Chapter Twenty Four. The Master Hand.

A man-servant answered my summons.

“Mrs Anson?” I inquired.

“Mrs Anson is out of town, sir,” answered the man. “The house is let.”

“Furnished?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is your mistress at home?” I inquired.

“I don’t know, sir,” answered the man, diplomatically.

“Oh, of course!” I exclaimed, taking out a card. It was the first I found within my cigarette-case, and was intentionally not my own. “Will you take this to your mistress, and ask her if she will kindly spare me a few moments. I am a friend of Mrs Anson’s.”

“I’ll see if she’s at home, sir,” said the man, dubiously; and then, asking me into the entrance-hall, he left me standing while he went in search of his mistress.

That hall was the same down which I had groped my way when blind. I saw the closed door of the drawing-room, and knew that within that room the young man whose name I knew not had been foully done to death. There was the very umbrella stand from which I had taken the walking-stick, and the door of the little-used library, which I had examined on that night when I had dined there at Mrs Anson’s invitation—the last night of my existence as my real self.

The man returned in a few moments and invited me into a room on the left—the morning-room, I supposed it to be—saying:

“My mistress is at home, sir, and will see you.”

I had not remained there more than a couple of minutes before a youngish woman of perhaps thirty or so entered, with a rather distant bow. She was severely dressed in black; dark-haired, and not very prepossessing. Her lips were too thick to be beautiful, and her top row of teeth seemed too much in evidence. Her face was not exactly ugly, but she was by no means good-looking.

“I have to apologise,” I said, rising and bowing. “I understand that Mrs Anson has let her house, and I thought you would kindly give me her address. I wish to see her on a most pressing personal matter.”

She regarded me with some suspicion, I thought.

“If you are a friend of Mrs Anson’s, would it not be better if you wrote to her and addressed the letter here? Her letters are always forwarded,” she answered.

She was evidently a rather shrewd and superior person.

“Well, to tell the truth,” I said, “I have reasons for not writing.”

“Then I must regret, sir, that I am unable to furnish you with her address,” she responded, somewhat stiffly.

“I have been absent from London for six years,” I exclaimed. “It is because of that long absence that I prefer not to write.”

“I fear that I cannot assist you,” she replied briefly.

There was a strange, determined look in her dark-grey eyes. She did not seem a person amenable to argument.

“But it is regarding an urgent and purely private affair that I wish to see Mrs Anson,” I said.

“I have nothing whatever to do with the private affairs of Mrs Anson,” she replied. “I merely rent this house from her, and, in justice to her, it is not likely that I give the address to every chance caller.”

“I am no chance caller,” I responded. “During her residence here six years ago I was a welcome guest at her table.”

“Six years ago is a long time. You may, for aught I know, not be so welcome now.”

Did she, I wondered, speak the truth?

“You certainly speak very plainly, madam,” I answered, rising stiffly. “If I have put you to any inconvenience I regret it. I can, no doubt, obtain from some other person the information I require.”

“Most probably you can, sir,” she answered, in a manner quite unruffled. “I tell you that if you write I shall at once forward your letter to her. More than that I cannot do.”

“I presume you are acquainted with Miss Mabel Anson?” I inquired.

She smiled with some sarcasm.

“The Anson family do not concern me in the least, sir,” she replied, also rising as sign that my unfruitful interview was at an end. Mention of Mabel seemed to have irritated her, and although I plied her with further questions, she would tell me absolutely nothing.

When I bowed and took my leave I fear that I did not show her very much politeness.

In my eagerness for information, her hesitation to give me Mrs Anson’s address never struck me as perfectly natural. She, of course, did not know me, and her offer to forward a letter was all that she could do in such circumstances. Yet at the time I did not view it in that light, but regarded the tenant of that house of mystery as an ill-mannered and extremely disagreeable person.

In despair I returned to St. James’s Street and entered my club, the Devonshire. Several men whom I did not know greeted me warmly in the smoking-room, and, from their manner, I saw that in my lost years I had evidently not abandoned that institution. They chatted to me about politics and stocks, two subjects upon which I was perfectly ignorant, and I was compelled to exercise considerable tact and ingenuity in order to avoid betraying the astounding blank in my mind.

After a restless hour I drove back westward and called at old Channing’s in Cornwall Gardens in an endeavour to learn Mabel’s address. The colonel was out, but I saw Mrs Channing, and she could, alas! tell me nothing beyond the fact that Mrs Anson and her daughter had been abroad for three years past—where, she knew not. They had drifted apart, she said, and never now exchanged letters.

“Is Mabel married?” I inquired as carelessly as I could, although in breathless eagerness.

“I really don’t know,” she responded. “I have heard some talk of the likelihood of her marrying, but whether she has done so I am unaware.”

“And the man whom rumour designated as her husband? Who was he?” I inquired quickly.

“A young nobleman, I believe.”

“You don’t know his name?”

“No. It was mentioned at the time, but it has slipped my memory. One takes no particular notice of teacup gossip.”

“Well, Mrs Channing,” I said confidently, “I am extremely desirous of discovering the whereabouts of Mabel Anson. I want to see her upon a rather curious matter which closely concerns herself. Can you tell me of any one who is intimate with them?”

“Unfortunately, I know of no one,” she answered. “The truth is, that they left London quite suddenly; and, indeed, it was a matter for surprise that they neither paid farewell visits nor told any of their friends where they were going.”

“Curious,” I remarked—“very curious!”

Then there was, I reflected, apparently some reason for the present tenant at The Boltons refusing the address.

“Yes,” Mrs Channing went on, “it was all very mysterious. Nobody knows the real truth why they went abroad so suddenly and secretly. It was between three and four years ago now, and nothing, to my knowledge, has since been heard of them.”

“Very mysterious,” I responded. “It would seem almost as though they had some reason for concealing their whereabouts.”

“That’s just what lots of people have said. You may depend upon it that there is something very mysterious in it all. We were such very close friends for years, and it is certainly strange that Mrs Anson has never confided in me the secret of her whereabouts.”

I remembered the old colonel’s strange warning on that evening long ago, when I had first met Mabel at his table. What, I wondered, could he know of them to their detriment?

I remained for a quarter of an hour longer. The colonel’s wife was full of the latest tittle-tattle, as the wife of an ex-attaché always is. It is part of the diplomatic training to be always well-informed in the sayings and doings of our neighbours; and as I allowed her to gossip on she revealed to me many things of which I was in ignorance. Nellie, her daughter, had, it appeared, married the son of a Newcastle shipowner a couple of years before, and now lived near Berwick-on-Tweed.

Suddenly a thought occurred to me, and I asked whether she knew Miss Wells or the man Hickman, who had been my fellow-guests on that night when I had dined at The Boltons.

“I knew a Miss Wells—a very pronounced old maid, who was a friend of hers,” answered Mrs Channing. “But she caught influenza about a year ago, and died of it. She lived in Edith Villas, Kensington.”

“And Hickman, a fair man, of middle age, with a very ugly face?”

She reflected.

“I have no recollection of ever having met him, or of hearing of him,” she answered. “Was he an intimate friend?”

“I believe so,” I said. Then, finding that she could explain nothing more, I took my leave.

Next day and the next I wandered about London aimlessly and without hope. Mabel and her mother had, for some unaccountable reason, gone abroad and carefully concealed their whereabouts. Had this fact any connexion with the mysterious tragedy that had been enacted at The Boltons? That one thought was ever uppermost in my mind.

A week passed, and I still remained at the Grand, going forth each day, wandering hither and thither, but never entering the club or going to places where I thought it likely that I might be recognised. I could not return to the life at Denbury with that angular woman at the head of my table—the woman who called herself my wife. If I returned I felt that the mystery of it all must drive me to despair, and I should, in a fit of desperation, commit suicide.

I ask any of those who read this strange history of my life, whether they consider themselves capable of remaining calm and tranquil in such circumstances, or of carefully going over all the events in their sequence and considering them with logical reasoning. I tried to do so, but in vain. For hours I sat within the hotel smoking and thinking. I was living an entirely false life, existing in the fear of recognition by unknown friends, and the constant dread that sooner or later I must return to that hated life in Devonshire.

That a hue-and-cry had been raised regarding my disappearance was plain from a paragraph which I read in one of the morning papers about ten days after my departure from Denbury. In the paragraph I was designated as “a financier well known in the City,” and it was there stated that I had left my home suddenly “after betraying signs of insanity,” and had not since been heard of.

“Insanity!” I laughed bitterly as I read those lines supplied by the Exeter correspondent of the Central News. The police had, no doubt, received my description, and were actively on the watch to trace me and restore me to my “friends.”

For nearly a fortnight I had been in hiding, and was now on the verge of desperation. By means of one of the cheques I had taken from Denbury I succeeded in drawing a good round sum without my bankers being aware of my address, and was contemplating going abroad in order to avoid the possibility of being put under restraint as a lunatic, when one evening, in the dusky, sunset, I went forth and wandered down Northumberland Avenue to the Victoria Embankment. In comparison with the life and bustle of the Strand and Trafalgar Square, the wide roadway beside the Thames is always quiet and reposeful. Upon that same pavement over which I now strolled in the direction of the Temple I had, in the days of my blindness, taken my lessons in walking alone. That pavement had been my practice-ground on summer evenings under the tender guidance of poor old Parker, the faithful servant now lost to me. My eyesight had now grown as strong as that of other men. The great blank in my mind was all that distinguished me from my fellows. During those past fourteen days I had been probing a period which I had not lived, and ascertaining by slow degrees the events of my unknown past.

And as I strolled along beneath the plane trees over that broad pavement I recollected that the last occasion I had been there was on that memorable evening when I had lost myself, and was subsequently present at the midnight tragedy in that house of mystery. I gazed around.

In the ornamental gardens, bright with geraniums, some tired Londoners were taking their ease upon the seats provided by that most paternal of all metropolitan institutions, the London County Council; children were shouting as they played at ball and hopscotch, that narrow strip of green being, alas! all they knew of Nature’s beauty outside their world of bricks and mortar. The slight wind stirred the dusty foliage of the trees beneath which I walked, while to the left river-steamers belched forth volumes of black smoke, and barges slowly floated down with the tide. On either side were great buildings, and straight before the dome of St. Paul’s. Over all was that golden, uncertain haze which in central London is called sunset, the light which so quickly turns to cold grey, without any of those glories of crimson and gold which those in the country associate with the summer sun’s decline.

That walk induced within me melancholy thoughts of a wasted life. I loved Mabel Anson—I loved her with all my soul. Now that marriage with her was no longer within the range of possibility I was inert and despairing, utterly heedless of everything. I had, if truth be told, no further desire for life. All joy within me was now blotted out.

At length, at Blackfriars Bridge, I retraced my steps, and some twenty minutes later, as I took my key from the hotel bureau, the clerk handed me a note, addressed to “Burton Lawrence, Esquire,” the fictitious name I had given. It had been delivered by boy-messenger.

Then I was discovered! My heart leapt into my mouth.

I tore open the envelope, and read its contents. They were brief and to the point.

“The undersigned will be obliged,” it ran, “if Mr Burton Lawrence will be present this evening at eight o’clock, in the main-line booking-office of the Brighton Railway, at Victoria Station. An interview is of very pressing importance.”

The note was signed, by that single word which had always possessed such mysterious signification, the word “Avel.”

Hitherto, in my old life long ago, receipt of communications from that mysterious correspondent had caused me much anxiety of mind. I had always feared their advent; now, however, I actually welcomed it, even though it were strange and unaccountable that the unknown writer should know my whereabouts and the name beneath which I had sought to conceal my identity.

I made a hasty dinner in the coffee-room, and went forthwith to Victoria, wondering whom I should meet. The last time I had kept one of those strange appointments on that summer evening long ago in Hyde Park, I had come face to face with the woman I loved. Would that I could meet her now!

I entered the booking-office, searching it with eager eyes. Two lines of persons were taking tickets at the pigeon-holes, while a number of loungers were, like myself, awaiting friends. Beyond, upon the platform, all was bustle as is usual at that hour, when the belated portion of business London is bound for the southern suburbs. From that busy terminus of the West End trains were arriving and departing each minute.

The big illumined clock showed that it was yet five minutes to the hour. Therefore I strolled out upon the platform, lounged around the bookstalls, and presently returned to the spot indicated in the letter.

As I re-entered the booking-office my eager eyes fell upon a figure standing before me—a well-dressed figure, with a face that smiled upon me.

An involuntary cry of surprise escaped my lips. The encounter was sudden and astounding; but in that instant, as I rushed forward to greet the new-comer, I knew myself to be on the verge of a startling and remarkable discovery.