Complete works of hall c.., p.532
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 532
I was standing by a rope which crossed the bow and holding on to it to save myself from falling, for, being alone with Nature at last, I was seeing my flight for the first time in full light.
I was telling myself that as surely as my flight became known Martin’s name would be linked with mine, and the honour that was dearer to me than, my own would be buried in disgrace.
O God! O God! Why should Nature be so hard and cruel to a woman? Why should it be permitted that, having done no worse than obey the purest impulses of my heart, the iron law of my sex should rise up to condemn both me and the one who was dearer to my soul than life itself?
I hardly know how long I stood there, holding on to that rope. There was no sound now except the tread of a sailor in his heavy boots, an inarticulate call from the bridge, an answering shout from the wheel, the rattling of the wind in the rigging, the throbbing of the engine in the bowels of the ship, and the monotonous wash of the waves against her side.
Oh, how little I felt, how weak, how helpless!
I looked up towards the sky, but there seemed to be no sky, no moon, and no stars, only a vaporous blackness that came down and closed about me.
I looked out to the sea, but there seemed to be no sea, only a hissing splash of green spray where the steamer’s forward light fell on the water which her bow was pitching up, and beyond that nothing but a threatening and thundering void.
I did not weep, but I felt as other women had felt before me, as other women have felt since, as women must always feel after they have sinned against the world and the world’s law, that there was nothing before me but the blackness of night.
“Out of the depths I cry unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my cry.”
But all at once a blessed thought came to me. We were travelling eastward, and dark as the night was now, in a few hours the day would dawn, the sun would shine in our faces and the sky would smile over our heads!
It would be like that with me. Martin would come back. I was only going to meet him. It was dark midnight with me now, but I was sailing into the sunrise!
Perhaps I was like a child, but I think that comforted me.
At all events I went down to the little triangular cabin with a cheerful heart, forgetting that I was a runaway, a homeless wanderer, an outcast, with nothing before me but the wilderness of London where I should be friendless and alone.
The fire had gone out by this time, the oil-lamp was swinging to the motion of the ship, the timbers were creaking, and the Liverpool women were asleep.
SEVENTY-NINTH CHAPTER
At eight o’clock next morning I was in the train leaving Liverpool for London.
I had selected a second-class compartment labelled “For Ladies,” and my only travelling companion was a tall fair woman, in a seal-skin coat and a very large black hat. She had filled the carriage with the warm odour of eau-de-Cologne and the racks on both sides with her luggage, which chiefly consisted of ladies’ hat boxes of various shapes and sizes.
Hardly had we started when I realised that she was a very loquacious and expansive person.
Was I going all the way? Yes? Did I live in Liverpool? No? In London perhaps? No? Probably I lived in the country? Yes? That was charming, the country being so lovely.
I saw in a moment that if my flight was to be carried out to any purpose I should have to conceal my identity; but how to do so I did not know, my conscience never before having had to accuse me of deliberate untruth.
Accident helped me. My companion asked me what was my husband’s profession, and being now accustomed to think of Martin as my real husband, I answered that he was a commander.
“You mean the commander of a ship?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, yes, you’ve been staying in Liverpool to see him off on a voyage. How sweet! Just what I should do myself if my husband were a sailor.”
Then followed a further battery of perplexing questions.
Had my husband gone on a long voyage? Yes? Where to? The South. Did I mean India, Australia, New Zealand? Yes, and still farther.
“Ah, I see,” she said again. “He’s probably the captain of a tramp steamer, and will go from port to port as long as he can find a cargo.”
Hardly understanding what my companion meant by this, I half agreed to it, and then followed a volley of more personal inquiries.
I was young to be married, wasn’t I? Probably I hadn’t been married very long, had I? And not having settled myself in a home perhaps I was going up to London to wait for my husband? Yes? How wise — town being so much more cheerful than the country.
“Any friends there?”
“No.”
“None whatever?”
“None whatever.”
“But won’t you be lonely by yourself in London?”
“A little lonely perhaps.”
Being satisfied that she had found out everything about me, my travelling companion (probably from the mere love of talking) told me something about herself.
She was a fashionable milliner and had a shop in the West End of London. Occasionally she made personal visits to the provinces to take orders from the leading shopkeepers, but during the season she found it more profitable to remain in town, where her connection was large, among people who could pay the highest prices.
By this time we had reached Crewe, and as there was some delay in getting into the station, my travelling companion put her head out of the window to inquire the cause. She was told that a night train from Scotland was in front of us, and we should have to be coupled on to it before we could proceed to London.
This threw her into the wildest state of excitement.
“I see what it is,” she said. “The shooting season is over and the society people are coming down from the moors. I know lots and lots of them. They are my best customers — the gentlemen at all events.”
“The gentlemen?”
“Why, yes,” she said with a little laugh.
After some shunting our Liverpool carriages were coupled to the Scotch train and run into the station, where a number of gentlemen in knickerbockers and cloth caps were strolling about the platform.
My companion seemed to know them all, and gave them their names, generally their Christian names, and often their familiar ones.
Suddenly I had a shock. A tall man, whose figure I recognised, passed close by our carriage, and I had only time to conceal myself from observation behind the curtain of the window.
“Helloa!” cried my companion. “There’s Teddy Eastcliff. He married Camilla, the Russian dancer. They first met in my shop I may tell you.”
I was feeling hot and cold by turns, but a thick veil must have hidden my confusion, for after we left Crewe my companion, becoming still more confidential, talked for a long time about her aristocratic customers, and I caught a glimpse of a life that was on the verge of a kind of fashionable Bohemia.
More than once I recognised my husband’s friends among the number of her clients, and trembling lest my husband himself should become a subject of discussion, I, made the excuse of a headache to close my eyes and be silent.
My companion thereupon slept, very soundly and rather audibly, from Rugby to Willesden, where, awakening with a start while the tickets were being collected, she first powdered her face by her fashion-glass and then interested herself afresh in my affairs.
“Did you say, my dear, that you have no friends in London?”
I repeated that I had none.
“Then you will go to an hotel, I suppose?”
I answered that I should have to look for something less expensive.
“In that case,” she said, “I think I know something that will suit you exactly.”
It was a quiet boarding establishment in Bloomsbury — comfortable house, reasonable terms, and, above all, perfectly respectable. In fact, it was kept by her own sister, and if I liked she would take me along in her cab and drop me at the door. Should she?
Looking back at that moment I cannot but wonder that after what I had heard I did not fear discovery. But during the silence of the last hour I had been feeling more than ever weak and helpless, so that when my companion offered me a shelter in that great, noisy, bewildering city in which I had intended to hide myself, but now feared I might be submerged and lost, with a willing if not a cheerful heart I accepted.
Half an hour afterwards our cab drew up in a street off Russell Square at a rather grimy-looking house which stood at the corner of another and smaller square that was shut off by an iron railing.
The door was opened by a young waiter of sixteen or seventeen years, who was wearing a greasy dress-suit and a soiled shirt front.
My companion pushed into the hall, I followed her, and almost at the same moment a still larger and perhaps grosser woman than my friend, with the same features and complexion, came out of a room to the left with, a serviette in her hand.
“Sophie!”
“Jane!” cried my companion, and pointing to me she said:
“I’ve brought you a new boarder.”
Then followed a rapid account of where she had met me, who and what I was, and why I had come up to London.
“I’ve promised you’ll take her in and not charge her too much, you know.”
“Why, no, certainly not,” said the sister.
At the next moment the boy waiter was bringing, my trunk into the house on his shoulder and my travelling companion was bidding me good-bye and saying she would look me up later.
When the door was closed I found the house full of the smell of hot food, chiefly roast beef and green vegetables, and I could hear the clink of knives and forks and the clatter of dishes in the room the landlady had come from.
“You’d like to go up to your bedroom at once, wouldn’t you?” she said.
We went up two flights of stairs covered with rather dirty druggeting, along a corridor that had a thin strip of linoleum, and finally up a third flight that was bare to the boards, until we came to a room which seemed to be at the top of the house and situated in its remotest corner.
It was a very small apartment, hardly larger than the room over the hall at home in which Aunt Bridget had made me sleep when I was a child, and it was nearly as cold and cheerless.
The wall-paper, which had once been a flowery pink, was now pale and patternless; the Venetian blind over the window (which looked out on the smaller square) had lost one of its cords and hung at an irregular angle; there was a mirror over the mantelpiece with the silvering much mottled, and a leather-covered easy chair whereof the spring was broken and the seat heavily indented.
“I dare say this will do for the present,” said my landlady, and though my heart was in my mouth I compelled myself to agree.
“My terms, including meals and all extras, will be a pound a week,” she added, and to that also, with a lump in my throat I assented, whereupon my landlady left me, saying luncheon was on and I could come downstairs when I was ready.
A talkative cockney chambermaid, with a good little face, brought me a fat blue jug of hot water, and after I had washed and combed I found my way down to the dining-room.
What I expected to find there I hardly know. What I did find was a large chamber, as dingy as the rest of the house, and as much in need of refreshing, with a long table down the middle, at which some twenty persons sat eating, with the landlady presiding at the top.
The company, who were of both sexes and chiefly elderly, seemed to me at that first sight to be dressed in every variety of out-of-date clothes, many of them rather shabby and some almost grotesque.
Raising their faces from their plates they looked at me as I entered, and I was so confused that I stood hesitating near the door until the landlady called to me.
“Come up here,” she said, and when I had done so, and taken the seat by her side, which had evidently been reserved for me, she whispered:
“I don’t think my sister mentioned your name, my dear. What is it?”
I had no time to deliberate.
“O’Neill,” I whispered back, and thereupon my landlady, raising her voice, and addressing the company as if they had been members of her family, said:
“Mrs. O’Neill, my dears.”
Then the ladies at the table inclined their heads at me and smiled, while the men (especially those who were the most strangely dressed) rose from their seats and bowed deeply.
EIGHTIETH CHAPTER
Of all houses in London this, I thought, was the least suitable to me.
Looking down the table I told myself that it must be the very home of idle gossip and the hot-bed of tittle-tattle.
I was wrong. Hardly had I been in the house a day when I realised that my fellow-guests were the most reserved and self-centred of all possible people.
One old gentleman who wore a heavy moustache, and had been a colonel in the Indian army, was understood to be a student of Biblical prophecy, having collected some thousands of texts which established the identity of the British nation with the lost tribes of Israel.
Another old gentleman, who wore a patriarchal beard and had taken orders without securing a living, was believed to be writing a history of the world and (after forty years of continuous labour) to have reached the century before Christ.
An elderly lady with a benign expression was said to be a tragic actress who was studying in secret for a season at the National Theatre.
Such, and of such kind, were my house-mates; and I have since been told that every great city has many such groups of people, the great prophets, the great historians, the great authors, the great actors whom the world does not know — the odds and ends of humanity, thrown aside by the rushing river of life into the gulley-ways that line its banks, the odd brothers, the odd sisters, the odd uncles, the odd aunts, for whom there is no place in the family, in society, or in the business of the world.
It was all very curious and pathetic, yet I think I should have been safe, for a time at all events, in this little corner of London into which chance had so strangely thrown me, but for one unfortunate happening.
That was the arrival of the daily newspaper.
There was never more than a single copy. It came at eight in the morning and was laid on the dining-room mantelpiece, from which (by an unwritten law of the house) it was the duty as well as the honour of the person who had first finished breakfast to take it up and read the most startling part of the news to the rest of the company.
Thus it occurred that on the third morning after my arrival I was startled by the voice of the old colonel, who, standing back to the fire, with the newspaper in his hand, cried:
“Mysterious Disappearance of a Peeress.”
“Read it,” said the old clergyman.
The tea-cup which I was raising to my mouth trembled in my hand, and when I set it down it rattled against the saucer. I knew what was coming, and it came.
The old colonel read:
“A telegram from Blackwater announces the mysterious disappearance of the young wife of Lord Raa, which appears to have taken place late on Thursday night or in the early hours of Friday morning.
“It will be remembered that the missing lady was married a little more than a year ago, and her disappearance is the more unaccountable from the fact that during the past month she has been actively occupied in preparing for a fête in honour of her return home after a long and happy honeymoon.
“The pavilion in which the fête was to have been held had been erected on a headland between Castle Raa and a precipitous declivity to the sea, and the only reasonable conjecture is that the unhappy lady, going out on Thursday night to superintend the final preparations, lost her way in the darkness and fell over the cliffs.
“The fact that the hostess was missing was not generally known in Ellan until the guests had begun to arrive for the reception on Friday evening, when the large assembly broke up in great confusion.
“Naturally much sympathy is felt for the grief-stricken husband.”
After the colonel had finished reading I had an almost irresistible impulse to scream, feeling sure that the moment my house-mates looked into my face they must see that I was the person indicated.
They did not look, and after a chorus of exclamations (“Most mysterious!” “What can have become of her?” “On the eve of her fête too!”) they began to discuss disappearances in general, each illustrating his point by reference to the subject of his own study.
“Perfectly extraordinary how people disappear nowadays,” said one.
“Extraordinary, sir?” said the old colonel, looking over his spectacles, “why should it be extraordinary that one person should disappear when whole nations — the ten tribes for example. . . .”
“But that’s a different thing altogether,” said the old clergyman. “Now if you had quoted Biblical examples — Elisha or perhaps Jonah. . . .”
After the discussion had gone on for several minutes in this way I rose from the table on my trembling limbs and slipped out of the room.
It would take long to tell of the feverish days that followed — how newspaper correspondents were sent from London to Ellan to inquire into the circumstances of my disappearance; how the theory of accident gave place to the theory of suicide, and the theory of suicide to the theory of flight; how a porter on the pier at Blackwater said he had carried my trunk to the steamer that sailed on Thursday midnight, thinking I was a maid from the great house until I had given him half-a-crown (his proper fee being threepence); how two female passengers had declared that a person answering to my description had sailed with them to Liverpool; how these clues had been followed up and had led to nothing; and how, finally, the correspondents had concluded the whole incident of my disappearance could not be more mysterious if I had been dropped from mid-air into the middle of the Irish Sea.
But then came another development.
My father, who was reported to have received the news of my departure in a way that suggested he had lost control of his senses (raging and storming at my husband like a man demented), having come to the conclusion that I, being in a physical condition peculiar to women, had received a serious shock resulting in a loss of memory, offered five hundred pounds reward for information that would lead to my discovery, which was not only desirable to allay the distress of my heart-broken family but urgently necessary to settle important questions of title and inheritance.
