He was very much interested, and most anxious to aid his unfortunate friend. His presence, somehow, was full of help and comfort. Maitland no longer felt alone and friendless, as he had done after his consultation of Bielby. Thus encouraged, he told, as clearly and fully as possible, the tale of the disappearance of Margaret, and of his entire failure even to come upon her traces or those of her companion.
"And you have heard nothing since your illness?"
"Nothing to any purpose. What do you advise me to do?"
"There is only one thing certain, to my mind," said Barton. "The seafaring man with whom Shields was drinking on the last night of his life, and the gentleman in the fur travelling-coat who sent the telegram in your name and took away Margaret from Miss Marlett"s, are in the same employment, or, by George, are probably the same person. Now, have you any kind of suspicion who they or he may be? or can you suggest any way of tracking him or them?"
"No," said Maitland; "my mind is a perfect blank on the subject. I never heard of the sailor till the woman at the _Hit or Miss_ mentioned him, the night the body was found. And I never heard of a friend of Shields", a friend who was a gentleman, till I went down to the school."
"Then all we can do at present is, _not_ to set the police at work--they would only prevent the man from showing--but to find out whether anyone answering to the description is "wanted" or is on their books, at Scotland Yard. Why are we not in Paris, where a man, whatever his social position might be, who was capable of that unusual form of crime, would certainly have his _dossier_? They order these things better in France."
"There is just one thing about him, at least about the man who was drinking with poor Shields on the night of his death. He was almost certainly tattooed with some marks or other. Indeed, I remember Mrs.
Gullick--that"s the landlady of the _Hit or Miss_--saying that Shields had been occupied in tattooing him. He did a good deal in that way for sailors."
"By Jove," said Barton, "if any fellow understands tattooing, and the cla.s.s of jail-birds who practise it, I do. It is a clew after a fashion; but, after all, many of them that go down to the sea in ships are tattooed, even when they are decent fellows; and besides, we seldom, in our stage of society, get a view of a fellow-creature with nothing on but these early decorative designs."
This was only too obvious, and rather damping to Maitland, who for a moment had been inclined to congratulate himself on his _flair_ as a detective.
CHAPTER VIII.--The Jaffa Oranges.
"Letting _I dare not_ wait upon _I would_."
Of all fairy gifts, surely the most desirable in prospect, and the most embarra.s.sing in practice, would be the magical telescope of Prince Ali, in the "Arabian Nights." With his gla.s.s, it will be remembered, he could see whatever was happening on whatever part of the earth he chose, and, though absent, was always able to behold the face of his beloved. How often would one give Aladdin"s Lamp, and Fortunatus" Purse, and the invisible Cap which was made of "a darkness that might be _felt_" to possess for one hour the Telescope of Fairyland!
Could Maitland and Barton have taken a peep through the tube, while they were pondering over the means of finding Margaret, their quest would have been aided, indeed, but they would scarcely have been rea.s.sured.
Yet there was nothing very awful, nor squalid, nor alarming, as they might have expected, antic.i.p.ated, and dreaded, in what the vision would have shown. Margaret was not in some foreign den of iniquity, nor, indeed, in a den at all.
The tube enchanted would have revealed to them Margaret, not very far off, not in Siberia nor Teheran, but simply in Victoria Square, Pimlico, S.W. There, in a bedroom, not more than commonly dingy, on the drawing-room floor, with the rattling old green Venetian blinds drawn down, Margaret would have been displayed. The testimony of a cloud of witnesses, in the form of phials and medical vessels, proved that she had for some time been an invalid. The pretty dusky red of health would have been seen to have faded from her cheeks, and the fun and daring had died out of her eyes. The cheeks were white and thin, the eyes were half-closed from sickness and fatigue, and Margaret, a while ago so ready of speech, did not even bestir herself to answer the question which a gentleman, who stood almost like a doctor, in an att.i.tude of respectful inquiry, was putting as to her health.
He was a tall gentleman, dark, with a ripe kind of face, and full, red, sensitive, sensual lips, not without a trace of humor. Near the door, in a protesting kind of att.i.tude, as if there against her will, was a remarkably handsome young person, attired plainly as a housekeeper, or upper-servant, The faces of some women appear to have been furnished by Nature, or informed by habit, with an aspect that seems to say (in fair members of the less educated cla.s.ses), "I won"t put up with none of them goings on." Such an expression this woman wears.
"I hope you feel better, my dear?" the dark gentleman asks again.
"She"s going on well enough," interrupted the woman with the beautiful dissatisfied face. "What with peaches and grapes from Covent Garden, and tonics as you might bathe in--"
"Heaven forbid!"
"She _ought_ to get well," the dissatisfied woman continued, as if the invalid were obstinately bent on remaining ill.
"I was not speaking, at the moment, to you, Mrs. Darling," said the dark gentleman, with mockery in his politeness, "but to the young lady whom I have entrusted to your charge."
"A pretty trust!" the woman replied, with a sniff
"Yes, as you kindly say, an extremely pretty trust. And now, Margaret, my dear--"--"
The fair woman walked to the window, and stared out of it with a trembling lip, and eyes that saw nothing.
"Now, Margaret, my dear, tell me for yourself, how do you feel?"
"You are very kind," answered the girl at last. "I am sure I am better.
I am not very strong yet. I hope I shall get up soon."
"Is there anything you would like? Perhaps you are tired of peaches and grapes; may I send you some oranges?"
"Oh, thank you; you are very good. I am often thirsty when I waken, or rather when I leave off dreaming. I seem to dream, rather than sleep, just now."
"Poor girl!" said the dark gentleman, in a pitying voice. "And what do you dream?"
"There seems to be a dreadful quiet, smooth, white place," said the girl, slowly, "where I am; and something I feel--something, I don"t know what--drives me out of it. I cannot rest in it; and then I find myself on a dark plain, and a great black horror, a kind of blackness falling in drifts, like black snow in a wind, sweeps softly over me, till I feel mixed in the blackness; and there is always some one watching me, and chasing me in the dark--some one I can"t see. Then I slide into the smooth, white, horrible place again, and feel I _must_ get away from it.
Oh, I don"t know which is worst! And they go and come all the while I"m asleep, I suppose."
"I am waiting for the doctor to look in again; but all _I_ can do is to get you some Jaffa oranges, nice large ones, myself. You will oblige me, Mrs. Darling" (he turned to the housekeeper), "by placing them in Miss Burnside"s room, and then, perhaps, she will find them refreshing when she wakes. Good-by for the moment, Margaret."
The fair woman said nothing, and the dark gentleman walked into the street, where a hansom cab waited for him. "Covent Garden," he cried to the cabman.
We have not for some time seen, or rather we have for some time made believe not to recognize, the Hon. Thomas Cranley, whose acquaintance (a very compromising one) we achieved early in this narrative.
Mr. Cranley, "with his own substantial private purpose sun-clear before him" (as Mr. Carlyle would have said, in apologizing for some more celebrated villain), had enticed Margaret from school. Nor had this been, to a person of his experience and resources, a feat of very great difficulty. When he had once learned, by the simplest and readiest means, the nature of Maitland"s telegram to Miss Marlett, his course had been dear. The telegram which followed Maitland"s, and in which Cranley used Maitland"s name, had entirely deceived Miss Marlett, as we have seen. By the most obvious ruses he had prevented Maitland from following his track to London. His housekeeper had entered the "engaged" carriage at Westbourne Park, and shared, as far as the terminus, the compartment previously occupied by himself and Margaret alone. Between Westbourne Park and Paddington he had packed the notable bearskin coat in his portmanteau. The consequence was, that at Paddington no one noticed a gentleman in a bearskin coat, travelling alone with a young lady. A gentleman in a light ulster, travelling with two ladies, by no means answered to the description Maitland gave in his examination of the porters. They, moreover, had paid but a divided attention to Maitland"s inquiries.
The success of Cranley"s device was secured by its elementary simplicity. A gentleman who, for any reason, wishes to obliterate his trail, does wisely to wear some very notable, conspicuous, unmistakable garb at one point of his progress. He then becomes, in the minds of most who see him, "the man in the bearskin coat," or "the man in the jack-boots," or "the man with the white hat." His ident.i.ty is practically merged in that of the coat, or the boots, or the hat; and when he slips out of them, he seems to leave his personality behind, or to pack it up in his portmanteau, or with his rugs. By acting on this principle (which only requires to be stated to win the a.s.sent of pure reason), Mr. Cranley had successfully lost himself and Margaret in London.
With Margaret his task had been less difficult than it looked. She recognized him as an acquaintance of her father"s, and he represented to her that he had been an officer of the man-of-war in which her father had served; that he had lately encountered her father, and pitied his poverty--in poor Shields, an irremediable condition. The father, so he declared, had spoken to him often and anxiously about Margaret, and with dislike and distrust about Maitland. According to Mr. Cranley, Shield"s chief desire in life had been to see Margaret entirely free from Maitland"s guardianship. But he had been conscious that to take the girl away from school would be harmful to her prospects. Finally, with his latest breath, so Mr. Cranley declared, he had commended Margaret to his old officer, and had implored him to abstract her from the charge of the Fellow of St Gatien"s.
Margaret, as we know, did not entertain a very lively kindness for Maitland, nor had she ever heard her father speak of that unlucky young man with the respect which his kindness, his academic rank, and his position in society deserved. It must be remembered that, concerning the manner of her father"s death, she had shrunk from asking questions. She knew it had been sudden; she inferred that it had not been reputable.
Often had she dreaded for him one of the accidents against which Providence does not invariably protect the drunkard. Now the accident had arrived, she was fain to be ignorant of the manner of it. Her new guardian, again, was obviously a gentleman; he treated her with perfect politeness and respect, and, from the evening of the day when she left school, she had been in the charge of that apparently correct chaperon, the handsome housekeeper with the disapproving countenance. Mr. Cranley had even given up to her his own rooms in Victoria Square, and had lodged elsewhere; his exact address Margaret did not know. The only really delicate point--Cranley"s a.s.sumption of the name of "Mr.
Lithgow"--he frankly confessed to her as soon as they were well out of the Dovecot. He represented that, for the fulfilment of her father"s last wish, the ruse of the telegram and the a.s.sumed name had been necessary, though highly repugnant to the feelings of an officer and a gentleman. Poor Margaret had seen nothing of gentlemen, except as philanthropists, and (as we know) philanthropists permit themselves a license and discretion not customary in common society.
Finally, even had the girl"s suspicions been awakened, her illness prevented her from too closely reviewing the situation. She was with her father"s friend, an older man by far, and therefore a more acceptable guardian than Maitland. She was fulfilling her father"s wish, and hoped soon to be put in the way of independence, and of earning her own livelihood; and independence was Margaret"s ideal.
Her father"s friend, her own protector--in that light she regarded Cranley, when she was well enough to think consecutively. There could be no more complete hallucination. Cranley was one of those egotists who do undoubtedly exist, but whose existence, when they are discovered, is a perpetual surprise even to the selfish race of men. In him the instinct of self-preservation (without which the race could not have endured for a week) had remained absolutely unmodified, as it is modified in the rest of us, by thousands of years of inherited social experience.
Cran-ley"s temper, in every juncture, was precisely that of the first human being who ever found himself and other human beings struggling in a flood for a floating log that will only support one of them.
Everything must give way to his desire; he had literally never denied himself anything that he dared taka As certainly as the stone, once tossed up, obeys the only law it knows, and falls back to earth, so surely Cranley would obtain what he desired (if it seemed safe), though a human life, or a human soul, stood between him and his purpose.
Now, Margaret stood, at this moment, between him and the aims on which his greed was desperately bent. It was, therefore, necessary that she should vanish; and to that end he had got her into his power. Cranley"s original idea had been the obvious one of transporting the girl to the Continent, where, under the pretence that a suitable situation of some kind had been found for her, he would so arrange that England should never see her more, and that her place among honest women should be lost forever. But there were difficulties in the way of this tempting plan.
For instance, the girl knew some French, and was no tame, unresisting fool; and then Margaret"s illness had occurred, and had caused delay, and given time for reflection.
"After all," he thought, as he lit his cigar and examined his mustache in the mirror (kindly provided for that purpose in well-appointed hansoms)--"after all it is only, the dead who tell no tales, and make no inconvenient claims."
For after turning over in his brain the various safe and easy ways of "removing" an inconvenient person, one devilish scheme had flashed across a not uninstructed intellect--a scheme which appeared open to the smallest number of objections.
"She shall take a turn for the worse," he thought; "and the doctor will be an uncommonly clever man, and particularly well read in criminal jurisprudence, if he sees anything suspicious in it."
Thus pondering, this astute miscreant stopped at Covent Garden, dismissed his cab, and purchased a basket of very fine Jaffa oranges.
He then hailed another cab, and drove with his parcel to the shop of an eminent firm of chemists, again dismissing his cab. In the shop he asked for a certain substance, which it may be as well not to name, and got what he wanted in a small phial, marked _poison_. Mr. Cranley then called a third cab, gave the direction of a surgical-instrument maker"s (also eminent), and amused his leisure during the drive in removing the label from the bottle. At the surgical-instrument maker"s he complained of neuralgia, and purchased a hypodermic syringe for injecting morphine or some such anodyne into his arm. a fourth cab took him back to the house in Victoria Square, where he let himself in with a key, entered the dining-room, and locked the door.
Nor was he satisfied with this precaution. After aimlessly moving chairs about for a few minutes, and prowling up and down the room, he paused and listened. What he heard induced him to stuff his pocket-handkerchief into the keyhole, and to lay the hearth-rug across the considerable c.h.i.n.k which, as is usual, admitted a healthy draught under the bottom of the door. Then the Honorable Mr. Cranley drew down the blinds, and unpacked his various purchases. He set them out on the table in order--the oranges, the phial, and the hypodermic syringe.