CHAPTER IV
OUT OF THE NIGHT
There was no sleep for either of us that night; nor, I think, did Sir Nicolas take off his clothes for two days after Miss More died. The black mystery of the whole thing, the extraordinary surprise of it, was more than he or I could cope with. We had seen the dead woman in the afternoon as merry and as light-hearted as a child; she had asked us to come down to her rooms and to take her picture just as one might ask a friend to pay a pleasant call. What had happened in the between time, what trouble or disappointment or sorrow had come upon her, I knew no more than the dead. That she loved Sir Nicolas Steele I was sure; that her death was in some way to be connected with the strange letter of warning my master had received was equally obvious. But who the writer of that letter was, and what was his claim upon Lilian More, I had yet to find out.
I say that I had yet to find out, and this is true. A jury returned a plain verdict,—a merciful verdict, you may be sure,—and the police, who had taken charge of the writing we found in the room, could add no information to our own. They went to the house to which we had been asked to send the photograph, and found it in a slum in Hammersmith—an empty house, once kept by a woman who let lodgings, but then deserted and almost in ruins. Nor was there any friend of Miss More who could add to what we knew. As for Connoley, he had gone to Scotland the very day his sister-in-law died. No one knew his address, and we took it that he saw nothing in the papers. Indeed, he told me, when I met him in Paris a year later, that he never learned the news until a month after his kinswoman was dead.
All this did not help me in getting at what I wanted; nor was my master any readier in doing what I could not do.
"’Tis a story of trouble, ye may be sure," he said to me on the second morning, "but I doubt if any man will write it. Whatever it was, it must have happened after I gave her the promise to take her picture. 'Twould be terrible to think that she meant it otherwise."
"That's so, sir," said I. "Yet, when a woman is driven to that state, God knows what she won't think of! Be sure of this, that she wanted somebody to know she was dead, and this was the queer idea she had of telling him."
"Would it be the man who wrote me the murdering letter?" he asked.
"I have no doubt of it—her husband, very likely, if she had one. At least, that's what appears on the face of it."
"I never thought of that," he said quickly. "It may be as you say, but he'll go wanting the picture, any way. I wouldn't have taken it for a thousand down."
"There you're wrong, sir," said I; "if we're prudent men we'll find out who this person is, and what he has against us. And the picture may help us. It's here, in my pocket, any way."
I never saw a man more astonished.
"Ye had it taken, then?" he cried.
"That's so, sir. I called in a photographer yesterday, and here's the print."
He took the picture and looked at for a long time.
"Well," said he, "we must all come to that, some day or other. Good God! it makes me cold to think of it. And the sweetest little woman that ever drew breath. Ye won't leave it about the place? I couldn't sleep with a thing like that in my rooms."
I told him that I would not, and I put the picture away. It was clear that I could do nothing with it until he should give me some information which I did not then possess; and, as it turned out, I had almost forgotten the affair when that information came to me. Indeed, three weeks had passed and Jack Ames had paid the two hundred, and we were on the eve of going up to Yorkshire, when, just as Nicky had left Gower Street one night to dine at the Green House Club, there came a ring at our bell and a tall man stepped into the hall and asked for him. There was only a bit of a gas-flare burning in the passage then, and the man being in the shadow, I couldn't very well see his face; but I noticed that his clothes were very shabby and that he wore a rough overcoat which was a size too small for him. And his hat was an old silk one; but so black inside that a regiment of heads might have worn it.
"You desire to see Sir Nicolas Steele?" said I, not much liking the look of him, for he stood there just like a mute.
"I want to see him," he answered in a thick, husky voice, "and to see him at once."
"Well," said I, not liking his manner, "I've a notion that you can't do that, since he isn't in the house."
"Not in the house!" cried he, losing his temper all in a minute. "Oh! I'll soon know about that. Come, no lies—where is he, and where is the other?"
With this word, he took a step forward into the passage, and I saw his face for the first time. It was the face of an exceedingly handsome man, but there was a queer look in the eyes, such as I have never seen in the eyes of a human being before or since. Try as I might I couldn't describe that strange expression of his. Anger, determination, cruelty, all these were in it, but there was something beyond, a look as though the man had no power to keep his thoughts on any one thing for two minutes together; not the peering gaze of the madman, but the glance of one weakened by long illness until the nerves were shattered and the brain unhinged.
"Where is your master?" he repeated, forcing his way up the hall. "I mean to speak to him."
"Then you'll have to come to-morrow," said I. "You don't suppose I'm going to work a miracle for your particular benefit! I tell you that he isn't in the house'"
"Oh!" said he, drawing back and seeming to think of it. "Do you know if he has gone to Chelsea?"
"To Chelsea?" cried I, though his words sent me cold all over. "What would he do at Chelsea?"
"He would be with Mrs. Hadley," said he, though I could see that his mind did not follow his words.
"That's a name I never heard before, so I really can't say," I replied.
"You know her as Lilian More," he exclaimed, turning his eyes upon me quickly. "He is with her now! Don't tell me lies, or I will serve you as I mean to serve him!"
"Sir!" said I quickly, for his words shocked me, "Miss More died three weeks ago."
Now at this he did not break out or make any scene, as I thought he would do. It was wonderful to watch the manner of him; his brain seeming to grasp the truth for a minute, only to let it go in the next. As for his eyes, they were never still, and his look passed unceasingly from one object to the other.
"Three weeks ago," he said, just like a man dreaming, while he took up his hat mechanically. "That could not be; I was with her then."
"Then you are a relation?" said I.
"I am her husband," he replied; and the remembrance of that fact caused him to hold himself erect and to look me straight in the face. "I am her husband, and if any thing like that had happened, should not I be the first to know of it?"
"Properly you ought to be, sir," said I, "but perhaps you weren't in London then."
"I have been in London for three months," he answered, raising his voice suddenly. "I know you are telling me a lie—by God! how dare you?"
"It is no lie," I replied; and sorry for him I was, for the tears were now running down his face like rain. "If you are the lady's husband, sir, it is you who ought to have the picture I have been carrying about with me since the day after Miss More died. I'll fetch it for you."
With this I ran upstairs to my room and took the photograph out of my box. I was away a couple of minutes, perhaps; but when I came down again he was still standing fingering his hat in the hall, and he didn't appear to have moved a foot since I left him. I was half frightened to give him the picture, so strange was his manner; but the dead woman had wished it, and I meant to respect her words.
"Here it is, sir," said I. "It was her wish that you should have it, and no thought of ours."
He made no answer, but snatched the frame out of my hand. His restless eyes seemed to fall upon the portrait for a minute, then to rest upon the floor, and after that again upon me! It was plain that his dazed brain was only beginning to find the truth.
"She was my wife," he said very slowly, after a long pause. "Oh, God, help me! I shall never hold her in my arms again."
He saw this, and thrusting the picture into his breast, he turned to leave the house.
"Shall I give my master any message, sir?" I asked.
"Tell him that I came here to strike him dead," said he; and, before I could answer, he had disappeared down the street.
It was the first and last time I ever saw Robert Hadley—for that was his full name; but ten days later he wrote a letter from Charing Cross Hospital to Sir Nicolas, and begged my master to go and see him. And this was the way his story came to us, and with it the story of Lilian More.
She had married him in Birmingham, a year after Sir Nicolas met her there. He was a well-to-do widower then, with one little child—a girl three years old; but six months after his marriage he began to nip with his business acquaintances, and in a year he was a confirmed dipsomaniac. Business, friends, wife, and child—all these became nothing to him. He went down the ladder of self-respect fast, until he had no longer a home, and his wife was driven to get what sort of a living she could as a play-actress. That he made her life a hell to her I have no sort of doubt; but while the child lived, the woman was content to work and to slave for love of it. What she put up with from the man's temper and brutality and jealousies God only knows; for his affection for her was strong to the last, and I believe he would have shot any man who spoke twice to her. At the time we first met her in London he was in a private hospital; but the child was dead—killed by a blow of his, as more than one whisperer says, though God forbid that I should charge him with it. Be that as it may, the little one's death robbed Lilian More of all she cared to live for; and the end was what I have told.
But of all the women I ever met, she was the sweetest and the truest—and that I will say with my last breath.