The House by the Lock/Chapter 26

", you don't!" I remarked, cheerfully, and with the force of superior muscles I pulled him towards me. "Come, sit down here by me," I said. "I want to talk to you." And somehow it came about that we subsided on the cushioned seat together.

He had recognised me, of course, as the man he had seen in the hotel–the man, Noel Stanton, against whom I did not doubt his cablegram had warned him. He was pale as death, and I could see that this meeting, added, like the piling of Ossa upon Pelion, on top of all that he had already gone through, had robbed him of the shattered remnant of his nerve.

Still, he was ready to "bluff" and brave if out while he could. "Confound you!" he exclaimed. "What are you about? You must be mad to attack a stranger without the slightest provocation. Let me alone, sir, or I'll rouse the car."

"I wouldn't, you know, if I were you," I said coolly, for the more excited he grew the more did my own calmness come back to me. "You've been playing a dangerous game ever since you took your passage in the American liner St. Paul (or, rather, since Carson Wildred took it for you), but you've never, perhaps, steered so close to the wind as to-night, when you resorted to incendiarism as a finishing stroke."

The fellow stared at me in simulated nonchalance and defiance, but my hand was on his shoulder still, and I could feel the shudder that ran through his body.

"I say you must be mad," he reiterated.

"So you observed before; but I could very easily prove to you that I'm not, if you were not already sure of it. You can call for assistance if you like, but if you do the story I've got to tell will go flashing over the wires back to 'Frisco, and on to Denver, and you will find yourself in almost as hot a place as if you had stayed at the Santa Anna Hotel, where you wanted the world to think that poor Harvey Farnham had been roasted."

Once more the fit of shivering seized him. He glanced wildly about, as though to find some means of escape, but there was none.

"I am a bigger man and a stronger man than you," I remarked, in a significant and reflective manner. "Better hear the alternative I've got to offer. I know everything, you see–that is, everything that concerns you, and the curious game you've been playing.

"I've been just three days behind you everywhere since you left New York. I've got every link in the evidence now, and what with Bennett, of Denver, and the proprietor of the Santa Anna Hotel, and a few others, I can burst your wretched little soap bubble plot in four-and-twenty hours. There's just one way in which you can stay my hand."

"What's that?" He had spoken out impulsively, before he had stopped to think. The instant the words were uttered he saw all that they admitted, and bit his lip. But it was too late; he was completely trapped.

"I'll tell you," I said, keeping my hand on his shoulder, almost caressingly. "I'd listen attentively, if I were in your place. What you can do is to make a clean breast of your story from beginning to end. I'm willing to pay you more for confessing than Wildred did for plotting. Then you must go back to England with me, and stand by while the thing is made public."

As I spoke he did not once take his eyes from me. It was remarkable even yet, now that he was out of his disguise, how strong his likeness was to Farnham. He might have been a younger brother.

When I had finished he sighed and drooped his head. His own hair, which was very closely cut, was of a beautiful reddish golden colour, much the shade of Karine Cunningham's, as the light fell on it from above. I thought of her with a great wave of passionate love, and more of hope than I had dared to feel for many a long day.

Perhaps it was the recollection of her lovely face and the wonderful halo of her hair which caused me for an instant to relax my grasp. I only became conscious of having done so when the fellow twisted himself from under my hand, and springing lithely to his feet would have darted through the swing door had I not leaped after him like a tiger.

We fought together as the car swayed and bounded along its tracks. Once he dived under my arm and was almost out of my clutches, but I caught him by the collar with so fierce a grip that the linen of his shirt tore, and the garment ripped open to the waistcoat. Something which he wore beneath snapped, as he still struggled to escape me, and a bright object flashed under my eyes as it fell, and dropped with a slight metallic noise to the floor.

Evidently it was to him an article of value. Impulsively he stooped, forgetful for a second of the object which had animated him, and thus the advantage became all mine again. I had him pinioned fast.

At our feet, I now had time to observe, lay a broken gold chain and a locket.

Twisting my hand firmly in his collar I bent over and picked up the ornaments. "Allow me," I said, smiling. And as I was about to put the locket in his hand I could not avoid seeing the portrait that it framed. It was an open-faced, old-fashioned thing, set round with a rim of pearls. The crystal had been cracked across in the fall, but the delicately painted ivory miniature within was intact, and I gave a slight exclamation as I saw that it represented Karine Cunningham.

If I had been surprised to see her picture in the "studio" at the House by the Lock, I was doubly surprised to see it in a locket worn by a young desperado on the other side of the world. Impulsively I withdrew my hand which held the ornament, with the feeling that the man had no right to it–that I could not return it to him again.

"Give it back to me!" he ejaculated, forgetting his evident fear of me for the first time, and speaking with a certain manly fierceness that thawed the chill of my contempt for him. "If I've got a right to nothing else on earth, I've got a right to that. It's a portrait of my sister."

"Your sister! You swear that?"

"Of course I swear it. I don't see why you shouldn't know it–though I haven't done much credit to the name of Cunningham."

I could not doubt him. Not that I had not every reason to believe that he would be willing to lie as fast as he could speak if it happened to suit his purpose, but the ring of sincerity in his voice was unmistakable.

I let go my hold upon him. Such was his astonishment at the manœuvre that he made no attempt to take advantage of his freedom, but simply stood still and stared at me.

"Here is the locket," I said. "I came from England to California to serve Miss Cunningham's interests, and I will not lay my hand upon her brother."

"I don't know what you mean," he said, sullenly.

"I'll tell you," I returned, "if you'll sit down here and listen to me for a few minutes longer. After that, as far as I am concerned, you are free to do as you choose. You look surprised–but whatever may have been your faults and your offences, I would stake my life you love your sister."

"She is the only being on earth I do love," he replied, still half dazedly.

Then he sat down, his eyes furtively on me, and I seated myself beside him.

"She is sacrificing herself for someone," I remarked. "I think I begin dimly to understand now who that someone may be. I think, too, that circumstances have given me the right to be inquisitive, as I can still further explain to you later on. Is Miss Cunningham going to marry Carson Wildred to save you from any unpleasant consequences of the past, for instance?"

He started as though he had been struck.

"She is not going to marry Carson Wildred!" he exclaimed.

"Oh, yes, she is, unless it can be prevented. I see I have even more to tell you than I thought. Is it long, may I ask, since you have seen your sister?"

"Last November," he said drooping his head, and bringing under my eyes again the hair that was like hers.

"Ah, that explains your ignorance. The man had not shown his hand at that time. Now I am going to trust to your affection for Miss Cunningham, to your presumable wish to save her from unhappiness, and talk to you as though we had been allies instead of enemies. Perhaps I may be a fool for my pains; but something seems to say to me"

"Something says right. Go on!" he ejaculated, gruffly.

No doubt the very most dunder-headed of lawyers or detectives would have told me that I was mad, thus deliberately to give all my good trumps away to the treacherous, hired scoundrel whom I had been hunting down with the dogged ferocity of a bloodhound. On principle, of course, I was all wrong, and I knew it; but still I went on.

I told him the strange story of the past few weeks from beginning to end. I commenced with the part which concerned Farnham and Carson Wildred alone. I did not pass over that which had to do with Karine, my hopeless and unrequited love for her, my passionate anxiety to serve her at all costs; and I ended by declaring my certainty that Carson Wildred and Willis Collins were one and the same man.

"He is doubly a murderer," I said. "And yet, unless you and I together can keep him from it, he will be your sister's husband."

"I'll kill him first!" exclaimed my companion.

"I think the trick can be done without resorting to such extreme measures as that," I returned, "especially if you are willing to come over from his camp to mine."

He looked at me sharply for a moment without answering, then he said:

"You seem pretty quick, I've noticed, in what you've just been telling me at putting two and two together. Well, you say you were at the Santa Anna Hotel the night the murder was committed ten years ago. You knew there were two men mixed up in it. You remembered one of them; would you remember the other?"

"He was a mere boy," I said, "and it's a long time ago. He must have changed almost beyond recognition."

"He's just twenty-nine at present; I've good reason to know, as I'm he."

It was my turn to be astonished, but it was not policy to show it. Therefore I merely said, "Oh, indeed!"

"You see," he went on dully, "that's where Wildred has had his pull over me since he ran across me, by a piece of devil's own luck, in Canada five years ago. As you say, I have changed; but his eyes are like gimlets, they'd pierce a stone wall. It's quite true, as you suspected, that he and Collins are one. I knew him by a queer scar on his hand, shaped like a star–perhaps you've observed it? But he didn't mind. He seemed even to find a sort of pleasure in telling me how he had been to a clever fellow in Paris, and got himself made over into another man, so that he might the more easily turn his back upon various little episodes of the past. I couldn't have proved it if I'd wanted to, he was so different, and had worked up such a new record for himself to travel on. He knew that, and he knew, too, that I was in his power."

"I don't exactly see how that came about," I objected.

"Don't you? You're not so quick as usual, then. I'd been accused of the murder at the Santa Anna Hotel. I hooked it, and got over to Mexico, so to Spain and France. I'd always been a black sheep, you know, but that was the first really serious trouble I'd got into. However, as I said, five years later, when Wildred and I met, I was in Canada; I'd turned actor (I'd always a little talent that way), and was doing pretty well. He pointed out to me–and I wasn't very long in seeing his point–that I was not so much changed but what I should easily be recognised by those who had known me during those wild days when I'd been under his thumb in San Francisco, and the authorities there would still be very glad to hear of me. He didn't happen to want anything of me just then, but he allowed me to understand that it was to my interest to keep sweet with him. And from that day to this he's had his eye on me."

"But it was he who was accused of that murder, not you," I said.

"What!"

The man seemed either not to believe or understand me.

I repeated the statement, and then, when he stammered his astonishment, his ignorance of all that had taken place in San Francisco after his escape (at which we had all tacitly connived at the time), I went on to explain the true circumstances of the case. Carson Wildred had deceived him into the belief that he alone had been suspected–that if he were caught he would be promptly hanged.

"He has told the same story to your sister, I would swear!" I exclaimed, hotly. "It is for this reason that she has been persuaded into promising to marry him. Believing that he knows your whereabouts, and holds it in his power at any moment to have you punished as a murderer–believing, too, no doubt, that you did commit the murder, she has been ready to save your life by the sacrifice of all that has made hers dear."

"Curse him! I'd take my oath you're right!" he asseverated. "He's sly enough and vile enough for anything."

"Did you ever see Harvey Farnham?" I questioned.

"Yes, years ago I knew him well, and liked him immensely–as he did me, I think. It was in Tuolumne County, California, where he had a gold mine–the Miss Cunningham. It was I who named that, oddly enough it may seem to you, after my sister, of course. He wasn't aware of that, but thought it was just a whim of mine, that probably I'd admired some girl called 'Miss Cunningham,' and wanted to pay her a compliment. You see, no one knew me by my right name even then.

"It was before that hateful time when I got in with Collins, or Wildred, whichever you like to call him, and not long after I'd run away from home and England under the assumed name of Hartley–it was my mother's maiden name. I was only seventeen or eighteen, but I was pretty sharp for my years, I'm afraid, for I'd been among a queer lot already, and one night I would have got into a row with some older man over cards, a row that might have ended badly if it hadn't been for Mr. Farnham, who had dropped into the place to look on, and who stood by me for all he was worth.

"It seemed he noticed me the moment he entered the room, thinking that I looked enough like him to be his own son. Afterward he took me up, making a lot of me, wanting to find out where I'd come from, and all that. He thought my resemblance to him (which everyone who saw us together invariably remarked) a wonderful joke, and used to call me his 'boy,' and 'sonny,' getting it into his head that I was a sort of 'Mascot,' who brought luck to him in whatever he undertook. That was the principal reason, of course, that he was so keen on having me name his mine for him. I think if I had sowed all my wild oats, and been willing to settle down a bit into a respectable member of society, there was a time when he wouldn't have minded adopting me, for some old, unhappy love affair or other had kept him out of the marriage-market, eligible as he was, and he swore that he never meant to marry, even for the hope of having an heir to all his money. Yes, I might have been that heir if I hadn't been a fool, for Farnham certainly thought the world and all of me in those days. As it was, he did me many a kindness."

"And now, by way of repaying that affection and those kindnesses," I could not help exclaiming, with a returning touch of the old bitter contempt, "you've undertaken to help his murderer to get off scot free. You've been masquerading in the very clothes the poor fellow wore, you've been using his luggage, trading on the likeness to him which once won for you his regard, heightening it in every way by artificial means, so that not only shall Carson Wildred, or Willis Collins, escape suspicion, but that he may enrich himself on the dead man's millions. You even set an hotel on fire to finish the whole fiendish plot with a fine dramatic effect!"

The poor wretch, who had made such a wreck of his young life, was white as death, and shaking like an aspen. I could see the beads of sweat oozing out on his pale forehead. "For God's sake," he implored, "don't say that to me; I can't bear it! Until you told me just now I swear to you by all I hold sacred–by my sister's love, which I so little deserve–that I never dreamed of Harvey Farnham's being dead. You may believe me or not, as you like, but you're her friend, so I should be glad that you should believe. And, at least, you owe it to me in common justice to hear what I've got to say.

"Collins always managed to keep his eye on me, and knew my whereabouts and my doings, making me feel that at any moment he could come down on me if he chose. I daresay he had other men in his power like that, men whom he thought he might wish to make his tools at one time or other. I didn't often hear from him, though I knew myself shadowed, and knew also, only too well, whom I had to thank for it. You can't guess the horror of the feeling, or how it got on my nerves. I fancied it would drive me to madness or suicide one day, always knowing I was watched, that I could never, try as I would, escape that Eye, which was really Willis Collins's, spying me out across the ocean.

"Well, a cablegram came from him commanding rather than asking me to go to England, saying that it would be much to my advantage to do so, and that my fare and all expenses would at once be sent me in advance. There was just a hint that I had better not refuse, which I understood as well as if it had been a definite threat; and, anyhow, there was a certain attractiveness in the idea of going home–I hadn't seen Karine or England for so long.

"I didn't mean to let my sister know of my presence–I would have spared her that–but I fancied myself standing among the crowd in the Park, watching her drive by, or something of that sort. Even a glimpse of her face would have been sweet.

"But when I arrived one of the first things Wildred did was to tell me that he knew the Tressidys, with whom Karine was living, that he had heard my sister often speak of me, and that he would secretly arrange a meeting between us. I couldn't resist the temptation of having a few words with her when it was offered for the asking, and I saw her at the House by the Lock. An excuse was made to bring her and Lady Tressidy there–something about a portrait of Karine that was in a queer room called the 'studio'–and while Wildred was showing Lady Tressidy over the house I saw my sister, and had a talk with her. She felt grateful to Wildred for bringing it about, and fool that I was, I didn't suspect the deep game he meant to play with her, using me as the decoy. I thought he had merely been willing to take the trouble that he might get the more work out of me when he wanted it, though what the work was for which he had brought me to England I didn't yet know.

"After that first meeting with Karine I had given Wildred my word never to try and see her again; now I understand why. He wished to revive all the old love she had felt by the sight of me, awaken her sympathy for my troubles, when she should learn his version of them from his lips, and then keep me from her, lest I should hear that he had asked her to be his wife, threatening to betray me if she did not accept, and so, in spite of my cowardice (for I am a moral coward), setting me against him, to be his slave and tool no more.

"When I had been in England about three or four weeks, keeping out of the way of anyone who might possibly remember me, Wildred suggested the scheme of my travelling back to America, impersonating Farnham, and finally finishing the plot, as I did finish it to-night. He admitted that it was for this he had sent for me, but swore Farnham himself was in the thing as deep as he; that it meant a fortune to them both, which they were to share, and which could be had in no other way. He explained that Farnham had had bad luck in speculations, was bankrupt, hadn't the pluck to begin over again on the lowest rounds of the ladder, nor to undertake carrying out this plan himself. He would funk the fire business, Wildred said, and might, instead of escaping, actually be burned to death. The object to be gained, of course, I was made to believe, was getting the life assurance. Farnham was supposed to have several policies, each one for an enormous sum; he had left everything of which he should die possessed, life assurance and all the rest, to Wildred, who would actually go halves with Farnham when the money should be secured.

"I have nothing of my own, you know, except what I can make by my wits, for my father disinherited me, and I've had just a little too much pride ever to take anything from Karine. Wildred offered me ten thousand pounds to work this business for him; half to be paid down, half when the thing had been successfully carried through to the close.

"Of course, I had sense enough to know it was a villainous fraud, but I've never been very scrupulous, and it was easy to persuade myself that I owed Harvey Farnham a good turn for what he did for me in the past. Besides, I wanted the money, and there was five thousand in notes (Wildred was too sly to give a cheque) on the table for me to take or leave. I didn't see that I was going to do much harm to anybody except the insurance companies, who are rich enough to lose, as Farnham hadn't a relative in the world; but before heaven, if I'd dreamed of the truth, I'd have let Wildred do his worst before I'd have gone in with him.

"As for the Santa Anna, I knew that every board of the hotel was assured–the landlord would lose nothing, and after I'd kindled the fire I knocked like mad on your door. I fancy, though you didn't know it, it must have been that which first began to rouse you. I didn't give myself much time to get out, after taking off the disguise (which I flatter myself I did pretty well), but I just managed it. I can tell you I was desperate when I walked in here and found you; but now I was never so thankful for anything in the course of my life."

"The present question is, then," I said, "whether you will go straight to England with me and tell all you know about Carson Wildred? If we stopped on this side, to prove things step by step as we went, we should labour under two disadvantages. It would mean indefinite delay, and you would get into trouble about that business at the hotel to-night. To sail at once for England, and let matters here take care of themselves for the present, is our only plan, I think. What do you say?"

"You are sure that Wildred can't swear my life away?"

"As sure as I am that we are both alive at this moment."

"Then I'm in your hands. I'll save my sister, and I'll get even with Wildred for making a tool and a dupe of me."

"By the time we have landed on the other side," I answered, "there'll still be a clear fortnight to do the first, and I think we may accomplish the latter transaction simultaneously."