Mr Bazalgette’s Agent

by Leonard Merrick

  “I shall he delighted to place myself at your service, Mrs. Lea; I have any amount of leisure at present, hut of course I’ve been here rather a short while to act the cicerone with great effect!”

  “If you are sure I shall not he troubling you,” I said doubtfully, “you would really he assisting me very much!” and so it was settled.

  Later, when Dunstan and I discussed this unlooked-for turn of affairs we decided the chance encounter had after all been fortunate. Whatever distrust he might have he had evidently determined to put a hold front on it, and no matter how much he might he on his guard the intimacy was hound to afford me more opportunities of bringing my mission to a successful issue than the conduct of my investigations from a distance such as I had originally contemplated. On the whole then it was in no despondent frame of mind that I retired to my room at the close of my first day on the Diamond Fields.

  The next afternoon he came in to luncheon while I was there; as I had found out the night before our table was the same, and in the course of the meal he offered to procure me a ‘pass’ to inspect a mine.

  “You can go down, if yon like, Mrs. Lee,” he said, “but I would not advise it, the way wants knowing!”

  “Thank you,” I replied, “I think I’ll content myself with viewing the machinery on the top; I should not care to he whirled down the wires in one of those buckets I saw the men clinging to an hour or two ago!”

  Oh, yon wouldn’t be asked to do that,” he laughed; “there is a pathway, though it isn’t quite so level as the Brighton pier! Still yon will see quite enough up above to make your head ache, I can promise you; the ‘sorting’ is most interesting, that is the process in which they find the stones.”

  “Can I go with Dunstan?”

  “Certainly, I will try to get a pass for three; that may include me in the rôle of guide, philosopher, and friend?”

  The faint stress ho laid upon the last article of the inventory was slightly embarrassing, but I nodded a quick assent.

  “I should be ungrateful to say ‘no’; if you will come too, and explain, I shall naturally be pleased. Men always understand more of these things than women, and the glimpse I was able to obtain of it from the market showed me a ‘key’ was a necessary adjunct!”

  “Then as ‘key’ or ‘friend’ I am to make one of the party; very well, Mrs. Lea, I will hunt up all the diggers I have met, and endeavour to get the desired paper from somebody. This evening yon shall hear the result; in the meantime, au revoir!”

  I wish he had not spoken of being my friend; it makes me feel mean!

  * * * * *

  December 19th.

  During the last six days, ever since that expedition indeed, a thought has come to me which I have sufficient conscience to find distressing. Whatever doubts he may have had earlier, I do not believe the man suspects me now.

  Were I wise, this, so far from troubling me, should be a very reassuring idea, for, if a fact, it must greatly simplify my task. I know that, I keep telling myself so, but there is another side to the picture: to take advantage of his good faith is hardly a lady’s mode of action.

  He is a thief; he himself has betrayed confidence; more, he has broken the law! I want to remember it; I want to retain the knowledge in my memory, and not allow it to slip away from me for so much as a minute, because (it is an ignominious, puerile confession) I am beginning to regard myself as only one degree less vile!

  It is terribly silly; here is the fulfilment of those prospects I have painted in my most sanguine moods; I grasp the very chance I have looked forward to, and built upon; and now that all my hopes and prayers are answered I falter within a week, because, forsooth, it is not honourable!

  What honour had he? What scruples did he permit to come between him and his design? Then why should his punishment be retarded by such feelings as he cannot comprehend! He had income, position, and respect; all the things that make life worth living, and——; no, I am wrong, not all! There is one desideratum more, and sweeter: that something I have gone without since a dull October day; ah, how many years ago, when, an ill-dressed pale-faced girl, they took me aside at school, and said coldly:

  “Be very grateful to Heaven and to us, because we are going to keep you here out of charity; you have no longer a mother, she is dead!”

  But he may have had love too, as well as he had the rest. I see no cause why I should pity him; I am not going to suggest so false a sentiment! He is to suffer for his crime in prison, and, as for me, my course is mapped out: I am to be the medium to put the handcuffs round his wrists. All the reflection in the world cannot alter it.

  I must write my Report for the mail!

  CHAPTER XI.

  January 9th, 1888.

  “I CAN hardly believe you have been here a month, Mrs. Lea,” he said to me this morning; “it seems impossible!”

  “I suppose that is a compliment, seeing how much of your time out of that month you have spared to me,” I rejoined; “is it meant for one?”

  We were in the large apartment overlooking Stockdale Street, and I was standing half on the balcony, half on the rug, thinking how shamefully neglected this record of mine had been.

  “And yet,” he continued after a pause, “it appears much longer, too, since you and I met!”

  “Why, so it is,” I answered; “didn’t we say ‘how do you do’ in Lisbon more than as long ago again? Yours isn’t half a paradox! By-the-bye, that reminds me, I have never returned your property, often as I’ve promised it; I have brought it down to give to you now,—permit me, with many thanks!”

  “What, the handkerchief,—you are indeed conscientious!”

  “Honesty’s the best policy——”

  “ ‘In small things,’ as some infidel added!” he remarked, as he took it from my hand. “There’s a good deal of philosophy in that postscript, Mrs. Lea!”

  “Dangerous philosophy, I opine, when it leads to confusion between meum and tuum!”

  “I daresay,” he sighed; “I haven’t tested it! How is your book progressing?”

  “My book! Oh, the only composition I am engaged on, unless you except correspondence, has scarcely been touched since I arrived. I began it, meaning to write a portion every day, but weeks go by sometimes without my opening it; more good intentions broken, you see!”

  “The end of most good intentions! You’ve not shocked me, I’m to a certain extent a fatalist, a big word which only means I am able to perceive destiny is stronger than human beings! You won’t dispute that?”

  “I am not going to, at any rate, but don’t construe silence into consent; that one is a mistake like the majority of proverbs!”

  “Though you just had recourse to them yourself!”

  “The privileged inconsistency of my sex!”

  “Play something?” lie requested abruptly, going across to the piano.

  “I don’t care to, here,” I replied; “you saw how the people stared the first evening; we are not on the continent!”

  “But there is no one in now; the few women there are have gone out, and none of the men will he back till tiffin!”

  “I’d sooner you did not ask me, I don’t want to make myself conspicuous!”

  “As you please!” he responded, with a shrug of the shoulders.

  I took the seat he had placed for me, and without premeditation strayed into the most exquisite of all Chopin’s nocturnes, the second; that melody wherein the mournful dissatisfaction which is its keynote thrice rises in the treble until the culminating D-flat comes like a veritable sob of pain, and, in playing, I was thinking of this man’s wasted life. The advantages he had flung away ceased to double his offence, they made the wreck more pitiable; I thought what he might have been under better influences, and what he was in fact, an exile and a fugitive.

  Then by a swift transition only explicable by the dominion self wields over our holiest moods, and by no association of ideas, my fancy sped back to Seville; I was remembering how from my window I had wa
tched a beggar over there, and envied him. He was blind, he was in rags, and yet I envied him, for a little child would lead him to his post in early morning, and put up her baby lips to kiss him when she left. One day the beggar did not come. He was dead, Then the child would come alone, and cry upon the step where he had been used to sit. “Who would cry for me if I were dead?” I had murmured. “What voice would falter as it spoke my name?—How silly, not one would even speak it!”

  For the last time came that wail mounting in crescendo, and I wondered vaguely if I had been given a brother whether all would have been still the same. I yearned for the clasp of this unborn brother’s arms to help and protect me; to feel I had someone to say to me “This is right, and that is wrong;” if I had had a brother I might have been a softer woman.

  “Thank you,” said my companion earnestly, “thank you very much!” My fingers rested on the final chord.

  For a moment I had a wild impulse to tell him what I was, and bid him hate me; only the recollection of the trust I should be violating held me back.

  “It is beautiful, that nocturne, is it not?”

  “Yes,” he assented, “like much of Chopin’s music, it says for us all we feel but do not know how to say ourselves!”

  “It moved you like that too?” I exclaimed. “I felt whilst you were at the piano, Mrs. Lea, that I was unutterably base, and that I might be superlatively good; contradictory emotions, but simultaneous and sincere!”

  “And also evanescent! It is the same with all of us; we see “Jo” at the theatre, and give half-a-crown to the first vagabond we notice outside the doors, hut the next day we are ourselves again, and pass the mother with six children selling grounsel without remorse. Art is very potent, hut human nature is much more mean!”

  “Yet surely there are circumstances under which one may become better, don’t you think so?”

  “I am twenty-eight years old, Mr. Vane, but unhappily I haven’t found them!”

  “You wrong yourself sometimes,” he said; “you do indeed, nature never intended you for a cynic!”

  “Unfortunately,” I answered rising, “it is not nature’s intention which moulds us, but the world’s lesson. There, pray don’t let us go in for drawing-room metaphysics, they generally mean egotism with a long name!”

  “I want to be egotistical,” he proceeded calmly; “don’t go yet, I want to talk to you about myself, may I? I do not know why I should inflict my private affairs on you, I’m not often taken communicative, upon my word, but I suppose the desire for sympathy comes to most men sometimes, and it certainly comes to me when I’m with you!”

  “I am much too selfish a, person to make an ideal confidante,” I rejoined awkwardly; “I warn you beforehand!”

  “But I won’t be warned; and if you were half as bitter as you pretend, you would attract me so, I could never admire a feminine edition of myself! I want advice, I’ve made an awful mess of my life, that’s a fact; to put it in its mildest form, I’ve been a fool. There are some things one can’t speak of without glossing over to a woman, more especially a woman whose opinion one values; hut a short while hack I, in an unexpected fashion, came into a lot of money——”

  “A legacy?” I faltered.

  “Eh? Oh, yes, a legacy; well, I ran through the whole heap in a few months, played general ducks and drakes with it till I found myself almost broke, and then, in the manner of the bad little boy who went fishing on Sunday, and seasonably repented when he fell in the pool, I determined to cut the whole game, the cards, and the turf, and the tables, turn over a new leaf, and begin afresh. Now do you believe a man who has come a cropper can blot the page out, and make amends for—for a terrible folly? “

  What was I to say! His gaze pained me, and the sunshine hurt my eyes; what could I say that would not be a mockery?

  “Do you think it is too late?”

  “They say it is never too late for good resolutions,” I replied harshly; “I hope for all our sakes the axiom may be true!”

  “I have at least a chance of doing something,” he resumed; “one of the mining companies is to be let; rich ground, by all accounts, and only vacant through a heavy fall of reef which the present lessees can’t afford to haul out. There’s a possibility of my going into it in partnership with a fellow who has all the business at his fingers’ ends; if our tender should be accepted, Mrs. Lea, I may be a rich man again!”

  “You have made an offer for the lease?”

  “Yes,” he responded cheerfully. “I ought to have enough for my share of the starting capital, and if I should require more, I hope to be able to raise it!”

  The gong sounded as he imparted this piece of information, and we went down. All the progress I have made in the past three weeks is comprised in the interview just chronicled. I lay my head on the pillow with the knowledge of having gained the confidence of the man I am going to ruin, and of course I am glad and proud. Dunstan wearies me with questions and prognostications of success, her cruel satisfaction makes it a relief to be alone.

  I have not seen him since two o’clock. I wish that I might never see him any more!

  * * * * *

  January 16th.

  His tender was the highest, and he is already hard at work; we never meet in the daytime now, excepting for a few minutes at tiffin, when he comes in hot and dusty, and looking, oh, so dreadfully tired. The weather is growing insupportable, it was 110° in the shade to-day.

  They say there is a terrible illness, to which Europeans are particularly liable during their first summer here, known as ‘Camp fever,’ and that it is often contracted by too reckless exposure to the sun. During the last four days I have missed a woman, who used to sit at the table opposite to mine; this morning I inquired the reason of her absence, they said “Camp fever!” This evening I asked if she was better; they answered she was dead.

  What if he should fall ill in this fearful place without a friend to nurse him! What if, like that poor woman,—

  Oh, why did I not starve with my self-respect before I became a spy! What is it to me he is a scoundrel, does his criminality lessen my degradation? Who was the author of the precept, There can be no friendship without respect? False every word of it! For if it is not friendship I have for this man what is it? why am I trembling at that horrid thought which crossed my mind? Why do I feel I would gladly take his guilt upon my shoulders, work for him, suffer for him, so that he, my friend, should be innocent and free?

  Beautiful sentiment, proverbial and profound philosophy culled from our first French grammar, I bow before your wisdom:

  “L’amitié est une belle fleur dont l’estime est la tige!”

  CHAPTER XII.

  January 23rd.

  I HAVE had a frightful dream, a dream that makes my bed an object of terror; I could not go to sleep again if I tried.

  Under these circumstances I have lighted the lamp, and prepared myself to wait for morning; it is not quite four a.m., and I want to write this dream of mine down, just as all the incidents occurred while they are still frightening me in recollection by their semblance of reality.

  I was in a wide, strange road; I knew it was the Du-Toits-Pan-road, for I had been in it often, and yet it was unfamiliar. The light was dim, I think it must have been dawn, since it was the same light as is breaking over the house-tops now. There were two men with me, and I was leading them. They said, “Is this the way?” and I answered “Yes, this is the way; you must follow me!” My feet sank deep in dust; it hampered my movements, and made each step an effort. It seemed to me I must be very ill. I could see nothing but dust in front of me, excepting a low fringe of stunted bushes far away. The murmured “We shall be late!” I shook my head. I said, “We are there!”

  We had come to a great building, and we entered it; we passed silently through long passages lined with doors until we came to one different from the rest, a narrow door shaped like a coffin-lid, and studded with nails; this we pushed open, and walked inside.

  W
ithin the room the sunshine was streaming hotly through a window, and two arms protruding from a heap upon the floor extended right across the threshold. We knew’ this heap was a human body lying beneath the coverlet as it had rolled from the bed in pain. The air was black with flies, and they were crawling over the dead hands.

  My companions turned to me: “Where have you brought us?” they asked. I cried, “My mission has finished in a hospital ward!”

  Then I was kneeling on the ground, I drew the blanket from the face; it was the face of the man I had hunted. Sight came back to the eyeballs that stared up at me; the white lips moved. They whispered, “My sin has parted us! Miriam, my love, have mercy!” I said, “lam going to die with you because I cannot save you. Hold me tight!” The features of the two men I had guided appeared blurred by distance; I saw myself weeping beside his corpse below, and yet it was not I, for I was floating towards another life bearing him with me, as I had known him in the flesh, breathing and speaking to me. As we ascended nearer to the heavens unclosing to receive us, a vast impenetrable mist sailed between me and the world, sinking earthward as we rose. Still I strained him to me, and we clung together. Denser grew that cloud, and I marvelled what it might he; voices answered, “It is the sins of which one soul is purged!” At the same instant my clasp relaxed, my arms dropped asunder, and the man I loved fell downward beyond my reach, beyond my sight, down—down—down through Space, only his scream re-echoed through the Universe, and I awoke!

  * * * * *

  January 25th.

  It was two o’clock, the mining whistles had sounded the hour for recommencing work, and I was sitting alone in the hotel thinking. The impression of that dream was yet upon me; it had haunted me for forty-eight hours with miserable persistency.

  I knew now, as absolutely as I had known in the vision, that I loved! that the man I was deceiving had become to me far dearer than my own existence. I knew it was no mere liking or regard for him which made me shudder in the presence of my accomplice, and shrink ashamed under her gaze, but the unadmitted consciousness of a passion that disgraced me. I could not dupe myself; I did not try. If it was shame to care for him it was also sweet! I longed again for the fancied touch of his embrace about my neck, to hear him saying as I had heard him in imagination, “Miriam, my love!” and yet I remembered I must never listen!