William Le Queux

“ Tibbie had told me so in confidence, but Jack naturally never mentioned his losses. If this were true, then it looked very much as though Ellice Winsloe was a shark, as my friend Domville declared him to be.
In a London club a white shirt and well-cut evening clothes enables many a scoundrel to pass himself off as a gentleman. Few young men who come into their inheritance and lead the fevered life of the West End escape the traps laid for them by those well-dressed blackguards who pose as friends and advisers, and at the same time cleverly contrive to pluck the pigeon. ”

“ Then parting the branches I saw to my utter amazement, Tibbie standing there with a man—a tallish fellow in a dark suit.”
“Tibbie!” I gasped. “With a man—in the wood?”
“Yes,” said my friend. “And mere. I overheard some of their conversation. The fellow looked to me like some farmer’s lout, yet he spoke with an air of refinement—he spoke to her, Wilfrid—as her lover!”
“Her lover!” I echoed, bewildered. Then the strange rumour I had heard had actually some foundation! The Honourable Sybil Burnet, one of the smartest women in London, was in the habit of meeting a lover in secret. ”

“ Oh! you would laugh if you could hear them laying open their hearts, as they call it,” she said gaily. “Why does a man call his love his secret—as though he’d committed some awful crime? It is most amusing, I can assure you. Mason and I have some good laughs over it very often.”
“But you surely don’t tell your maid such things?” I said, surprised, but knowing well her hoydenish spirit.
“Indeed I do. Mason enjoys the joke just as much as I do.”
“Ah! Tibbie,” I said reproachfully, “you are a sad breaker of men’s hearts! ”

“ You are young, wealthy, courted, flattered, and one of the best-looking women in London. You are well aware of that, Tibbie.”
“Aware of it!” she exclaimed hoarsely, in a low, broken voice. “Everyone tells me so. Yes,” she added bitterly, “I have everything except the one thing debarred me—happiness.”
“And why not that?”
“Can one be happy if one does not possess peace of mind? That, alas! I do not possess.”
“Because you hold a secret,” I remarked slowly, looking into her eyes as they suddenly met mine. “Will you never reveal it to me, Tibbie?” I asked. “I could surely assist you.” ”

“ I opened it, and Pickering shone his lamp within. The blinds were up, but Edwards rushed and pulled them down. Then, on glancing round, I saw it was a pretty well-furnished room, another sitting-room, quite different from those below, as it was decorated in modern taste, with furniture covered with pale yellow silk and comfortable easy chairs, as though its owner were fond of luxury. The odour of stale cigars still hung in the curtains. Perhaps it was the vampire’s den, a place where he could at all events be safe from intrusion with those fatal stairs between him and the street. ”

“ As I stood at the kerb looking up and down the wet pavement with its busy, hurrying crowd carrying umbrellas, I knew that I had commenced a very dangerous game. Would she keep her appointment? Did she really intend to go into voluntary exile in some mean street in one of the dismal southern suburbs? Was it possible that she who had from her birth been used to every luxury and extravagance could pose successfully as the wife of a compositor with forty shillings a week?
Ah! would not her very voice, her smart expressions, betray her as a lady? ”

“ I said. “There is no more intelligent class than the working-class in London, or indeed in any of the big cities of the North. It is the working-man who is the back-bone of England, after all. The capitalist may direct and public companies may manoeuvre, but it is the skilled labourer who has made England what she is. Yes, I’m quite with you there. I shall have to exert all my tact if I’m to pass as a printer among working-men. Yet Tibbie’s idea that I should be on a morning paper and be out at work at night is an ingenious one, isn’t it?” ”

“ Every woman who is popular, be it in merry Mayfair or tattling Tooting, blasé Belgravia or busy Brixton, is sure to make a host of enemies. There is no more bitter enmity in this world of ours than the jealousy between woman and woman.
So I had always dismissed the stories I had heard in various quarters concerning Tibbie as unjust and untrue. One rumour, however, a strange, faint echo, had reached me in a curious roundabout way while staying at a country house up in Yorkshire, and of late it had caused me to pause and wonder—as I still paused and wondered that night. ”

“ Beneath a dress shirt beats the heart of many a blackguard, and in our London drawing-rooms are to be found persons whose careers, if exposed, would startle the world. There are men with world-famous names who ought to be in the criminal dock, but whose very social position is their safeguard; and women with titles who pose as charity patrons, but are mere adventuresses. Our little world, Wilfrid, is, indeed, a strange one, a circle of class and criminality utterly inconceivable by the public who only know of us through the newspapers. ”

“ Then, ascending as quickly as my shattered nerves and swimming head would allow, I found above me a closed grating, through which I could hear the roar of the London traffic above.
I shouted, but could attract no attention.
To push up the iron was impossible, for I saw that it was locked.
A woman passed close by, and I shouted to her. She turned and looked in an opposite direction, surprised to see no one. She never suspected anyone being beneath the roadway.
An omnibus rumbled over me, and I saw that it was a green “Bayswater,” from which I concluded that I must be beneath Oxford Street. ”

“ Say you will, Wilfrid,” she gasped, taking my hand again. “You will not desert me now, will you? Remember you are the only friend I dare go to in my present trouble. You will not refuse to be known in Camberwell as my husband—will you?”
I was silent. Was any living man ever placed in dilemma more difficult? What could I reply? That she was in real deep earnest I saw from her white, drawn countenance. The dark rings around her eyes told their own tale. ”

“ I shall have compromised myself and placed you in an invidious position, all to no purpose.”
“But by discretion—by my remaining away from you, and only coming here by stealth when I know that Winsloe is not watchful, I may still remain your husband in the eyes of these people.”
“Yes, yes, Wilfrid,” she said eagerly, placing her nervous hand upon my shoulder and looking deeply into my eyes. “That is the only way. I must live here alone—in hiding. They must not find me. Let us have patience—patience always—and we may foil that man’s evil intentions. ”

“ Then, with a sigh, she added, “You, of course, cannot believe it, Wilfrid, but I am now a changed woman.”
“I do believe you, Tibbie,” was my blank reply, for want of something else to say.
“Yes,” she went on, “I see the folly of it all now, the emptiness, the soul-killing wear and tear, the disgraceful shams and mean subterfuges. The woman who has success in our set stands alone, friendless, with a dozen others constantly trying to hurl her from her pedestal, and ever ready with bitter tongues to propagate grave insinuations and scandal. It is woman to woman; and the feuds are always deadly. ”

“ Take Mason with you. Go to the Bath Hotel, and then slip away by train say up to Birmingham, and from there to London.”
“Yes, but I can’t take Mason. She must remain in ignorance. She knows far too much of my affairs already.”
“Well, I can’t go with you. It would be madness. And you cannot go alone.”
She was silent, her lips pressed together, her brows knit. Her countenance was hard and troubled, and there was a look of unmistakable terror in those wonderful eyes of hers.
“And if I act on your advice, Wilfrid, will you meet me in secret in London to-morrow or the next day?” ”

“ I am engaged to Mr Winsloe!’ In an instant the fellow’s affection turned to an ungovernable fury. He raved and threatened, declaring that she was his, and no one else’s, and that she should never marry Winsloe. At all this, however, Tibbie only laughed defiantly, apparently treating his words as mere empty threats, until of a sudden he took her roughly by the shoulders, and glaring into her face said, ‘Sybil! You will marry me, or I will tell the world the truth! ”

“ One sees more of the realities of life in Camberwell than in Mayfair. Here I see how the poor live, and I pity them. I was ignorant of how hard are the lives of the working people; how they have to struggle to keep the wolf from the door, or of the long hours of work, and the cutting down, of wages. Do you know, Wilfrid, I sometimes hear stories of poverty and distress that make my heart bleed. I want to help them, but how can I? To give them money would be to arouse suspicion against myself. ”

“ I must efface my identity, and for certain reasons—indeed to obtain greater security I must marry.”
“Marry!” I echoed. “Well, really, Sybil, I don’t understand you in the least. Why?”
“Because I can, I hope, save myself by marrying,” she went on quickly. “To-night I am going into hiding, and not a soul must know of my whereabouts. The place best of all in which to hide oneself is London, in one of the populous working districts. They would never search for me there. As the wife of an industrious working-man I should be safe. To go abroad would be useless.” ”

“ I unlocked a drawer in my old-fashioned bureau, a quaint old piece of Queen Anne furniture from Netherdene, and took out the paper with the cabalistic jumble of figures and letters which I had found on the body of the dead man in Charlton Wood.
For a long while I sat and studied the cipher and its key, finding it very ingeniously contrived—evidently a secret code established for some evil purpose, a code that had been given to the dead man to enable him to have secret communication with some persons who desired to remain unseen and unknown. ”

“ Jack was furious, for he saw how cleverly he had been fleeced by Ellice Winsloe, while I, on my part, turned to the little love of my youth, saying frankly,—
“As Tibbie seems to be still in fear that the French police may apply for her extradition on account of the sale of the naval secret to our Admiralty, she may be inclined to change her nationality in real earnest. She can do this by marriage, easier than by letters of naturalisation, and as we are man and wife and poor in the eyes of Camberwell, so, if Tibbie consents, will we become the same in the eyes of Society.” ”

“ With womanly enthusiasm she told me of the kindness of the landlady, who would not allow her to mope there alone. She had taken her out to see her friends, wives of working-men like herself, and they had gossiped, had high tea and discussed the affairs of the neighbourhood.
“Tibbie,” I said, presently, after we had been chatting some time, “I am compelled to leave London, and I confess I am very apprehensive on your behalf.”
“Leave London!” she exclaimed. “Why?”
“It is imperative. Winsloe is watching me, and is doing all he can to discover you. Every time I come here I run a great risk.” ”

“ What was her secret?
I, Wilfrid Hughes, confess that I admired her, though I was in no way a lady’s man. I was comparatively poor. I preferred to lead a wandering life as an independent bachelor, pursuing my favourite antiquarian studies, than to settling down to the humdrum existence of a country gentleman with the appended J.P. and D.L. after one’s name. I had just enough to make both ends meet, and while Netherdene was let I occupied, when not travelling on the Continent, a decently comfortable set of chambers in Bolton Street. ”

“ I swear to you I’m not. We could never marry. We are no longer lovers.”
“I hope not,” he said in an altered tone. “But pretended love-making is always dangerous, you know.”
“Well,” I said, pacing up the old tapestried room and down again, “let’s leave love out of the question. What I intend to do is to save Tibbie, and at the same time find out the truth. You, Eric, will help me, won’t you?”
“With all my heart, my dear chap,” he said. “But—well, somehow I have had lately a very faint suspicion of one thing; and that is, I believe Ellice Winsloe is deeply in love with her. ”

“ Dean’s Yard is a quiet square of ancient smoke-blackened houses, a cloister of the abbey in the old days, quiet and secluded even in these modern go-ahead times. In all Westminster there is no quieter, old-world spot, frequented in the daytime only by the few persons who use it as a short cut to Tufton Street and Horseferry Road, and at night quiet and deserted. ”

“ The person might, I mean, have merely resembled Eric Domville. Was your informant an intimate friend?”
“A friend—and also an enemy.”
“Ah! Many of us have friends of that sort!” I remarked, whereat she sighed, recollecting, no doubt, the many friends who had played her false.
The wild, irresponsible worldliness, the thoughtless vices of the smart woman, the slangy conversation and the loudness of voice that was one of the hall-marks of her go-ahead circle, had now all given place to a quietness of manner and a thoughtful seriousness that utterly amazed me. ”

“ All I knew was that we had turned off Regent Street about half-way up and that the house was situated in a quiet, rather dark street, an old-fashioned house of three storeys.
Eagerly in search of the place from which I had so narrowly escaped with my life I wandered in the night up and down those narrow thoroughfares, that puzzling maze of streets that lie between Regent Street and Soho Square—Brewer Street, Bridle Lane, Lexington Street, Poland Street and Berwick Street. ”

“ Every moment’s delay increases my peril. I must escape.”
“Why?”
But again she refused any explanation, merely saying that her departure from Leeds was imperative, and expressing despair that her enemies would never relinquish their hot pursuit. They were hounding her down, she said in despair, and they must sooner or later triumph over her.
“No,” I exclaimed. “Hope on, Tibbie. You must escape—you will escape. They shall never harm you as long as I have strength to be your protector.”
“Ah!” she cried. “How can I thank you, Wilfrid. To you I owe my very life. ”

“ And glancing down I saw the well-set-up figure, in drab tweeds with his gun across his shoulder, striding over the park, together with her brother Jack, my old friend Eric Domville, Lord Wydcombe, and several ladies of the house-party in shooting kit, followed by the keepers and dogs.
“Tibbie,” I said, seriously, turning to her. “You know we’ve known each other many years. I was your first sweetheart, and afterwards your friend. I am still your firm friend, and as such I may be permitted to give you a single word of advice—to urge you not to marry that man unless you really love him.” ”