You must have been in it the whole lot of you or you wouldn"t have been here!
"But, perhaps," he went on, with a sudden change of tone, "you would rather tell the police when they come; there must be some reason, I suppose, for your bringing that woman, a common prost.i.tute, into my house, and into the presence of my wife."
"Oh, you fool, you hypocrite, you have asked for the punishment of your sin, and you shall have it!"
Dora had taken a couple of strides towards him, and faced him--cheeks blazing, and eyes flaming.
"Prost.i.tute! yes, I was; but how do _you_ know it? Because you lived in the same house with me. Yes, up to the very week of your wedding, with me and that man"s daughter. You have asked why he was killed. He was killed righteously, because he wasn"t fit to live. No, you didn"t know that then, and so far you are innocent; but you are guilty of a crime nearly as great. Your father stole Carol"s mother from her husband; you stole your wife from the man she loved and would have married but for you.
"It was _you_ who made Vane Maxwell drunk that morning at Oxford, in the hope of wrecking his career. You didn"t do that, but you gained your end all the same, and your sin is just as great. How do I know this--how do _we_ know it? I will tell you. Carol Vane, Mr. Maxwell"s sister, _and yours_, went to your wedding. Carol recognised him as her father. Look, there is his photograph taken with her, when Carol was ten years old. If you don"t believe that, look at his left arm, and you will find two spear stabs on it, and if that is not enough, I can bring police evidence from France to prove that he committed the crime for which he has died, and now, you--son of a seducer, libertine and thief of another man"s love--you have got your answer and your punishment!"
Dora"s words, spoken in a moment of rare, but ungovernable pa.s.sion, had leaped from her lips in such a fast and furious torrent of denunciation, that before the first few moments of the horror she had caused were pa.s.sed, she had done.
Enid heard her to the end, her voice sounding ever farther and farther away, until at last it died out into a faint hum and then a silence.
Vane ran to her, and caught her just as she was swaying before she fell, and carried her to a sofa. It was the first time he had held her in his arms since he had had a lover"s right to do so, and all the man-soul in him rose in a desperate revolt of love and pity against the coldly calculating villainy of the man who had used the vilest of means to rob him of his love.
The moment he had laid her on the sofa, Dora was at her side, loosening the high collar of her dress and rubbing her hands. Garthorne, crushed into silence by the terrible vehemence of Dora"s accusation, had dropped into an armchair close by his father"s body. Sir Arthur, half-dazed with the horror of it all, threw open the door with a vague idea of getting into the fresh air out of that room of death. As he did so, the hall door opened, and an Inspector of Police followed by two constables and a gentleman in plain clothes entered. The sight of the uniformed incarnation of the Law brought him back instantly to the realities of the situation. The Inspector touched his cap, and said, briefly, and with official precision:
"Good morning, Sir Arthur. This is Dr. Saunders, the Coroner. I met him on my way up from the village, and asked him to come with me. Very dreadful case, Sir; but I hope the bodies have not been disturbed?"
"Oh, no," said Sir Arthur, "they have not been touched, but Mrs.
Garthorne is lying in the same room in a faint. I suppose we may take her out before you make your examination?"
"Why, certainly, Sir Arthur," said the Coroner. "Of course, we will take your word for that. But I believe Mr. Reginald Garthorne is at the Abbey, is he not?"
"Yes," replied Sir Arthur, in a changed tone, "he is there, in the library, but of course--well, I mean--what has happened has affected him terribly, and I don"t think he will be able to give you very much a.s.sistance at present. In fact, he is almost in a state of collapse himself."
"That is only natural, under the very painful circ.u.mstances," said the Inspector, "please don"t put him about at all, Sir Arthur. The last thing we should wish would be to put the family to any inconvenience or unpleasantness, and I am sure Dr. Saunders will arrange that the inquest will be as private and quiet as possible."
And so it was, but, somehow, the ghastly truth of it all leaked out, and for a week after the inquest the horrible story of Sir Reginald"s crime and its consequences made sport of the daintiest kind for the readers of the gutter rags, those microbes of journalism, which, like those of cancer and consumption, can only live on the corruption or decay of the body-corporate of Society.
Only one name and one fact never came out, and that was due to Ernest Reed"s uncompromising declaration that he would shoot any man who said anything in print about the ident.i.ty of Carol Vane with the daughter of Sir Reginald Garthorne"s victim. He worked by telegraph and otherwise for twenty-four hours on end, and the result was that his brother pressmen all over the country, being mostly gentlemen, recognised the chivalry of his attempt, and so chivalrously suppressed that part of the truth. And so effectually was it suppressed, that it was not until about a year afterwards that Mr. Ernest Reed found a rather difficult matrimonial puzzle solved for him by the receipt of Mr. Cecil Rayburn"s cheque for a thousand pounds.
EPILOGUE.
A little more than a year had pa.s.sed since the inquest on Sir Reginald and Koda Bux. For Vane Maxwell, the Missionary to Midas, as every one now called him, it had been a continued series of tribulations and triumphs. From Land"s End to John o" Groats, and from Cork Harbour to Aberdeen he had preached the Gospel that he had found in the Sermon on the Mount. He had, in truth, proved himself to be the Savonarola of the twentieth century, not only in words, but also in the effects of his teaching.
He had asked tens and hundreds of thousands of professing Christians, just as he had asked the congregation of St. Chrysostom, to choose honestly between their creed and their wealth, to be honest, as he had said then, with themselves or with G.o.d; to choose openly and in the face of all men between the service of G.o.d and of Mammon. And his appeal had been answered throughout the length and breadth of the land.
Never since the days of John Wesley had there been such a re-awakening of religious, really religious, feeling in the country. Just as the rich Italians brought their treasures of gold and silver and jewels and heaped them up under the pulpit of Savonarola in the market-places, so hundreds of men and women of every social degree recognised the plain fact that they could not be at the same time honestly rich and honestly Christians, and so, instead of material treasure, they had sent their cheques to Vane.
Before the year was over he found himself nominally the richest man in the United Kingdom. He had more than five millions sterling at his absolute disposal, almost countless thousands of pounds given up for conscience" sake because he had said that honest Christians could not own them; and he and Father Philip, Father Baldwin and Ernshaw, having given many hours and days of anxious consideration to the very pressing question as to which was the best way of disposing of this suddenly, and, as they all confessed, unexpectedly acquired wealth, decided to devote it to the extirpation, so far as was possible in England, of that Cancer in Christianity which Christians of the canting sort call the Social Evil.
As Jesus of Nazareth had said to the woman taken in adultery, "Go thou and sin no more!" so the Missionary and his helpers said:
"You have sinned more through necessity than choice, and the Society which denies you redemption is a greater sinner than you, since it drives you into deeper sin. There is no hope for you here. Civilization has no place for you, save the streets or the "homes," which are, if anything, more degrading than the streets.
"Those who are willing to save themselves we will save so far as earthly power can help you. We will give you homes where you will not be known, where, perhaps, you may begin to lead a new life, where it may be that you will become wives and mothers, as good as those who now, when they pa.s.s you in the street, draw their skirts aside fearing lest they should touch yours. And, if not that, at least we will save you from the horrible necessity of keeping alive, by living a life of degradation."
The foregoing paragraphs are, to all intents and purposes, a precis of a charter of release to the inhabitants of the twentieth century Christian Inferno which was drawn up by Dora Russell the day before she yielded to Ernshaw"s year-long wooing, and consented to be his helpmeet as well as his helper.
It was scattered broadcast in hundreds of thousands all over the country. Storms of protest burst forth from all the citadels of orthodoxy and respectability. It seemed monstrous that these women, who had so far defied all the efforts of official Christianity to redeem them, should be bribed--as many put it--bribed back into the way of virtue, if that were possible, with the millions which had been coaxed out of the pockets of sentimental Christians by this Mad Missionary of Mayfair--as one of the smartest of Society journals had named him.
But, for all that, the Mad Missionary said very quietly to Ernshaw a few hours before he intended to marry him to Dora:
"These good Christians, as they think themselves, are wofully wrong. It seems absolutely impossible to get them to see this matter in its proper perspective. They can"t or won"t see that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is one of absolute necessity--the choice between that and misery and starvation. They don"t see that this accursed commercial system of ours condemns thousands of girls----"
"Yes," interrupted Dora, "I know what you are going to say. I was a shop-girl myself once, a slave, a machine that was not allowed to have a will or even a soul of its own, and I----"
Before she could go on, the door of the Den at Warwick Gardens--where the conversation had taken place--opened, and Sir Arthur came in with some letters in his hands.
"I just met the postman on the doorstep," he said, "and he gave me these.
"Here"s one for you, Vane. There"s one for me, and one for Miss Russell--almost the last time I shall call you that, Miss Dora, eh?"
Vane tore his envelope open first. As he unfolded a sheet of note-paper, a cheque dropped out. The letter was in Carol"s handwriting. His eye ran over the first few lines, and he said:
"Good news! Rayburn and Carol are coming home next week and bringing a fine boy with them--at least, that is what the fond mother says--and--eh?--Rayburn has made another half million out there, and, just look, Ernshaw--yes, it is--a cheque for a hundred thousand pounds, to be used, as she says here in the postscript, "as before.""
"Oh, I"m so glad," exclaimed Dora, as she was opening her own envelope.
"Fancy having Carol back again. Mark, I won"t marry you till she comes.
You must put everything off. I won"t hear of it and--oh--look!" she went on, after a little pause, "Sir Arthur, read that, please. Isn"t it awful?"
"The mills of G.o.d grind slowly but they grind exceeding small," said Sir Arthur when he had looked over the sheet of note-paper. "Shall I read it, Miss Russell?"
Dora nodded, and he read aloud:
"I have just heard that my husband, whom, as you know, I have not seen since that terrible day at the Abbey, has died in a fit of delirium tremens. The lawyers tell me that everything will be mine. If so, Garthorne Abbey shall go back to the Church if Vane will take it, and if you will let me come and help you in your work."
"Thank G.o.d!" said Sir Arthur, as he gave the letter back, "not for his death, for that was, after all that we have heard, inevitable; but for what Enid has done. Vane, she is your latest and, perhaps, after all, your worthiest convert. And now, what"s this?"
He tore open his own envelope, which was addressed in the handwriting of one of his solicitor"s clerks. The letter was very brief and formal, but before he had read it through his face turned grey under the bronze of his skin. He pa.s.sed it over to Vane, and left the room without a word.
Vane looked at the few formal lines, and, as he folded the letter up with trembling fingers, he said almost in a whisper:
"The tragedy is over. My mother is dead."
THE END.