He paused a moment, his head leaned down on his hands, which held on to the bars. I did not speak. His allusion to the ‘tricky business’ he had surprised the girl over was haunting my mind. How did it consort with my latent suspicion of a mystery somewhere?
‘Hugh,’ I said presently, ‘you won’t tell me what she was doing when you first—?’
‘No, I won’t,’ he interrupted me bluntly. ‘Think what she became to me, and allow me a little decency. I’ve told you all that’s necessary—more than I had ever intended to tell you when I promised you my confidence. I’m sorry for that, Viv. God knows if I had spoken to you at first it might have altered things. But I couldn’t make up my mind while a chance existed—or I thought it did. She put me out of my last conceit that day, swearing she was going to expose the whole story. It was all true that I said. She may have been waiting there on the chance of my passing: I swear I didn’t know it. We had our few words, and I gave my promise and passed on. The evidence about the shot was a black lie. I can say no more than that.’
I give his words, and leave them at that, making no comment and drawing no conclusions. If his admission as to his first emotion on learning of his release might repel some people, I can only plead that one man’s psychology, like one man’s meat, may be impossible of digestion by another. I found it, I confess, hard to stomach myself; but then I had never been a spoilt and wayward only son.
We talked some little time longer on another matter, which had indeed been the main object of my visit—the nature of, and Counsel for, his defence. I had undertaken, at Sir Calvin’s instance, to go to London and interview his lawyers on the subject, thus sparing the father the bitter trial of a preliminary explanation, and I told Hugo of my intention.
‘What a good fellow you are, Viv,’ he said fondly. ‘I don’t deserve that you should take all this trouble, about me.’
‘If I can only appear to justify my own indecent persistence in remaining on to help,’ I said stiffly, ‘I shall feel satisfied.’
I could not forbear the little thrust: that wounding remark of his had never ceased to rankle in me.
‘Well, I asked for it,’ he said, with a flushed smile. ‘But don’t nurse a grudge any longer. I was hardly accountable for what I said in those days: a man hardly is, you know, when he’s on the rack.’
‘O! I forgive you,’ I answered. ‘There’s a virtue sometimes in pretending to a thick skin—’ and we parted on good terms.
My journey to London was arranged for the morrow after the interview. I had one of my passages with Audrey before going. I don’t know what particular prejudice it was the girl cherished against me, but she would never let us be friends. I saw scarcely anything of her in these days, and when we did meet she would hardly speak to me. I could have wished even to propitiate her, because it was plain enough to me how the poor thing was suffering. Her pride and her affections—both of which, I think, were really deep-seated—were cruelly involved in the disgrace befallen them. They found some little compensation, perhaps, in the improved relations established between her father and herself. Circumstances had brought these two into closer and more sympathetic kinship; it was as if they had discovered between them a father and a daughter; and so far poor Hugo’s catastrophe had wrought good. But still the girl’s loneliness of heart was an evident thing. Pathetically grateful as she might be for the change in her father’s attitude towards her, she could never get nearer to that despotic nature than its own limitations would permit.
‘You are pining for your Baron, I suppose,’ I said on this day, goaded at last to speak by her insufferable manner towards me. The taunt was effective, at least, in opening her mouth.
‘You are always hinting unpleasant things about the Baron, Mr Bickerdike,’ she answered, turning sharply on me. ‘Don’t you think it a little mean to be continually slandering him in that underhand way?’
I saw it was still to be battle, and prepared my guard.
‘That is your perverse way of looking at it, Audrey,’ I answered quietly. ‘From my point of view, it is just trying to help my friends.’
‘By maligning them to their enemies?’ she answered. ‘I suppose that was why you confided to Sergeant Ridgway all you knew about Hugh’s affairs?’
It gave me a certain shock. I knew that she had read a full report of the proceedings, but not that she, or anyone, had drawn such a cruel conclusion from it.
‘Confided, is the word, Audrey,’ I answered, with difficulty levelling my voice. ‘I can’t be held responsible for that breach of trust. Yes, thank you for that smile; but I know what was in my heart, and it was to help Hugh over a difficult place I foresaw for him. My weakness was in thinking other men as honourable as myself. But, anyhow, your stab is rather misplaced, since I wasn’t “maligning”, as you say, my friends to their enemies, but the other way about, as I see it.’
‘Well, don’t see it,’ she said insolently. ‘Perhaps—just consider it as possible—I may happen to know more about the Baron than you do.’
‘O! I dare say he’s been yarning to you,’ I answered, ‘and quite plausibly enough to a credulous listener. But, if I were you, I wouldn’t attach too much importance to what he tells you about himself. I’ll say no more as to my own suspicions, though events have not modified them, I can assure you; but I will say that regard for your brother should at least incline you to go warily in a matter which may have a very strong bearing on his interests.’
She stood conning me a moment or two in silence.
‘Please to be explicit,’ she said then. ‘Do you mean that you believe the Baron to be the real criminal?’
I positively jumped.
‘Good Heavens!’ I cried. ‘Don’t make me responsible for such wild statements. I mean only that, in the face of your brother’s awful situation, you should be scrupulously careful to do nothing which might seem to impair the efforts of those who are working to throw new light on it. I don’t say the Baron is the guilty one, but it is possible your brother is not.’
‘Is that all?’ she cried. She stepped right up to me, so that our faces were near touching. ‘Mr Vivian Bickerdike,’ she said, ‘Hugh did not commit that murder. I tell you, in case you do not know.’
‘I never said he did,’ I answered, involuntarily backing a little, her eyes were so pugnacious. ‘How you persist in misreading me! I only want to be prepared against all contingencies.’
‘Amongst which, I suppose, is the Baron’s wicked attempt to exculpate himself to me, by encouraging my suspicions against Hughie?’ She laughed, with a sort of defiant sob in her voice. ‘I’ll tell you what I truly think: that he is a better friend to my brother than you are; and I hope he’ll come back soon; and, when he does, I shall go on listening to and believing in him, as I do think I believe in no one else. And in the meantime I’ll tell you this for your comfort: he is really English, and really the Baron Le Sage. He takes his title from an estate in the Cevennes, which was left him by a maternal uncle; and he is very rich, and I dare say very eccentric in wanting to do good with his money; and that is enough for the present.’
‘And he plays chess for half-crowns and steals private papers!’ I cried to myself scornfully, as she turned and left me.
Poor foolish creature. It was no good my trying to convince her, and I gave up the attempt then and there.
CHAPTER XVII
AND AUDREY
AUDREY had been starting for a walk when detained by the interview recorded in the last chapter. She left it burning with indignation and passionate resentment. That this man could call himself a friend of Hughie, and conceive for one moment the possibility of his guilt! He pretended to be his intimate, and did not even know him. How she hated such Laodicean allies! And that he should dare to try to involve her in his doubts and half concessions! It was infamous. It had needed all her sense of the confidence her father placed in him, and of the authority to act for him which he had delegated to him, to stop her from saying something so cuttingly
rude that even he could not have consented to swallow the insult and remain on.
She did Mr Bickerdike, as we know, a sad injustice. The truth was, one suspects, that in all this business of his friend’s exoneration the unhappy gentleman was flying in the face of his own conscience, and doing it for pure loyalty’s sake. He could not quite bring himself to argue against appearances in the Justice’s sense; but he hoped, and he tried to take a rosy view of his own hopes. It was not to be expected of him, or of his disposition, that he should feel or express that blind and incorrigible staunchness to an ideal natural in a devoted blood-relation; yet it should be counted to him that he was staunch too, and on behalf of a cause which in his heart he mistrusted. Perhaps his suspicions anent the Baron were conceived more in a desperate attempt to discover a way out for his friend, than in any spirit of strong belief in their justification. But Audrey was prejudiced against him, and the prejudices of young people are like their loves, unreasoning and devastating.
She was very miserable, poor girl—proud, friendless, solitary. Essentially companionable by nature, the social restrictions of her state, man-administered, had deprived her of all warm intimacies among her own sex. She was not allowed to know those she would have liked to know; the few selected for her acquaintance she detested. There was none to whom she could appeal for understanding or sympathy. Repellent to them all in her pride, was it likely they would spare her in her humiliation? The very thought made her hold her head high, and filled her heart with a hard defiance. Nobody cared, nobody believed but herself and her father. Poor Hughie, to be so admired and courted in prosperity, so slandered and abandoned in adversity! Never mind; the truth would be known presently, and then the humiliation would be theirs who had unwittingly betrayed their own abject natures.
She crossed the high road, and, entering the thickets beyond, proceeded in a direction almost due west. That way lay the least association with all the squalid events of the past few weeks, and she knew that if she pushed on over the boundaries of Wildshott, she would come presently to a place of quiet woods and streams and easeful solitudes. She wanted to avoid any possibility of Contact with her fellow-creatures, and to be alone. It was a glowing September day, when everything, save her own unquiet heart, seemed resolved into an eternal serenity of peace and happiness never again to be broken. The coney had lain down with the fox and the stoat; the ageing bracken had renewed its youth in a sparkling vesture of diamond-mist; the birds were singing as if a dream-spring had surprised them in the very thought of hibernating. Presently, going among trees, Audrey came out on the lip of a little shelving dingle, at whose foot ran a full bountiful stream watering a wooded valley. And at once she paused, because the figure of a small sturdy boy was visible below her, busy about a spot where a tiny fall plunged frothing and merry-making into a pool which it tried to brim and could not. She paused, watching the figure; and suddenly, driven by some inexplicable impulse, she was going quickly down the slope to speak to it. It was a revulsion of feeling, a sob for a voice in the wilderness, a cry to give herself just one more chance before she flung away the world and took loneliness for her eternal doom.
The boy, hearing her coming, lifted his head, then rose to his feet. He had been engaged over a fly rod, which he held in his hand.
‘Mornin’, Miss,’ he said, grinning and saluting.
‘Are you fishing, Jacob?’
‘Me and the master, miss. He’ll be back in a minute. He’n been whipping the stream up-ways.’
Her lip curled, ever so slightly. There might be better occupation than fishing for a man who cared.
‘He’s thinking,’ said Jake.
‘Thinking!’ she echoed scornfully.
‘Yes’m. He says to me, he says, “Jacob, fishing helps a man to think; and what d’you suppose I’ve been thinking about, Jacob?”’
‘Well?’
‘“Why, who it was as killed Annie Evans,”’ he says. The boy looked up shyly. ‘We knows anyhow as it weren’t Master Hugo, Miss.’
‘Do you? Did he say that, Jacob?’ She spoke softly, with a wonderful new glow about her heart.
‘Yes’m,’ said the boy. ‘He did that. You should ha’ heard him yesterday giving Squire Redwood the lie. We was hunting otter, Miss, and was on to his spraints, when Squire said something bad about Master Hugo as caught Sir Francis’s ear. He went up to him, he did, and he told him he’d lay his good ash-spear across his shoulders unless he withdrew the expression.’
‘Redwood! That great powerful bully!’ cried Miss Kennett.
‘Yes’m. And Squire looked that frit, it might ha’ been a boggle had sudden come to life and faced him. But he did what he was told, and saved his shoulders.’
‘He did, he did?’ She put her hands up to her throat a moment, as if to strangle the emotion that would not be suppressed, and in the act heard his footstep and turned.
He came with wonder and pleasure in his face.
‘Audrey!’ he exclaimed; ‘what good luck has brought you here?’
‘I don’t know, Frank,’ she answered a little wildly; ‘but it is good luck, and I thank it. Why do you, who hate hunting, hunt otters, sir?’
‘Because they kill my fish,’ he replied promptly.
‘And so spoil your thinking, I suppose,’ she said.
He seemed to understand in a moment, and his face flushed.
‘Jake has been t-talking, has he?’ he said.’ Jake, I’m ashamed of you.’
‘And did Redwood save his big shoulders?’ she asked.
‘Jake!’ cried his master reproachfully.
She laughed and sobbed together.
‘Frank, will you leave your things here, and come a little way with me, please?’
‘O, Audrey! You know—not only a little way, if it could be.’
They walked together along the green bank of the stream, from sunlight into luminous shadow, and forth again, parting the branches sometimes, always with the water, like a merry child, running and talking beside them. Suddenly she stopped, and turned upon him.
‘If it could be,’ she said, repeating his words: ‘that is to say, if I had not a murderer for a brother.’
He cried out: ‘Good God! What do you mean? Hugh is not a murderer!’
‘You declare it—in spite of all, Frank?’
‘All what? I know him, and that’s enough.’
‘For me, for me, yes, and for you! O, Frank!’—she could not keep them back; they came irresistibly, and rolled down her cheeks—‘you don’t know what you have done, what you have lifted from my heart! And I said you were not a man—like him. O, forgive me, Frank dear!’
‘Hush!’ he said. He took her arm and tucked it close and comfortable under his, and led her on. ‘I am not, if it comes to that,’ he said.
‘You don’t mean that unkindly? No, you never would, of course. But I can be glad to think it now—glad that you are not. He is not good, Frank. I should hate him for what he has done—I can say it to you now—if he were not suffering so dreadfully for what he has not done.’
‘I know, Audrey. Poor fellow—for what he has not done. That is the point. How are we going to p-prove it? I have been pushing some private inquiries, for my part, about that mysterious figure seen or not seen by Henstridge on the hill. I can’t get it out of my head that there really was such a figure, and that, if we could only t-trace it, we should hold the clue to the riddle.’
‘Have you been doing that, Frank? And I thought you had forsaken us like the rest.’
‘That was ungenerous of you, Audrey, dear. I should have come and told you, only I was delicate of starting you, perhaps, on a false scent, and thought it better to w-wait till I had something definite to offer.’
‘Frank, did you read of the Inquest?’
‘I was present at it—in the background.’
‘O! Do you remember the master of the poor man who was supposed then—’
‘Le Sage? I should think I do. His b-benevolent truthfulness was a thing to
wonder over.’
‘I think it is. He and I are great friends. He is away for the moment; but when he comes back, I wish you would let me introduce you to him!’
‘Why, Audrey, I know him already. Have you forgotten Hanson’s cottage and our talk about the poachers? A r-remarkably shrewd old file I thought him.’
‘So he is. I have such faith in him somehow. Somehow I feel that all will come right when he returns. I do wish he would. It is all so dreadful waiting. Will you tell him about your theory, when he does?’
‘Of course I will. Don’t go yet, Audrey.’
She had stopped.
‘Yes, Frank, I am going. I feel that every moment taken from your fishing is robbing Hughie of a chance.’
‘Audrey—after what you’ve said—poor Hugh—I’ll not be thought a man at his expense—but—are you going to let me hope just a little again?’
‘Are you serious, dear? His sister? Think.’
‘A m-martyr’s sister—the greater honour mine.’
She could not help a little laugh over the picture of Hugh a martyr.
‘I love you, Frank,’ she said, ‘but not quite that way.’
‘Well, I love you all ways,’ he answered, ‘so that any little defect in yours is provided for.’
‘How good you are to me!’ she sighed. ‘If it’s to be thought of, it must not be on any consideration till Hugh is cleared.’
‘Agreed!’ he cried joyously. ‘Then we are as g-good as engaged already.’
‘You dear!’ she said, and jumped at him. ‘I will kiss you once for that. No, put your hands down—handy-pandy-sugary-candy, and—there, sir! And now please to go back to your fishing.’
The Mystery of the Skeleton Key Page 16