I was thankful for the prospect of a prompt deliverance. But I was not to be rid of him so easily, as his next words showed. He was drumming with his finger-tips on the front of the cab.
"By the way, you were good enough to mention something about a deposit for my handkerchief. I think that, after all, I will trouble you for one."
I advanced my hand towards my pocket.
"With pleasure. If you have no objection, I will buy the handkerchief right out at a liberal price?"
His reply was a sneer.
"Thank you; I am obliged; the handkerchief is not for sale. I prize it too greatly-as a present from my late lamented greatgrandmother. But something on deposit I don't mind."
"How much shall we say?"
"Say-we'll say ten pounds."
"Ten pounds!" I stared at him. The fellow's impudence was increasing. "You are jesting."
He turned on me quite savagely-his black eyes glared.
"Jesting? What do you mean by saying I am jesting?"
"I shall certainly deposit with you no sum approaching ten pounds."
He continued to regard me as if he were taking my measure. I met his glance unflinchingly. I wished him to understand that I was not quite the simpleton he seemed to take me for. I think he grasped something of my meaning. His tone became sullen.
"Make it five pounds, then."
"I am more likely to make it five shillings. However, under the peculiar circumstances, as I don't know what I should have done without your handkerchief, I don't mind going as far as half a sovereign, which is about four times its value."
His reply, though scarcely a direct answer to my words, still was sufficiently plain.
"You and I, Mr. Tennant, will spend the night together."
"Again, I ask you, what do you mean by that?"
The fellow smoothed his clean-shaven chin and grinned.
"I mean, Mr. Tennant, that I am beginning to suspect that it may be my painful duty to thrust myself on your society until I have ascertained what became of the woman who got into your compartment at Brighton, but who was not in it when we reached Victoria."
A creepy, crawly feeling went all over me. This came of not having told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, directly the accident had happened. Already I was suspected of the worst. And by such a fellow! Already, to a certain extent, I was in his power.
I did not give him the five pounds he asked. I did not make quite such an idiot of myself as that. But I gave him much more than his ancient rag was worth. He rattled the coins, gold coins, together in the palms of his hands; he chuckled at the sound of them; he called out to the cabman, "Stop!" Standing on the pavement, he took off his hat to me with a sweeping flourish, saying, with a laugh-
"The handkerchief itself-that priceless relic of my late lamented greatgrandmother! – I will call for at your office in Austin Friars."
CHAPTER III
THE NAME ON THE SCRAP OF PAPER
I was quite conscious, as I drove home the rest of the way alone, that I had made of myself, doubly and trebly, a fool. But, if possible, still worse remained behind.
How the African gentleman, of whom I read the other day, manages with 999 wives, I, for one, am at a loss to understand. When a man is on good terms with one wife-and I had rather be on good terms with one wife than on bad terms with 999-occasions do arise on which he experiences little difficulties. For instance, I had been in the habit of telling my wife everything-or, perhaps, it would be more correct to write, practically everything. It would have been well for me if there had been no reservations. As a matter of fact, I had said nothing about two or three little incidents of my pre-nuptial existence. Notably, I had said nothing about Ellen Howth-though that, perhaps, was rather more than an incident.
The result was that when I reached home I was in something of a quandary. The wife plied me with the usual questions, to which I was unable to supply the accustomed copious and satisfactory answers. She wished to know how my face came to be cut in that terrible fashion. I rigged up some cock-and-bull story about a broken window-a window had been broken, but not altogether in the manner I led her to infer. Then she found that a button was missing from my overcoat. Another cock-and-bull story had to be manufactured to account for that. It did not require a woman's keen eyes to discover that there was something amiss about my general demeanour-that I "wore a worried look." In endeavouring to satisfactorily account for that I blundered fearfully. We went to bed with a shade of coolness perceptible on either side. I felt that I had been ill-used generally, and Lucy felt that I had ill-used her.
The wife had bound up my face with a sticking-plaster. In the morning the sticking-plaster was much in evidence. I had not had a good night's rest. I should like to know who would have done, after my adventures of the evening! I got up, not so much in a bad temper as oppressed with gloom. Lucy, as a matter of course, plied me with her questions all over again. We had a fencing match while dressing. The match was continued at breakfast, till the buttons almost came off the foils. I had resolved, in the small hours of the morning, to screw my courage to the sticking point, and to make a clean breast of it to some one. I told myself that the first plunge would be the worst, when I had taken that all would be well. But, by the time I started for the City, I had become so aggrieved with Lucy that my resolution, as it were, had assumed a different hue. It was irresolution again.
I bought all the papers. I searched them to learn if anything or any one had been found upon the Brighton line. I did not see very well how there could have been, in time for the fact to have been printed in the morning papers. But a morbid anxiety constrained me to the search. Pilbeam, who always travels with me to town, displayed almost as much interest in the papers as I did. He wanted to know why I had bought them. He became facetious in his way-which is his way, and, thank Providence, his way only. I listened to Pilbeam's facetiæ while I was mentally asking myself if it would be better-for me-for her to be found living or dead. In the one case I knew that she would denounce me at once to the police, and I should sleep that night in gaol-and then, what could I say or do? In the other, the odds might be slightly in my favour. Under the circumstances, I naturally enjoyed Pilbeam's jokes. They were so funny, and so suited to my mood.
That was a dreadful day. There was no business doing. Had there been I might have been saved from thinking-and from drinking. As a rule, I never drink anything in town. But that day I had to. I was too invertebrate to keep going without it.
Soon after midday I was sitting in one of the City bars-one of those in which men play chess and draughts and dominoes. I was leaning on one of the little marble tables scribbling aimlessly upon a sheet of paper. Some one, standing in front of me, addressed me by my name. I looked up. It was a man with whom I had occasionally done business-a man named Townsend, a tall, well-built fellow, with what one sometimes hears called the "beauty of the devil." He had always been something of a mystery to me. Although I had done a good deal for him at one time or another, he had never given me an address at which, in case of necessity, I could find him. His reference, which hitherto had been a sufficient one, had been a City bank. He used to give me instructions, and then would call at the office to see what I had made of them. He certainly seemed to get hold of reliable information, principally about mining securities; but that he was no City man I was persuaded. There was about him an indefinable something which irresistibly suggested the West End. He struck me as some butterfly of fashion with opportunities and tastes for punting of various kinds. That he confined his transactions to me I never for a moment believed, and in spite of his being the best dressed and the handsomest man I ever saw, whenever he gave me anything like a large line, before I operated I was always careful to have an eye for cover.
"I've been looking for you," he said, as I glanced up at him. "They told me at the office I should probably find you here. I want you to