Bernard Capes

“ Coolness is, or should be, the first quality of a gambler; gamblers, for that reason, do not easily fall in love. But when they do fall they fall hard, they fall headlong, they do not so much fall as plunge, as a gambler plunges, all heaven or all hell the stake. There is no doubt that Ridgway's passion for this girl was a true gambler's passion. ”

“ To the detective it meant betrayal and the ruin of his plans. Would that consideration be enough in itself to goad him on to murder? With a man of Ridgway's character and trained cautiousness of disposition I did not think it probable. Assuming, then, that the murder were his act, what more overmastering motive could have driven him to it? What but jealousy, the one passion uncontrollable by even the most self-disciplining nature. He was himself passionately enamoured of his own beautiful decoy, and she had betrayed not only his interests but his love. ”

“ CHAPTER XX THE BARON LAYS HIS CARDS ON THE TABLE Sir Francis Orsden and the Baron Le Sage walked slowly up the kitchen garden together. It was a windless autumn morning, such serene and gracious weather as had prevailed now for some days, and the primroses under the wall were already putting forth a little precocious blossom or two, feeling for the Spring. There was a balm in the air and a softness in the soil which communicated themselves to the human fibre, reawakening it as it were to a sense of new life out of old distress. ”

“ Said Le Sage:—
'Are we not a little apt to judge a man by his business—as that a lawyer must be unfeeling, a butcher cruel, a doctor humane, and a sweep dishonest? But it is not his profession which makes a man what he is, but the man who makes his profession what it appears in him. ”

“ To be the wife of the problematic heir of Wildshott might be a good thing; to be the wife of the heir of Wildshott in esse, a gentleman, a soldier and an Antinous, was certainly a better. So, having surrendered to love, she played for the greater stake—and she lost. We can pity her: she was frankly an adventuress. We could pity him, were it not for the thought of that inhuman revenge. Yet he had provocation perhaps beyond a gambler's endurance. ”

“ The last thing of which a lawyer, as a lawyer, would be guilty, would be the bringing himself within the grasp of the law: the last thing of which a detective, as a detective, would be guilty would be the making himself a subject for detection. What induces either of them, then, to sin against the logic of his own profession? Imagination alone and always, the primary impulse to everything that is good and bad in the world. A man may be blessed with it, or he may be cursed ”

“ Jean dead, what was to prevent him, John, from personating his step-brother, from claiming himself to be Sir Calvin's son, from profiting by the evidence which was said to prove that son's legitimacy? As to that he had only Mrs Ridgway's word, but it had been uttered with such solemnity and conviction, by a dying woman, as to leave little doubt of its truth. At worst the thing would be a gamble; but there was that in the very romantic hazard of it to appeal to his imagination: at best it would be prosperity beyond his dreams. ”

“ He had been simply got at by the detective, and officially bullied and threatened into stating what was wanted of him. As a matter of fact, he had bad no idea of what the time was at all, but had taken any suggestion offered him. The fellow is a blackguard and a coward, and would swear any man's life away for thirty pieces of silver. I did a little persuasion with him on my own account—again during one of those refreshing drives, Sir Francis—and, taking a leaf out of Ridgway's book, had little difficulty in bringing him to his knees. ”

“ To find the very woman, for worship of whom he had been scheming away his position, his reputation, his soul of truth and honour, not only turned traitor to his best interests, but faithless in the worst sense, and for his rival's sake, to her pledge to him—well, one must pause before utterly condemning. ”

“ So we arrive necessarily at the question, who was this Annie Evans, whom he had chosen for his accomplice in the business, and whom he had ended by so foully doing to death? To get at the whole truth of the story, it was essential that the mystery of their connexion should be traced to its source.
'To any one, not possessed of the clues which Fortune had placed in my hands, it must have appeared nothing less than astonishing that, with all the wide publicity given to the case, the victim should have remained virtually unidentified and unclaimed. ”

“ We come now to the frustrated business f the theft, and the crime which was its terrible consequence. It had inevitably occurred to me that the safe in Sir Calvin's study must be the repository, and known by the confederates to be the repository, of the papers in question; else, if of easier access, they had long ago been abstracted and used to serve their purpose. Probably, as it appeared to me, the girl's first business had been to secure an impression of the keyhole in wax, which she had despatched to Ridgway, receiving back from him in exchange the master-key. ”

“ Madly enamoured, yet hopeless of prevailing against the virtue of the lady, young Kennett had recourse to the vile and dishonourable strategem of a sham marriage, which he effected through the instrumentality of a worthless acquaintance, one Barry Skelton, who had come abroad in connexion with some Oxford Missionary Society, and who, though not yet in Holy Orders, was supposed to be qualifying himself for the priesthood. With the aid of this scamp the cruel fraud was perpetrated, and Mademoiselle Desilles became the wife, as she supposed, of Sir Calvin. ”

“ I claim so much, though, for myself, I entertain no doubt as to the truth.'
'My story opens in the Café l'Univers in Paris, where we two, Mr Bickerdike, strangers to one another, were sitting one September afternoon precisely a year ago. We got into talk on the subject of a neighbour, an artist, and an object of interest to us both, who was busily engaged in sketching into a book pencil-memoranda of the more noticeable hats worn by passing ladies. He worked fast and cleverly, and was manifestly an adept at his craft. ”

“ I was fortunate in securing it only a few minutes before the Sergeant came down to examine the place of the crime.
'Now, what had Annie Evans to do with a skeleton key—she, a modest servant girl of irreproachable character, as the housekeeper had just informed us? I examined the key. It was of the usual burglarious pattern, seemed newly turned, had a slight flaw, or projection, on the barrel end, and was splashed with an ugly Bluebeard red. Had Annie, after all, been quite the impeccable person Mrs Bingley supposed? I wondered. ”

“ He was present at Tel-el-Kebir in mid-September, and again, two days later, at the entry of the British troops into Cairo, when he took the occasion—his passion in the interval having burned itself out, as such mere animal transports will—to break the truth to Mademoiselle Desilles of the fraud he had practised on her. ”

“ She told it him, being herself under the fear of death at the time; and there is no doubt that the poor woman still believed perfectly honestly in the legality of her first marriage, not only before heaven, but on the practical testimony of the little Catholic vade-mecum in which the names of the contracting parties, with their clerical witness, had been inscribed. ”

“ Ivy Mellor was to be the means, the condition of her success the bestowal of her spotless hand upon the rightful heir of Wildshott—a splendid dream, a transpontine melodrama. But John saw at once that a first condition of its success lay in a scrupulous obliteration of all clues pointing to the identity of his confederate: hence his anger on discovering the portrait, and the immediate measures taken by him to wipe it out of existence.
'Well, we know the rest—how the beautiful accomplice betrayed her trust; how she developed a passion for the very man whom she was scheming to disinherit ”

“ My casual encounter with Mr Bickerdike in Paris; the discovery that he was there to meet Mr Kennett, the son of a gentleman already slightly known to me; the accident witnessed by us; my subsequent visits to the patient, and his confiding to me of his story; my second meeting with Mr Bickerdike in London, and the coincidence of our common invitation to Wildshott; the act which betrayed Jean's father to me, and seemed to confirm the truth of the man's story ”

“ The Baron paused for refreshment, while Sir Francis applauded softly, his whole face beaming delight and approval.
'Have I convinced you so far,' continued the narrator, 'of the efficiency of the toils in which I was manœuvring to entangle my "suspect"? Very well: here was another little pièce de conviction. In spying about the scene of the crime I had picked up, in addition to the skeleton key—a button. It was a common horn coat-button, and was lying on the spot whence the gun had been fired—jerked off, probably, by the recoil. ”

“ The similarity of their names; the fact that he himself had always been regarded as the younger; the early death of the Quartermaster-Sergeant, and the consequent long removal of the one most damaging witness to the truth; Jean's prolonged absence from home in a foreign city; his own more apparent devotion to the woman to be claimed as his mother—he could find nothing in it all inimical to the success of the plot. Only the first essential would be to obtain possession of the vade-mecum. ”

“ So little was she convinced that, when her death came actually to be imminent, she called John to her side and confided to him the whole story, begging him to look after his step-brother's interests, and to vindicate, if possible, his true claim to the name and estates of Kennett, something about which, she told him, Jean already knew. And John promised she was not his mother, remember ”

“ This alleged evidence touched upon the question of a sham marriage, a clerical impostor officiating, which had turned out to be a true marriage; and the names of the contracting parties were recorded, with that of the clergyman in question as witness, on the fly-leaf of a little Roman Catholic vade-mecum, which had belonged to Jean's mother but of which her would-be wronger had secured possession, and which he retained to this day. ”