could n't go out in that Scotch mist; I don't know the country very well, and I should have lost my way. But I am going to get the boy this morning."
" But how do you know there is such a boy as you want anywhere about?"
86 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
"Oh, I have no doubt as to that. I may have to walk a mile or two at the most, but I am sure to find just the boy I require."
I thought the professor was joking, but though his tone was airy enough there was something grim and set about his features that puzzled me. He got his stick, and stood at the door looking medita- tively before him, and as I passed through the hall he called to me.
"By the way, Miss Lally, there was one thing I wanted to say to you. I daresay you may have heard that some of these country lads are not over bright; idiotic would be a harsh word to use, and they are usually called ' naturals,' or something of the kind. I hope you won't mind if the boy I am after should ' turn out not too keen-witted ; he will be perfectly harmless, of course, and blacking boots doesn't need much mental effort."
With that he was gone, striding up the road that led to the wood ; and I remained stupefied, and then for the first time my astonishment was mingled with a sudden note of terror, arising I knew not whence, and all unexplained even to myself, and yet I felt about my heart for an instant something of the chill of death, and that shapeless, formless dread of the unknown that is worse than death it- self. I tried to find courage in the sweet air that b}ew up from the sea, and in the sunlight after rain, but the mystic woods seemed to darken around me; and the vision of the river coiling between the reeds, and the silver gray of the ancient bridge, fashioned in my mind symbols of vague dread, as the mind of a child fashions terror from things harmless and familiar.
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 87
Two hours later Professor Gregg returned. I met him as he came down the road, and asked quietly if he had been able to find a boy.
"Oh, yes," he answered; "I found one easily enough. His name is Jervase Cradock, and I ex- pect he will make himself very useful. His father has been dead for many years, and the mother, whom I saw, seemed very glad at the prospect of a few shillings extra coming in on Saturday nights. As I expected, he is not too sharp, has fits at times , the mother said; but as he will not be trusted with the china, that does n't much matter, does it? And he is not in any way dangerous, you know, merely a little weak."
"When is he coming?"
" To-morrow morning at eight o'clock. Anne will show him what he has to do, and how to do it. At first he will go home every night, but perhaps it may ultimately turn out more convenient for him to sleep here, and only go. home for Sundays."
I found nothing to say to all this. Professor Gregg spoke in a quiet tone of matter-of-fact, as indeed was warranted by the circumstance; and yet I could not quell my sensation of astonishment at the whole affair. I knew that in reality no assistance was wanted in the housework, and the professor's prediction that the boy 'he was to engage might prove a little "simple," followed by so exact a fulfilment, struck me as bizarre in the extreme. The next morning I heard from the housemaid that the boy Cradock had come at eight, and that she had been trying to make him useful. "He doesn't seem quite all there, I don't think, miss," was her
88 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
comment; and later in the day I saw him helping the old man who worked in the garden. He was a youth of about fourteen, with black hair and black eyes, and an olive skin, and I saw at once from the curious vacancy of his expression that he was men- tally weak. He touched his forehead awkwardly as I went by, and I heard him answering the gardener in a queer, harsh voice that caught my attention ; it gave me the impression of some one speaking deep below under the earth, and there was a strange sib- ilance, like the hissing of the phonograph as the pointer travels over the cylinder. I heard that he seemed anxious to do what he could, and was quite docile and obedient, and Morgan the gardener, who knew his mother, assured me he was perfectly harmless. "He's always been a bit queer," he said, "and no wonder, after what his mother went through before he was born. I did know his father, Thomas Cradock, well, and a very tine workman he was too, indeed. He got something wrong with his lungs owing to working in the wet woods, and never got over it, and went off quite sudden like. And they do say as how Mrs. Cradock was quite off her head; anyhow, she was found by Mr. Hillyer, Ty Coch, all crouched up on the Gray Hills, over there, crying and weeping like a lost soul. And Jervase he was born about eight months after- wards, and as I was saying, he was a bit queer always; and they do say when he could scarcely walk he would frighten the other children into fits witli the noises he would make."
A word in the story had stirred up some remem- brance within me, and vaguely curious, I asked the old man where the Gray Hills were.
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 89
"Up there," he said, with the same gesture he had used before; "you go past the Fox and Hounds, and through the forest, by the old ruins. It 7s a good five mile from here, and a strange sort of a place. The poorest soil between this and Monmouth, they do say, though it 7s good feed for sheep. Yes, it was a sad thing for poor Mrs. Cradock."
The old man turned to his work, and I strolled on down the path between the espaliers, gnarled and gouty with age, thinking of the story I had heard, and groping for the point in it that had some key to my memory. In an instant it came before me ; I had seen the phrase " Gray Hills " on the slip of yellowed paper that Professor Gregg had taken from the drawer in his cabinet. Again I was seized with pangs of mingled curiosity and fear; I remembered the strange characters copied from the limestone rock, and then again their iden- tity with the inscription on the age-old seal, and the fantastic fables of the Latin geographer. I saw beyond doubt that, unless coincidence had set all the scene and disposed all these bizarre events with curious art, I was to be a spectator of things far removed from the usual and customary traffic and jostle of life. Professor Gregg I noted day by day. He was hot on his trail, growing lean with eager- ness ; and in the evenings, when the sun was swim- ming on the verge of the mountain, he would pace the terrace to and fro with his eyes on the ground, while the mist grew white in the valley, and the stillness of the evening brought far voices near, and the blue smoke rose a straight column from the diamond-shaped chimney of the gray farmhouse,
90 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
just as I had seen it on the first morning. I have told you I was of sceptical habit; but though I understood little or nothing, I began to dread, vainly proposing to myself the iterated dogmas of science that all life is material, and that in the system of things there is no undiscovered land even beyond the remotest stars, where the supernatural can find a footing. Yet there struck in on this the thought that matter is as really awful and unknown as spirit, that science itself but dallies on the thresh- old, scarcely gaining more than a glimpse of the wonders of the inner place.
There is one day that stands up from amidst the others as a grim red beacon, betokening evil to come. I was sitting on a bench in the garden, watching the boy Cradock weeding, when I was suddenly alarmed by a harsh and choking sound, like the cry of a wild beast in anguish, and I was unspeakably shocked to see the unfortunate lad standing in full view before me, his whole body quivering and shaking at short intervals as though shocks of electricity were passing through him, and his teeth grinding, and foam gathering on his lips, and his face all swollen and blackened to a hideous mask of humanity. I shrieked with terror, and Professor Gregg came running; and as I pointed to Cradock, the boy with one. convulsive shudder fell face forward, and lay on the wet earth, his body writhing like a wounded blind-worm, and an incon- ceivable babble of sounds bursting and rattling and hissing from his lips; he seemed to pour forth an infamous jargon, with words, or what seemed words, that might have belonged to a tongue dead since
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 91
untold ages, and buried deep beneath Nilotic mud, or in the inmost recesses of the Mexican forest. For a moment the thought passed through my mind, as my ears were still revolted with that infernal clamor, " Surely this is the very speech of hell," and then I cried out again and again, and ran away shuddering to my inmost soul. I had seen Pro- fessor Gregg's face as he stooped over the wretched boy and raised him, and I was appalled by the glow of exultation that shone on every lineament and feature. As I sat in. my room with drawn blinds, and my eyes hidden in my hands, I heard heavy steps beneath, and I was told afterwards that Professor Gregg had carried Cradock to his study, and had locked the door. I heard voices murmur indistinctly, and I trembled to think of what might be passing within a few feet of where I sat; I longed to escape to the woods and sunshine, and yet I dreaded the sights that might confront me on the way. And at last, as I held the handle of the door nervously J I heard Professor Gregg's voice calling to me with a cheerful ring : " It 's all right now, Miss Lally," he said. "The poor fellow has got over it, and I have been arranging for him to sleep here after to-morrow. Perhaps I may be able to do something for him."
"Yes, "he said later, "it was a very painful sight, and I don't wonder you were alarmed. We may hope that good food will build him up a little, but I am afrad he will never be really cured; " and he affected the dismal and conventional air with which one speaks of hopeless illness, and yet beneath it I detected the delight that leapt up rampant within
92 THE THKEE IMPOSTORS.
him, and fought and struggled to find utterance. It was as if one glanced down on the even surface of the sea, clear and immobile, and saw beneath raging depths, and a storm of contending billows. It was indeed to me a torturing and offensive prob- lem that this man, who had so bounteously rescued me from the sharpness of death, and showed himself in all the relations of life full of benevolence and pity and kindly forethought, should so manifestly be for once on the side of the demons, and take a ghastly pleasure in the torments of an afflicted fel- low-creature. Apart, I struggled with the horned difficulty, and strove to find the solution, but with- out the hint of a clue ; beset by mystery and contra- diction, I saw nothing that might help me, and began to wonder whether, after all, I had not escaped from the white mist of the suburb at too dear a rate. I hinted something of my thought to the professor; I said enough to let him know that I was in the most acute perplexity, but the moment after regretted what I had done, when I saw his face contort with a spasm of pain.
"My dear Miss Lally," he said, /'you surely do not wish to leave us? No, no, you would not do it. You do not know how I rely on you; how confi- dently I go forward, assured that you are here to watch over my children. You, Miss Lally, are my rear-guard; for, let me tell you, that the business in which I am engaged is not wholly devoid of peril. You have not forgotten what I said the first morn- ing here; my lips are shut by an old and firm resolve, till they can open to utter no ingenious hypothesis or vague surmise but irrefragable fact,
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 93
as certain as a demonstration in mathematics. Think over it, Miss Lally, not for a moment would I endeavor to keep you here against your own instincts, and yet I tell you frankly that I am per- suaded that it is here, here amidst the woods, that your duty lies."
I was touched by the eloquence of his tone, and by the remembrance that the man, after all, had been my salvation, and I gave him my hand on a promise to serve him loyally and without question. A few days later the rector of our church, a little church, gray and severe and quaint, that hovered on the very banks of the river and watched the tides swim and return, came to see us, and Professor Gregg easily persuaded him to stay and share our dinner. Mr. Meyrick was a member of an antique family of squires, whose old manor house stood amongst the hills some seven miles away, and thus rooted in the soil, the rector was a living store of all the old fading customs and lore of the country. His manner, genial with a deal of retired oddity, won on Professor Gregg; and towards the cheese, when a curious Burgundy had begun its incanta- tions, the two men glowed like the wine, and talked of philology with the enthuiasm of a burgess over the peerage. The parson was expounding the pro- nunciation of the Welsh II, and producing sounds like the gurgle of his native brooks, when Professor Gregg struck in.
"By the way," he said, "that was a very odd word I met with the other day. You know my boy, poor Jervase Cradock. Well, he has got the bad habit of talking to himself, and the day before yes-
94 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
terday I was walking in the garden here and heard him; he was evidently quite unconscious of my presence. A lot of what he said I couldn't' make out, but one word struck me distinctly. It was such an odds ound; half-sibilant, half-guttural, and as quaint as those double I's you have been demon- strating. I do not know whether I can give you an idea of the sound. " Ishakshar " is perhaps as near as I can get ; but the k ought to be a Greek chi or a Spanish^'. Now what does it mean in Welsh?"
"In Welsh?" said the parson. "There is no such word in Welsh, nor any word remotely resem- bling it. I know the book-Welsh, as they call it, and the colloquial dialects as well as any man, but there 's no word like that from Anglesea to Usk. Besides, none of the Cradocks speak a word of Welsh; it's dying out about here."
"Beally. You interest me extremely, Mr. Mey- rick. I confess the word did n't strike me as hav- ing the Welsh ring. But I thought it might be some local corruption."
" No, I never heard such a word, or anything like it. Indeed," he added, smiling whimsically, "if it belongs to any language, I should say it must be that of the fairies, — the Tylwydd Teg, as we call them."
The talk went on to the discovery of a Roman villa in the neighborhood ; and soon after I left the room, and sat down apart to wonder at the draw- ing together of such strange clues of evidence. As the professor had spoken of the curious word, I had caught the glint of his eye upon me ; and though the pronunciation he gave was grotesque in the
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 95
extreme, I recognized the name of the stone of sixty characters mentioned by Solinus, the black seal shut up in some secret drawer of the study, stamped forever by a vanished race with signs that no man could read, signs that might , for all I knew, be the veils of awful things done long ago, and forgotten before the hills were moulded into form.
When, the next morning, I came down, I found Professor Gregg pacing the terrace in his eternal walk.
"Look at that bridge," he said when he saw me, "observe the quaint and Gothic design, the angles between the arches, and the silvery gray of the stone in the awe of the morning light. I confess it seems to me symbolic; it should illustrate a mystical allegory of the passage from one world to another."
"Professor Gregg," I said quietly, "it is time that I knew something of what has happened, and of what is to happen."
For the moment he put me off, but I returned again with the same question in the evening, and then Professor Gregg flamed with excitement. "Don't you understand yet?" he cried. "But I have told you a good deal; yes, and shown you a good deal. You have heard pretty nearly all that I have heard, and seen what I have seen; or at least," and his voice chilled as he spoke, " enough to make a good deal clear as noonday. The ser- vants told you, I have no doubt, that the wretched boy Cradock had another seizure the night before last; he awoke me with cries in that voice you heard in the garden, and I went to him, and God forbid you should see what I saw that night. But all this is useless ; my time here is drawing to a close ;
96 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
I must be back in town in three weeks, as I have a course of lectures to prepare, and need all my books about me. In a very few days it will be all over, and I shall no longer hint, and no longer be liable to ridicule as a madman and a quack. No, I shall speak plainly, and I shall be heard with such emo- tions as perhaps no other man has ever drawn from the breasts of his fellows.57
He paused, and seemed to grow radiant with the joy of great and wonderful discovery.
"But all that is for the future, the near future certainly, but still the future," he went on at length. "There is something to be done yet; you will remember my telling you that my researches were not altogether devoid of peril? Yes, there is a certain amount of danger to be faced; I did not know how much when I spoke on the subject before, and to a certain extent I am still in the dark. But it will be a strange adventure, the last of all, the last demonstration in the chain."
He was walking up and down the room as he spoke, and I could hear in his voice the contending tones of exultation and despondence, or perhaps I should say awe, the awe of a man who goes forth on unknown waters, and I thought of his allusion to Columbus on the night he had laid his book before me. The evening was a little chilly, and a fire of logs had been lighted in the study where we were, and the remittent flame and the glow on the walls reminded me of the old days. I was sitting silent in an arm-chair by the fire, wondering over all I had heard, and still vainly speculating as to the secret springs concealed from me under all the
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 97
phantasmagoria I had witnessed, when I became suddenly aware of a sensation that change of some sort had been at work in the room, and that there was something unfamiliar in its aspect. For some time I looked about me, trying in vain to localize the alteration that I knew had been made ; the table by the window, the chairs, the faded settee were all as I had known them. Suddenly, as a sought-for recollection flashes into the mind, I knew what was' amiss. I was facing the professor's desk, which stood on the other side of the lire, and above the desk was a grimy looking bust of Pitt, that I had never seen there before. And then I remembered the true position of this work of art; in the furthest corner by the door was an old cupboard, projecting into the room, and on the top of the cupboard, fifteen feet from the floor, the bust had been, and there no doubt it had delayed, accumulating dirt since the early years of the century.
I was utterly amazed, and sat silent still, in a confusion of thought. There was, so far as I knew, no such thing as a step-ladder in the house, for I had asked for one to make some alterations in the curtains of my room ; and a tall man standing on a chair would have found it impossible to take down the bust. It had been placed not on the edge of the cupboard, but far back against the wall ; and Professor Gregg was, if anything, under the average height.
"How on earth did you manage to get down Pitt?" I said at last.
The professor looked curiously at me, and seemed to hesitate a little.
7
98 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
"They must have found you a step-ladder, or per- haps the gardener brought in a short ladder from outside."
"No, I have had no ladder of any kind. Now, Miss Lally," he went on with an awkward simula- tion of jest, "there is a little puzzle for you; a problem in the manner of the inimitable Holmes; there are the facts, plain and patent; summon your acuteness to the solution of the puzzle. For Heaven's sake," he cried with a breaking voice, " say no more about it. I tell you, I never touched the thing," and he went out of the room with horror manifest on his face, and his hand shook and jarred the door behind him.
I looked round the room in vague surprise, not at all realizing what had happened, making vain and idle surmises by way of explanation, and wondering at the stirring of black waters by an idle word, and the trivial change of an oranment. " This is some petty business, some whim on which I have jarred," I reflected; "the professor is perhaps scrupulous and superstitious over trifles, and my question may have outraged unacknowledged fears, as though one killed a spider or spilled the salt before the very eyes of a practical Scotchwoman." I was immersed in these fond suspicions, and began to plume myself a little on my immunity from such empty fears, when the truth fell heavily as lead upon my heart, and I recognized with cold terror that some awful influence had been at work. The bust was simply inaccessible; without a ladder no one could have touched it.
T went out to the kitchen and spoke as quietly as I could to the housemaid.
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 99
" Who moved that bust from the top of the cup- board, Anne?" I said to her. "Professor Gregg says he has not touched it. Did you find an old step-ladder in one of the outhouses ?"
The girl looked at me blankly.
"I never touched it," she said. "I found it where it is now the other morning when I dusted the room. I remember now, it was Wednesday morning, because it was the morning after Cradock was taken bad in the night. My room is next to his, you know, miss," the girl went on piteously; "and it was awful to hear how he cried and called out names that I could n't understand. It made me feel all afraid, and then master came, and I heard him speak, and he took down Cradock to the study and gave him something."
"And you found that bust moved the next morning ? "
"Yes, miss, there was a queer sort of a smell in the study when I came down and opened the win- dows; a bad smell it was, and I wondered what it could be. Do you know, miss, I went a long time ago to the Zoo in London with my cousin Thomas Barker, one afternoon that I had off, when I was at Mrs. Prince's in Stanhope Gate, and we went into the snake-house to see the snakes, and it was just the same sort of a smell, very sick it made me feel, I remember, and I got Barker to take me out. And it was just the same kind of a smell in the study, as I was saying, and I was wondering what it could be from, when I see that bust with Pitt cut in it standing on the master's desk, and I thought to myself, now who has done that, and how have they
100 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
done it ? And when I came to dust the things, I looked at the bust, and I saw a great mark on it where the dust was gone, for I don't think it can have been touched with a duster for years and years, and it was n't like finger-marks, but a large patch like, broad and spread out. So I passed my hand over it, without thinking what I was doing, and where that patch was it was all sticky and slimy, as if a snail had crawled over it. Very strange, is n't it, miss ? and I wonder who can have done it, and how that mess was made."
The well-meant gabble of the servant touched me to the quick. I lay down upon my bed, and bit my lip that I should not cry out' loud in the sharp anguish of my terror and bewilderment. Indeed, I was almost mad with dread; I believe that if it had been daylight I should have fled hot foot, forgetting all courage and all the debt of gratitude that was due to Professor Gregg, not caring whether my fate were that I must starve slowly so long as I might escape from the net of blind and panic fear that every day seemed to draw a little closer round me. If I knew, I thought, if I knew what there were to dread, I could guard against it; but here, in this lonely house, shut in on all sides by the olden woods and the vaulted hills, terror seems to spring inconsequent from every covert, and the flesh is aghast at the half -heard murmurs of horrible things. All in vain I strove to summon scepticism to my aid, and endeavored by cool common-sense to but- tress my belief in a world of natural order, for the air that blew in at the open window was a mystic breath, and in the darkness I felt the silence go
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 101
heavy and sorrowful as a mass of requiem, and I conjured images of strange shapes gathering fast amidst the reeds, beside the wash of the river.
In the morning, from the moment that I set foot in the breakfast-room I felt that the unknown plot was drawing to a crisis; the professor's face was firm and set, and he seemed hardly to hear our voices when we spoke.
"I am going out for rather a long walk," he said, when the meal was over. " You must n't be expect- ing me, now, or thinking anything has happened if I don't turn up to dinner. 1 have been getting stupid lately, and I dare say a miniature walking tour will do me good. Perhaps I may even spend the night in some little inn, if I find any place that looks clean and comfortable."
I heard this, and knew by my experience of Pro- fessor Gregg's manner that it was no ordinary busi- ness or pleasure that impelled him. I knew not, nor even remotely guessed, where he was bound, nor had I the vaguest notion of his errand, but all the fear of the night before returned; and as he stood, smiling, on the terrace, ready to set out, I implored him to stay, and to forget all his dreams of the undiscovered continent.
"No, no, Miss Lally," he replied, still smiling, "it's too late now. Vestigia nulla retrorsum, you know, is the device of all true explorers, though I hope it won't be literally true in my case. But, indeed, you are wrong to alarm yourself so ; I look upon my little expedition as quite commonplace; no more exciting than a day with the geological hammers. There is a risk, of course, but so there
102 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
is on the commonest excursion. I can afford to be jaunty; I am doing nothing so hazardous as 'Arry does a hundred times over in the course of every Bank Holiday. Well, then, you must look more cheerfully; 'and so good-by till to-morrow at latest."
He walked briskly up the road, and I saw him open the gate that marks the entrance of the wood, and then he vanished in the gloom of the trees.
All the day passed heavily with a strange dark- ness in the air, and again I felt as if imprisoned amidst the ancient woods, shut in an olden land of mystery and dread, and as if all was long ago and for- gotten by the living outside. I hoped and dreaded, and when the dinner-hour came, I waited expecting to hear the professor's step in the hall, and his voice exulting at I knew not what triumph. I com- posed my face to welcome him gladly, but the night descended dark, and he did not come.
In the morning when the maid knocked at my door, I called out to her, and asked if her master had returned; and when she replied that his bed- room stood open and empty, I felt the cold clasp of despair. Still, I fancied he might have discovered genial company, and would return for luncheon, or perhaps in the afternoon, and I took the children for a walk in the forest, and tried my best to play and laugh with them, and to shut out the thoughts of mystery and veiled terror. Hour after hour I waited, and my thoughts grew darker; again the night came and found me watching, and at last, as I was making much ado to finish my dinner, I heard steps outside and the sound of a man's voice.
The maid came in and looked oddly at me.
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 103
"Please, miss,7' she began, "Mr. Morgan the gar- dener wants to speak to you fora minute, if you did n't mind."
"Show him in, please," I answered, and I set my lips tight.
The old man came slowly into the room, and the servant shut the door behind him.
"Sit down, Mr. Morgan," I said; "what is it that you want to say to me?"
" Well, miss, Mr. Gregg he gave me something for you yesterday morning, just before he went off; and he told me particular not to hand it up before eight o'clock this evening exactly, if so be as he wasn't back again home before, and if he should come home before I was just to return it to him in his own hands. So, you see, as Mr. Gregg is n't here yet, I suppose I 'd better give you the parcel directly."
He pulled out something from his pocket, and gave it to me, half rising. I took it silently, and seeing that Morgan seemed doubtful as to what he was tojio next, I thanked him and bade him good- night, and he went out. I was left alone in the room with the parcel in my hand, — a paper parcel neatly sealed and directed to me, with the instruc- tions Morgan had quoted all written in the profes- sor's large loose hand. I broke the seals with a choking at my heart, and found an envelope inside, addressed also, but open, and I took the letter out.
" MY DEAR Miss LALLY," it began, " To quote the old logic manual, the case of your reading this note is a case of iny having made a blunder of some sort, and, I am afraid, a
104 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
blunder that turns these lines into a farewell. It is prac- tically certain that neither you nor anyone else will ever see me again. I have made my will with provision for this eventuality, and I hope you will consent to accept the small remembrance addressed to you, and my sincere thanks for the way in which you joined your fortunes to mine. The fate which has come upon me is desperate and terrible beyond the remotest dreams of man ; but this fate you have a right to know — if you please. If you look in the left-hand drawer of my dressing-table, you vrill find the key of the escritoire, properly labelled. In the well of the escritoire is a large envelope sealed and addressed to your name. 1 advise you to throw it forthwith into the fire ; you will sleep better of nights if you do so. But if you must know the history of what has happened, it is all written down for you to read."
The signature was firmly written below , and again I turned the page and read out the words one by one, aghast and white to the lips, my hands cold as ice, and sickness choking me. The dead silence of the room, and the thought of the dark woods and hills closing me in on every side, oppressed me, helpless and without capacity, and not knowing where to turn for counsel. At last I resolved that though knowledge should haunt my whole life and all the days to come, I must know the meaning of the strange terrors that had so long tormented me, rising gray, dim, and awful, like the shadows in the wood at dusk. I carefully carried out Professor Gregg's directions, and not without reluctance broke the seal of the envelope, and spread out his manu- script before me. That manuscript I always carry with me, and I see that I cannot deny your un- spoken request to read it. This, then, was what I
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 105
read that night, sitting at the desk, with a shaded lamp beside ine.
The young lady who called herself Miss Lally then proceeded to recite : —
The Statement of William Gregg, F. E. S., etc.
It is many years since the first glimmer of the theory which is now almost , if not quite , reduced to fact dawned first on my mind. A somewhat exten- sive course of miscellaneous and obsolete reading had done a good deal to prepare the way, and, later, when I became somewhat of a specialist and im- mersed myself in the studies known as ethnological, I was now and then startled by facts that would not square with orthodox scientific opinion, and by dis- coveries that seemed to hint at something still hid- den for all our research. More particularly I became convinced that much of the folk-lore of the world is but an exaggerated account of events that really hap- pened, and I was especially drawn to consider the stories of the fairies, the good folk of the Celtic races. Here I thought I could detect the fringe of embroi- dery and exaggeration, the fantastic guise, the little people dressed in green and gold sporting in the flowers, and I thought I saw a distinct analogy be- tween the name given to this race (supposed to be imaginary) and the description of their appearance and manners. Just as our remote ancestors called the dreaded beings "fair" and "good" precisely because they dreaded them, so they had dressed them up in charming forms, knowing the truth to
106 THE THEEE IMPOSTOES.
be the very reverse. Literature, too, had gone early to work, and had lent a powerful hand in the trans- formation, so that the playful elves of Shakespeare are already far removed from the true original, and the real horror is disguised in a form of prankish mischief. But in the older tales, the stories that used to make men cross themselves as they sat round the burning logs, we tread a different stage; I saw a widely opposed spirit in certain histories of children and of men and women who vanished strangely from the earth. They would be seen by a peasant in the fields walking towards some green and rounded hillock, and seen no more on earth; and there are stories of mothers who have left a child quietly sleeping with the cottage door rudely barred with a piece of wood, and have returned, not to find the plump and rosy little Saxon, but a thin and wizened creature, with sallow skin and black piercing eyes, the child of another race. Then, again, there were myths darker still; the dread of witch and wizard, the lurid evil of the Sabbath, and the hint of demons who mingled with the daughters of men. And just as we have turned the terrible " fair folk " into a company of benignant, if freakish, elves, so we have hidden from us the black foulness of the witch and her companions under a popular diablerie of old women and broomsticks and a comic cat with tail on end. So the Greeks called the hideous furies benevolent ladies, and thus the northern nations have followed their example. I pursued my investigations, stealing odd hours from other and more imperative labors, and I asked myself the question : Supposing these tradi-
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 107
tions to be true, who were the demons who are reported to have attended the Sabbaths? I need not say that I laid aside what I may call the super- natural hypothesis of the middle ages, and came to the conclusion that fairies and devils were of one and the same race and origin} invention, no doubt, and the Gothic fancy of old days had done much in the way of exaggeration and distortion; yet I firmly believed that beneath all this imagery there was a black background of truth. As for some of the alleged wonders, I hesitated. While I should be very loth to receive any one specific instance of modern spiritualism as containing even a grain of the genuine, yet I was not wholly pre- pared to deny that human flesh may now and then, once perhaps in ten million cases, be the veil of powers which seem magical to us; powers which, so far from proceeding from the heights and leading men thither, are in reality survivals from the depths of being. The amoeba and the snail have powers which we do not possess; and I thought it possible that the theory of reversion might explain many things which seem wholly inexplicable. Thus stood my position ; I saw good reason to believe that much of the tradition, a vast deal of the earliest and un- corrupted tradition of the so-called fairies, repre- sented solid fact, and I thought that the purely supernatural element in these traditions, was to be accounted for on the hypothesis that a race which had fallen out of the grand march of evolution might have' retained, as a survival, certain powers which would be to us wholly miraculous. Such was my theory as it stood conceived in my mind; and work-
108 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
ing with this in view, I seemed to gather confirma- tion from every side, from the spoils of a tumulus or a barrow, from a local paper reporting an anti- quarian meeting in the country, and from general literature of all kinds. Amongst other instances, I remember being struck by the phrase " articulate- speaking men " in Homer, as if the writer knew or had heard of men whose speech was so rude that it could hardly be termed articulate; and on my hypothesis of a race who had lagged far behind the rest, I could easily conceive that such a folk would speak a jargon but little removed from the inarticu- late noises of brute-beasts.
Thus I stood, satisfied that my conjecture was at all events not far removed from fact, when a chance paragraph in a small country print one day arrested my attention. It was a short account of what was to all appearance the usual sordid tragedy of the village; a young girl unaccountably missing, and evil rumor blatant and busy with her reputation. Yet I could read between the lines that all this scandal was purely hypothetical, and in all proba- bility invented to account for what was in any other manner unaccountable. A flight to London or Liverpool, or an undiscovered body lying with a weight about its neck in the foul depths of a wood- land pool, or* perhaps murder, — such were the theo- ries of the wretched girl's neighbors. But as I idly scanned the paragraph, a flash of thought passed through me with the violence of an electric shock: What if the obscure and horrible race of the hills still survived, still remained haunting wild places, and barren hills, and now and then repeating the
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 109
evil of Gothic legend, unchanged and unchangeable as the Turanian Shelta, or the Basques of Spain. I have said that the thought came with violence; and indeed I drew in my breath sharply, and clung with both hands to my elbow-chair, in a strange confusion of horror and elation. It was as if one of my confreres of physical science, roaming in a quiet English wood, had been suddenly stricken aghast by the presence of the slimy and loathsome terror of the ichthyosaurus, the original of the stories of the awful worms killed by valorous knights, or had seen the sun darkened by the pterodactyl, the dragon of tradition. Yet as a resolute explorer of knowledge, the thought of such a discovery threw me into a passion of joy, and I cut out the slip from the paper, and put it in a drawer in my old bureau, resolved that it should be but the first piece in a collection of the strangest significance. I sat long that evening dreaming of the conclusions I should establish, nor did cooler reflection at first dash my confidence. Yet as I began to put the case fairly, I saw that I might be building on an unstable foun- dation; the facts might possibly be in accordance with local opinion ; and I regarded the affair with a mood of some reserve. Yet I resolved to remain perched on the look-out, and I hugged to myself the thought that I alone was watching and wakeful, while the great crowd of thinkers and searchers stood heedless and indifferent, perhaps letting the most prerogative facts pass by unnoticed.
Several years elapsed before I was enabled to add to the contents of the drawer; and the second find was in reality not a valuable one, for it was a mere
110 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
repetition of the first, with only the variation of another and distant locality. Yet I gained some- thing; for in the second case, as in the first, the tragedy took place in a desolate and lonely country, and so far my theory seemed justified. But the third piece was to me far more decisive. Again, amongst outland hills, far even from a main road of traffic, an old man was found done to death, and the instru- ment of execution was left beside him. Here, indeed, there was rumor and conjecture, for the deadly tool was a primitive stone axe, bound by gut to the wooden handle, and surmises the most extravagant and improbable were indulged in. Yet, as I thought with a kind of glee, the wildest conjectures went far astray; and I took the pains to enter into corre- spondence with the local doctor, who was called at the inquest. He, a man of some acuteness, was dumfoundered. "It will not do to speak of these things in country places," he wrote to me; "but, frankly, Professor Gregg, there is some hideous mystery here. I have obtained possession of the stone axe, and have been so curious as to test its powers. I took it into the back-garden of my house one Sunday afternoon when my family and the servants were all out, and there, sheltered by the poplar hedges, I made my experiments. I found the thing utterly unmanageable. Whether there is some peculiar balance, some nice adjustment of weights, which require incessant practice, or whether an effectual blow can be struck only by a certain trick of the muscles, I do not know ; but I assure you that I went into the house with but a sorry opinion of my athletic capacities. It was
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. Ill
like an inexperienced man trying 'putting the ham- mer ; 7 the force exerted seemed to return on oneself, and I found myself hurled backwards with violence, while the axe fell harmless to the ground. On another occasion I tried the experiment with a clever woodman of the place; but this man, who had handled his axe for forty years, could do noth- ing with the stone implement, and missed every stroke most ludicrously. In short, if it were not so supremely absurd, I should say that for four thousand years no one on earth could have struck an effective blow with the tool that undoubtedly was used to murder the old man." This, as may be imagined, was to me rare news; and afterwards, when I heard the whole story, and learned that the unfortunate old man had babbled tales of what might be seen at night on a certain wild hillside, hinting at unheard-of wonders, and that he had been found cold one morning on the very hill in question, my exultation was extreme, for I felt I was leaving conjecture far behind me. But the next step was of still greater importance. I had possessed for many years an extraordinary stone seal, — a piece of dull black stone, two inches long from the handle to the stamp, and the stamping end a rough hexagon an inch and a quarter in diameter. Altogether, it presented the appearance of an enlarged tobacco-stopper of an old-fashioned make. It had been sent to me by an agent in the East, who informed me that it had been found near the site of the ancient Babylon. But the charac- ters engraved on the seal were to me an intolerable puzzle. Somewhat of the cuneiform pattern, there
112 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
were yet striking differences, which I detected at the first glance, and all efforts to read the inscrip- tion on the hypothesis that the rules for decipher- ing the arrow-headed writing would apply proved futile. A riddle such as this stung my pride, and at odd moments I would take the Black Seal out of the cabinet, and scrutinize it with so much idle perseverance that every letter was familiar to my mind, and I could have drawn the inscription from memory without the slightest error. Judge then of my surprise, when I one day received from a cor- respondent in the west of England a letter and an enclosure that positively left me thunderstruck. I saw carefully traced on a large piece of paper the very characters of the Black Seal, without alteration of any kind, and above the inscription my friend had written: Inscription found on a limestone rock on the Gray Hills, Monmouthshire. Done in some red earth, and quite recent. I turned to the letter. My friend wrote : " I send you the enclosed inscription with all due reserve. A shepherd who passed by the stone a week ago swears that there was then no mark of any kind. The characters, as I have noted, are formed by drawing some red earth over the stone, and are of an average height of one inch. They look to me like a kind of cuneiform character, a good deal altered, but this of course is impossible. It may be either a hoax or more probably some scribble of the gypsies, who are plentiful enough in this wild country. They have, as you are aware, many hieroglyphics which they use in communi- cating with one another. I happened to visit the stone in question two days ago in connection
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 113
with a rather painful incident which has occurred here."
As may be supposed, I wrote immediately to my friend, thanking him for the copy of the inscrip- tion, and asking him in a casual manner, the his- tory of the incident he mentioned. To be brief, I heard that a woman named Cradock, who had lost her husband a day before, had set out to communi- cate the sad news to a cousin who lived some five miles away. She took a short cut which led by the Gray Hills. Mrs. Cradock, who was then quite a young woman, never arrived at her relative's house. Late that night a farmer who had lost a couple of sheep, supposed to have wandered from the flock, was walking over the Gray Hills, with a lantern and his dog. His attention was attracted by a noise, which he described as a kind of wailing, mournful and pitiable to hear; and, guided by the sound, he found the unfortunate Mrs. Cradock crouched on the ground by the limestone rock, swaying her body to and fro, and lamenting and crying in so heart-rending a manner that the farmer was, as he says, at first obliged to stop his ears, or he would have run away. The woman allowed herself to be taken home, and a neighbor came to see to her necessities. All the night she never ceased her crying, mixing her lament with words of some unintelligible jargon, and when the doctor arrived he pronounced her insane. She lay on her bed for a week, now wailing, as people said, like one lost and damned for eternity, and now sunk in a heavy coma; it was thought that grief at the loss of her husband had unsettled her mind, and the medical
114 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
man did not at one time expect her to live. I need not say that I was deeply interested in this story, and I made my friend write to me at intervals with all the particulars of the case. I heard then that in the course of six weeks the woman gradually recovered the use of her faculties and some months later she gave birth to a son, christened Jervase, who unhappily proved to be of weak intellect. Such were the facts known to the village; but to me while I whitened at the suggested thought of the hideous enormities that had doubtless been committed, all this was nothing short of conviction, and I incautiously hazarded a hint of something like the truth to some scientific friends. The moment the words had left my lips I bitterly regretted hav- ing spoken, and thus given away the great secret of my life, but with a good deal of relief mixed with indignation, I found my fears altogether misplaced, for my friends ridiculed me to my face, and I was regarded as a madman; and beneath a natural an- ger I chuckled to myself, feeling as secure amidst these blockheads, as if I had confided what I knew to the desert sands.
But now, knowing so much, I resolved I would know all, and I concentrated my efforts on the task of deciphering the inscription on the Black Seal. For many years I made this puzzle the sole object of my leisure moments ; for the greater portion of my time was, of course, devoted to other duties, and it was only now and then that I could snatch a week of clear research. If I were to tell the full history of this curious investigation, this statement would be wearisome in the extreme, for it would
ADVENTURE 'OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 115
contain simply the account of long and tedious failure. By what I knew already of ancient scripts I 'was well-equipped for the chase, as I always termed it to myself. I had correspondents amongst all the scientific men in Europe, and, indeed, in the world, and I could not believe that in these days any character, however ancient and however per- plexed, could long resist the search-light I should bring to bear upon it. Yet, in point of fact, it was fully fourteen years before I succeeded. With every year my professional duties increased, and my leisure became smaller. This no doubt retarded me a good deal; and yet, when I look back on those years I am astonished at the vast scope of my inves- tigation of the Black Seal. I made my bureau a centre, and from all the world and from all the ages I gathered transcripts of ancient writing. Nothing, I resolved, should pass me unawares, and the faintest hint should be welcomed and followed up. But as one covert after another was tried and proved empty of result, I began in the course of years to despair, and to wonder whether the Black Seal were the sole relic of some race that had vanished from the world and left no other trace of its existence, — had perished, in fine, as Atlantis is said to have done, in some great cataclysm, its secrets perhaps drowned beneath the ocean or moulded into the heart of the hills. The thought chilled my warmth a little, and though I still persevered, it was no longer with the same certainty of faith. A chance came to the rescue. I was staying in a considerable town in the north of England, and took the opportunity of going over the very creditable museum that had for some time
116 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
been established ' in the place. The curator was one of my correspondents; and, as we were looking through one of the mineral cases, my attention was struck by a specimen, a piece of black stone some four inches square, the appearance of which reminded me in a measure of the Black Seal. I took it up carelessly, and was turning it over in my hand, when I saw, to my astonishment, that the under side was inscribed. I said, quietly enough, to my friend the curator that the specimen inter- ested me, and that I should be much obliged if he would allow me to take it with me to my hotel for a couple of days. He, of course, made no objection, and I hurried to my rooms, and found that my first glance had not deceived me. There were two inscriptions; one in the regular cuneiform charac- ter, another in the character of the Black Seal, and I realized that my task was accomplished. I made an exact copy of the two inscriptions; and when I got to my London study, and had the Seal before me, I was able seriously to grapple with the great prob- lem. The interpreting inscription on the museum specimen, though in itself curious enough, did not bear on my quest, but the transliteration made me master of the secret of the Black Seal. Conjec- ture, of course, had to enter into my calculations; there was here and there uncertainty about a par- ticular ideograph, and one sign recurring again and again on the Seal baffled me for many successive nights. But at last the secret stood open before me in plain English, and I read the key of the awful transmutation of the hills. The last word was hardly written, when with fingers all trembling and
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 117
unsteady I tore the scrap of paper into the minutest fragments, and saw them flame and blacken in the red hollow of the fire, and then I crushed the gray films that remained into finest powder. Never since then have I written those words ; never will I write the phrases which tell me how man can be reduced to the slime from which he came, and be forced to put on the flesh of the reptile and the snake. There was now .but one thing remaining. I knew; but I desired to see, and I was after some time able to take a house in the neighborhood of the Gray Hills, and not far from the cottage where Mrs. Cradock and her son Jervase resided. I need not go into a full and detailed account of the appar- ently inexplicable events which have occurred here, where I am writing this. I knew that I should find in Jervase Cradock something of the blood of the "Little People," and I found later that he had more than once encountered his kinsmen in lonely places in that lonely land. When I was summoned one day to the garden, and found him in a seizure speaking or hissing the ghastly jargon of the Black Seal, I am afraid that exultation prevailed over pity. I heard bursting from his lips the secrets of the underworld, and the word of dread, " Ishakshar," the signification of which I must be excused from giving.
But there is one incident I cannot pass over unnoticed. In the waste hollow of the night I awoke at the sound of those hissing syllables I knew so well; and on going to the wretched boy's room, I found him convulsed and foaming at the mouth, struggling on the bed as if he strove to
118 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
escape the grasp of writhing demons. I took him down to my room and lit the lamp, while he lay twisting on the floor, calling on the power within his flesh to leave him. I saw his body swell and become distended as a bladder, while the face blackened before my eyes ; and then at the crisis I did what was necessary according to the directions on the Seal, and putting all scruple on one side, I became a man of science, observant of what was passing. Yet the sight I had to witness was hor- rible , almost beyond the power of human conception and the most fearful fantasy; something pushed out from the body there on the floor, and stretched forth, a slimy wavering tentacle, across the room, and grasped the bust upon the cupboard, and laid it down on my desk.
When it was over, and I was left to walk up and down all the rest of the night, white and shudder- ing, with sweat pouring from my flesh, I vainly tried to reason with myself; I said, truly enough, that I had seen nothing really supernatural, that a snail pushing out his horns and drawing them in was but an instance on a smaller scale of what I had witnessed; and yet horror broke through all such reasonings and left me shattered and loath- ing myself for the share I had taken in the night's work.
There is little more to be said. I am going now to the final trial and encounter; for I have deter- mined that there shall be nothing wanting, and I shall meet the " Little People " face to face. I shall have the Black Seal and the knowledge of its secrets to help me, and if I unhappily do not return
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 119
from my journey, there is no need to conjure up here a picture of the awfulness of my fate.
Pausing a little at the end of Professor Gregg's statement, Miss Lally contiuned her tale in the following words : —
Such was the almost incredible story that the pro- fessor had left behind him. When I had finished reading it, it was late at night, but the next morning 1 took Morgan with me, and we proceeded to search the Gray Hills for some trace of the lost professor. I will not weary you with a description of the savage desolation of that tract of country, a tract of utterest loneliness, of bare green hills dotted over with gray limestone boulders, worn by the ravage of time into fantastic semblances of men and beasts. Finally, after many hours of weary searching, we found what I told you — the watch and chain, the purse, and the ring — wrapped in a piece of coarse parchment. When Morgan cut the gut that bound the parcel together, and I saw the professor's prop- erty, I burst into tears, but the sight of the dreaded characters of the Black Seal repeated on the parch- ment froze me to silent horror, and I think I under- stood for the first time the awful fate that had come upon my late employer.
I have only to add that Professor Gregg's lawyer treated my account of what had happened as a fairy tale, and refused even to glance at the documents I laid before him. It was he who was responsible for. the statement that appeared in the public press, to the effect that Professor Gregg had been drowned, and that his body must have been swept into the open sea.
120 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
Miss Lally stopped speaking and looked at Mr. Phillipps, with a glance of some enquiry. He, for his part, was sunken in a deep revery of thought; and when he looked up and saw the bustle of the evening gathering in the square, men and women hurrying to partake of dinner, and crowds already besetting the music-halls, all the hum and press of actual life seemed unreal and visionary, a dream in the morning after an awakening.
"I thank you," he said at last, "for your most interesting story; interesting to me, because I feel fully convinced of its exact truth."
"Sir," said the lady, with some energy of indig- nation, "you grieve and offend me. Do you think I should waste my time and yours by concocting fictions on a bench in Leicester Square?"
"Pardon me, Miss Lally, you have a little mis- understood me. Before you began I knew that whatever you told would be told in good faith, but your experiences have a far higher value than that of bona fides. The most extraordinary circum- stances in your account are in perfect harmony with the very latest scientific theories. Professor Lodge would, I am sure, value a communciation from you extremely; I was charmed from the first by his daring hypothesis in explanation of the wonders of Spiritualism (so called), but your narrative puts the whole matter out of the range of mere hypothesis."
"Alas, sir, all this will not help me. You for- get, I have lost my brother under the most start- ling and dreadful circumstances. Again, I ask you, did you not see him as you came here? His black whiskers, his spectacles, his timid glance to right
ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING BROTHER. 121
and left; think, do not these particulars recall his face to your memory?"
"I am sorry to say I have never seen any one of the kind," said Phillipps, who had forgotten all about the missing brother. "But let me ask you a few questions. Did you notice whether Professor Gregg — "
"Pardon me, sir, I have stayed too long. My employers will be expecting me. I thank you for your sympathy. Good-bye."
Before Mr. Phillipps had recovered from his amazement at this abrupt departure, Miss Lally had disappeared from his gaze, passing into the crowd that now thronged the approaches to the Empire. He walked home in a pensive frame of mind, and drank too much tea. At ten o'clock he had made his third brew, and had sketched out the outlines of a little work to be called Protoplasmic Reversion.
INCIDENT OF THE PRIVATE BAR.
MR. DYSON often meditated at odd moments over the singular tale he had listened to at the Cafe de la Touraine. In the first place he cherished a pro- found conviction that the words of truth were scattered with a too niggardly and sparing hand over the agreeable history of Mr. Smith and the Black Gulf Canon; and, secondly, there was the undeniable fact of the profound agitation of the nar- rator, and his gestures on the pavement, too violent to be simulated. The' idea of a man going about London haunted by the fear of meeting a young man with spectacles struck Dyson as supremely ridiculous ; he searched his memory for some prece- dent in romance, but without success ; he paid visits at odd times to the little cafe, hoping to find Mr. Wilkins there ; and he kept a sharp watch on the great generation of the spectacled men without much doubt that he would remember the face of the indi- vidual whom he had seen dart out of the Aerated Bread Shop. All his peregrinations and researches, however, seemed to lead to nothing of value, and Dyson needed all his warm conviction of his innate detective powers and his strong scent for mystery to sustain him in his endeavors. In fact, he had
INCIDENT OF THE PRIVATE BAR. 123
two affairs on hand; and every day, as he passed through streets crowded or deserted, and lurked in the obscure districts, and watched at corners, he was more than surprised to find that the affair of the gold coin persistently avoided him ; while the inge- nious Wilkins, and the young man with spectacles whom he dreaded, seemed to have vanished from the pavements.
He was pondering these problems one evening in a house of call in the Strand, and the obstinacy with which the persons he so ardently desired to meet hung back gave the modest tankard before him an additional touch of bitter. As it happened, he was alone in his compartment, and, without thinking, he uttered aloud the burden of his meditations. "How bizarre it all is!" he said, "a man walking the pavement with the dread of a timid-looking young man with spectacles continually hovering before his eyes. And there was some tremendous feeling at work, I could swear to that." Quick as thought, before he had finished the sentence, a head popped round the barrier, and was withdrawn again; and while Dyson was wondering what this could mean, the door of the compartment was swung open, and a smooth, clean-shaven, arid smiling gentleman entered.
"You will excuse me, sir," he said politely, "for intruding on your thoughts, but you made a remark a minute ago."
"I did," said Dyson; "I have been puzzling over a foolish matter, and I thought aloud. As you heard what I said, and seem interested, perhaps you may be able to relieve my perplexity?"
124 THE THEEE IMPOSTOKS.
"Indeed, I scarcely know; it is an odd coinci" dence. One has to be cautious. I suppose, sir, that you would have no repulsion in assisting the ends of justice."
"Justice," replied Dyson, "is a term of such wide meaning, that I too feel doubtful about giving an answer. But tnis place is not altogether fit for such a discussion; perhaps you would come to my rooms?"
"You are very kind; my name is Burton, but I am sorry to say I have not a card with me. Do you live near here?"
"Within ten minutes' walk."
Mr. Burton took out his watch and seemed to be making a rapid calculation.
" I have a train to catch ," he said ; " but after all, it is a late one. So, if you don't mind, I think I will come with you. I am sure we should have a little talk together. We turn up here?"
The theatres were filling as they crossed the Strand, the street seemed alive with voices, and Dyson looked fondly about him. The glittering lines of gas-lamps, with here and there the blind- ing radiance of an electric light, the hansoms that flashed to and fro with ringing bells, the laden buses, and the eager hurrying east and west of the foot passengers, made his most enchanting picture; and the graceful spire of St. Mary le Strand, on the one hand, and the last flush of sunset on the other, were to him a cause of thanksgiving, as the gorse blossom to Linnaeus. Mr. Burton caught his look of fondness as they crossed the street.
INCIDENT OF THE PRIVATE BAK. 125
"I see you can find the picturesque in London," he said. " To me this great town is as I see it is to you, the study and the love of life. Yet how few there are that can pierce the veils of apparent monotony and meanness! I have read in a paper which is said to have the largest circulation in the world, a comparison between the aspects of London and Paris, a comparison which should be positively laureat, as the great masterpiece of fatuous stupidity. Conceive if you can a human being of ordinary in- telligence preferring the Boulevards to our London streets; imagine a man calling for the wholesale destruction of our most charming city, in order that the dull uniformity of that whited sepulchre called Paris should be reproduced here in London. Is it not positively incredible?"
"My dear sir," said Dyson, regarding Burton with a good deal of interest. " I agree most heartily with your opinions, but I really cannot share your wonder. Have you heard how much George Eliot received for 'Komola'? Do you know what the circulation of 'Robert Elsmere ' was? Do you read 'Tit Bits ' regularly? To me, on the contrary, it is constant matter both for wonder and thanksgiving that London was not boulevardized twenty years ago. I praise that exquisite jagged sky line that stands up against the pale greens and fading blues and flushing clouds of sunset, but I wonder even more than I praise. As for St. Mary le Strand, its preservation is a miracle, nothing more or less. A thing of exquisite beauty versus four buses abreast ! Keally, the conclusion is too obvious. Did n't you read the letter of the man who proposed that the
126 THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
whole mysterious system, the immemorial plan of computing Easter, should be abolished off-hand be- cause he does n;t like his son having his holidays as early as March 25th? But shall we be going on?"
They had lingered at the corner of a street on the north side of the Strand, enjoying the contrasts and the glamour of the scene. Dyson pointed the way with a gesture, and they strolled up the com- paratively deserted streets, slanting a little to the right, and thus arriving at Dyson's lodging on the verge of Bloomsbury. Mr. Burton took a comfort- able armchair by the open window, while Dyson lit the candles and produced the whiskey and soda and cigarettes.
"They tell me these cigarettes are very good," he said, "but I know nothing about it myself. I hold at last that there is only one tobacco, and that is shag. I suppose I could not tempt you to try a pipeful?"
Mr. Burton smilingly refused the offer, and picked out a cigarette from the box. When he had smoked it half through, he said with some hesitation: —
"It is really kind of you to have me here, Mr. Dyson; the fact is that the interests at issue are far too serious to be discussed in a bar, where, as you found for yourself, there may be listeners, voluntary or involuntary, on each side. I think the remark I heard you make was something about the oddity of an individual going about London in deadly fear of a young man with spectacles."
"Yes, that was it."
"Well, would you mind confiding to me the cir- cumstances that gave rise to the reflection? "
"Not in the least; it was like this." And he ran
INCIDENT OF THE PRIVATE BAR. 127
over in brief outline the adventure in Oxford Street, dwelling on the violence of Mr. Wilkins's gestures, but wholly suppressing the tale told in the cafe. " He told me he lived in constant terror of meeting this man; and I left him when I thought he was cool enough to look after himself," said Dyson, ending his narrative.
"Really," said Mr. Burton. "And you actually saw this mysterious person? "
"Yes."
"And could you describe him?"
"Well, he looked to me a youngish man, pale and nervous. He had small black side whiskers, and wore rather large spectacles."
"But this is simply marvellous! You astonish me. For I must tell you that my interest in the matter is this. I am not in the least in terror of meeting a dark young man with spectacles, but I shrewdly suspect a person of that description would much rather not meet me. And yet the account you give of the man tallies exactly. A nervous glance to right and left — is it not so? And, as you observed, he wears prominent spectacles, and has small black whiskers. There cannot be surely two people exactly identical — one a cause of terror, and the other, I should imagine, extremely anxious to get out of the way. But have you seen this man since?"
" No, I have not ; and I have been looking out for him pretty keenly. But, of course, he may have left London, and England too for the matter of that."
"Hardly, I think. Well, Mr. Dyson, it is only fair that I should explain my story, now that I
128 « THE THREE IMPOSTORS.
have listened to yours. I must tell you, then, that I am an agent for curiosities and precious things of all kinds. An odd employment, is n't it? Of course I was n't brought up to the business ; I gradually fell into it. I have always been fond of things queer and rare, and by the time I was twenty I had made half a dozen collections. It is not generally known how often farm laborers come upon rari- ties ; you would be astonished if I told you what I have seen turned up by the plough. I lived in the country in those days, and I used to buy anything the men on the farms brought me; and I had the queerest set of rubbish, as my friends called my collection. But that 's how I got the scent of the business, which means everything; and, later on, it struck me that I might very well turn my knowledge to account and add to my income. Since those early days I have been in most quarters of the world, and some very