Arnold Bennett

“ When Louis Ravengar was nine years old, his father, a widower, married a widow with one child, aged six. That child was Hugo. The two lads, violently different in temperament—the one gloomy and secretive, the other buoyant and frank—with no tie of blood or of affection, were forced by destiny to grow up together in the same house, and by their parents even to sleep in the same room. They were never apart, and they loathed each other. Louis regarded young Owen as an interloper, and acted towards him as boys and tigers will towards interlopers weaker than themselves. ”

“ Here lay the repository of Ravengar's secrets, the grave of Hugo's happiness, the dead mate of Tudor's desire. Here lay the eternal woman, symbol of all beauty and all charm, victimized by her own loveliness. For if she had not been lovely, thought Hugo, if the curves of her cheek and her nostrils and the colour of her skin had been ever so slightly different, the world might have contained one widower, one ruined heart, and one murderer the less that night. ”

“ For you must agree that murder in the strict sense is an impossible thing. The immortal cannot die. Vital energy cannot be destroyed. All that the murderer does is to end one incarnation and begin another.'
'So that is your theory!'
'Was it not yours, when you got me deposited in the vault?' Hugo demanded with ferocious irony. 'I am bound to believe that it was. The common outcry against murder (as it is called) can have no weight with enlightened persons like you and me, Ravengar.'
'Perhaps not,' said Ravengar, summoning his powers of self-control. ”

“ The night was cold and damp, as the morning had been, and Hugo shivered, but not with cold. He shivered in the mere exciting eagerness of anticipation. He had chosen the drawing-room window because the panes were very large. He found it perfectly simple, by means of the treacled cardboard which he carried, to force in the pane noiselessly. He pushed aside the blind, and crept within the room. So simple was it to violate the will of a dead man, and the solemnly affixed seals of his executor! ”

“ The thought of the false death certificates and burial certificates, and of the unprofessionalism of Darcy, will abrade your legal susceptibilities; but submit to the torture for my sake, Polycarp. You are human. I shall add to the letter which Mrs. Catherine Pounds will bring you a note to say that if you have any scruples, you are to listen to the phonographic records in the safe; if not, you are to destroy the phonographic records.
Do I seem gay, Polycarp?
I ought to be. I have carried through my scheme. I have outwitted Ravengar. I have saved Camilla from death at his hands. ”

“ In the whole history of Hugo's a poster had never before been known to be posted on a mirror, which is utterly the wrong place for a poster, but Hugo had chosen the mirror as the field of his labours solely that he might surreptitiously observe every soul that entered the room.
The clock on the mantelpiece struck nine, and the last assistant had fled, and Hugo was left alone with the pink-aproned waitress, who was collecting glasses on a tray. ”

“ Not long since I condemned Tudor to an early and sudden death—a death which might be hastened by circumstances.'
'Poor chap!' Hugo murmured.
The dead man looked so young, artless, and content.
'Why "poor"?' Darcy turned on him sharply but coldly. 'Is not a sudden death the best? Would you not wish it for yourself, for your friends?'
'Yes,' said Hugo; 'but when one is dead one is dead. That's all I meant.'
'I have heard much of you, Mr. Hugo,' said the other. 'And, if I may be excused a certain bluntness, it is very obvious that, though you say little, you are no ordinary man. ”

“ It was a scene well calculated to intensify a man's emotions, especially when a man stands to view it, as Hugo stood, on a lofty balcony, with a beautiful and loved woman by his side.
She was indicating pathways, as well as she could, when they both saw a man hurrying in the direction of the dome along by the roof-balustrade of the court of fountains—the route by which Camilla herself had come. ”

“ The window was almost at a corner of the room, near a door; but Hugo had a perfect view of the two men within, and one was as certainly Louis Ravengar as the other was Francis Tudor. They were gesticulating violently and angrily, and a heavy, ornate Empire chair had already been overturned. The dispute seemed to be interminable; each moment heralded a fight, but it is the watched pot that never boils. Suddenly Hugo became aware that Camilla was no longer at his elbow, and the next instant, to his extreme amazement, he saw her glide into the room. ”

“ You are getting accustomed to the unpleasant prospect of not dying in your bed surrounded by inconsolable dependants.'
'Hugo,' Ravengar began persuasively, 'you must be aware that all these suspicions of yours are a figment of your excited brain. You must be aware that I never meant to murder you.'
'My dear fellow,' Hugo replied with calm bitterness, 'I don't intend to murder you. I intend merely to put you in that vault. Your death will be an accidental consequence, as mine would have been. And why should you not die? Can you give me a single good reason why you should continue to live? ”

“ The two men climbed to the summit which dominated the City of Pleasure. To the east the famous roof restaurant glittered and jingled under the moon. To the west the Great Wheel was outlined in flame—a symbol of the era. Hugo told Darcy the history of the night in the cemetery, and what preceded, and what came after it, including the strange death of Ravengar in a lunatic asylum, and how everything was explained or explicable—even Mr. Brown, the manager of the Safe Deposit, had run up against justice in Caracas—save and except the identity of Ravengar's accomplice during the last days. ”

“ Ravengar put his hands in his pockets.
'I can only assume that you are going mad, Owen,' said he. 'I have long guessed that you were. Nothing else will explain this extraordinary action of yours towards me.'
'You act well,' replied Hugo, sitting down and eyeing Ravengar critically. 'You act well. But you gave the whole show away by the tone in which you swore two minutes ago. If there is anyone mad in this room, it is yourself. Your schemes show that queer mixture of amazing ingenuity and amazing folly which is characteristic of madmen. ”

“ The rest of her seemed to be covered with a man's overcoat, flung hastily down. He stared, enchanted by the horror. What was that white stuff round her head? Part of it seemed to be torn, and a strip fluttered across her closed eyelids. He went nearer. He touched—cold! Could she be so soon cold? And then the truth swept over him, and almost swept his senses away, that this image in the corner was not she, but merely that waxen thing made by the sculptor in Paris, that counterfeit which had deceived him in the drawing-room of the flat. ”

“ Those doors admitted to the blouse department, and the blouse department, as Lily could see through the diamond panes, was a surging sea of bargain-hunters, amid which shopwalkers stood up like light-houses, while the girls behind the counters trembled in fear of being washed away. Discipline, order, management, had ceased to exist at Hugo's.
Mrs. Shawn turned to seek another route, but already dozens of women were upon her, and she could not retire. ”

“ The bell rang off. Louis Ravengar had finished his good-bye. Hugo tried in vain to resume communication with him. He could not even get any sort of reply from the Exchange.
'It's a queer world,' he soliloquized, as he returned to bed. 'What does the man mean?'
He was still happy in the prospect of finding Camilla, but it was as though his happiness were a pool in a private ground, and some trespasser had troubled it with a stone.
The clock struck ten, and Simon entered with tea and the paper. ”

“ Some people may think—you may think, Polycarp—that a man like me, under sentence of death from a doctor, had no right to make love to a woman. That may be so. But in love there isn't often any question of right. Human instincts have no regard for human justice, and when the instinct is strong enough, the sense of justice simply ceases to exist for it. When you're in love—enough—you don't argue. You desire—that's all.
To my amazement, she came to the flat. ”

“ Tortoni had protested that it was destructive of the elementary principles of art to order a dinner for eight-thirty at seven o'clock. However, he had not completely failed. The waiters had departed, and Camilla, in dazzling ivory-white, was pouring out coffee. Hugo was cutting a cigar. They did not speak; they felt. They were at the end of the brief honeymoon, and the day was at an end. The last remnants of twilight had vanished, and through the eastern windows of the dome the moon was rising. Neither the hour nor the occasion made for talkativeness. Life lay before Hugo and Camilla. ”

“ When at eleven o'clock that same winter night Hugo stood hesitating, with certain tools and a hooded electric lamp in his hand, on the balcony in front of the drawing-room window of Francis Tudor's sealed flat, he thought what a strange, illogical, and capricious thing is the human heart. ”

“ It could not be a coincidence that a man so strongly resembling Ravengar, a man posing as a doctor, and buying nearly a sovereign's worth of chloroform, should be occupying rooms in the same house as Camilla. The tremendous revelation of Ravengar's genius for stratagem and intrigue afforded by the recital of the two brothers came upon Hugo with a dazing shock. This man, whom he knew from Camilla's own story to be curiously deficient in ordinary human sentiments, had arranged a sham suicide for the benefit of the general public. ”

“ The profound and pathetic tragedy of Tudor's career did not touch him until long afterwards.
'She lives! Ravengar lives! Ravengar probably knows where she is, and I do not know! And Ravengar is at large! I have set him at large.'
His mind a battlefield on which the most glorious hope struggled against a frenzied fear, Hugo rose from the chair in front of the phonograph-stand, and, after a slight hesitation, left the flat as he had entered it. Before dawn the pane had been replaced in the drawing-room window, and the side-door secured. ”

“ He put the lamp on a chair, and took the revolver from his pocket in readiness for any complications that might follow his forcing of the door.
Then he heard a woman's voice within the bedroom.
'I shall open it, Alb, if you kill me for it. I don't care who it is. You may be dying of loss of blood. In fact, I'm sure you are.'
And the door was pulled wide open with a single sweeping movement, and Hugo beheld the figure, slightly dishevelled and more than slightly perturbed, of Mrs. Albert Shawn.
'Oh, Alb!' cried Lily. 'It's Mr. Hugo! Oh, Mr. Hugo! ”

“ Besides, I shall be doing the human race, and especially the investing part of the human race, a very good turn.'
Then Ravengar approached Hugo, and, Hugo rising to meet him, their faces almost touched in the middle of the great room.
'You called me a cur,' he said. 'Yet perhaps I am not such a cur after all. You have beaten me. You mean to finish me; I can see it in your face. Well, you will regret it more than I shall. Do you know I have often wished to die? You are right in saying that there is no reason why I should live. ”

“ When I am dead, Polycarp, you will find that the secret instructions instruct you to realize all my estate, and to keep the proceeds in negotiable form until a lady named Mrs. Catherine Pounds, a widow, comes to you with an autograph letter from me. You will hand everything to that lady, or to her representative, without any further inquiry. But it has struck me this very day, Polycarp, that you, with your confounded suspicious and legal nature, when you see Mrs. Catherine Pounds, if she should come in person, may recognise in her a striking resemblance to Camilla. ”