"You desire to see Sir Nicolas Steele?" said I, not much liking the look of him, for he stood there just like a mute.
"I want to see him," he answered in a thick, husky voice, "and to see him at once."
"Well," said I, not liking his manner, "I've a notion that you can't do that, since he isn't in the house."
"Not in the house!" cried he, losing his temper all in a minute. "Oh! I'll soon know about that. Come, no lies—where is he, and where is the other?"
With this word, he took a step forward into the passage, and I saw his face for the first time. It was the face of an exceedingly handsome man, but there was a queer look in the eyes, such as I have never seen in the eyes of a human being before or since. Try as I might I couldn't describe that strange expression of his. Anger, determination, cruelty, all these were in it, but there was something beyond, a look as though the man had no power to keep his thoughts on any one thing for two minutes together; not the peering gaze of the madman, but the glance of one weakened by long illness until the nerves were shattered and the brain unhinged.
"Where is your master?" he repeated, forcing his way up the hall. "I mean to speak to him."
"Then you'll have to come to-morrow," said I. "You don't suppose I'm going to work a miracle for your particular benefit! I tell you that he isn't in the house'"
"Oh!" said he, drawing back and seeming to think of it. "Do you know if he has gone to Chelsea?"
"To Chelsea?" cried I, though his words sent me cold all over. "What would he do at Chelsea?"
"He would be with Mrs. Hadley," said he, though I could see that his mind did not follow his words.
"That's a name I never heard before, so I really can't say," I replied.
"You know her as Lilian More," he exclaimed, turning his eyes upon me quickly. "He is with her now! Don't tell me lies, or I will serve you as I mean to serve him!"
"Sir!" said I quickly, for his words shocked me, "Miss More died three weeks ago."
Now at this he did not break out or make any scene, as I thought he would do. It was wonderful to watch the manner of him; his brain seeming to grasp the truth for a minute, only to let it go in the next. As for his eyes, they were never still, and his look passed unceasingly from one object to the other.
"Three weeks ago," he said, just like a man dreaming, while he took up his hat mechanically. "That could not be; I was with her then."
"Then you are a relation?" said I.
"I am her husband," he replied; and the remembrance of that fact caused him to hold himself erect and to look me straight in the face. "I am her husband, and if any thing like that had happened, should not I be the first to know of it?"
"Properly you ought to be, sir," said I, "but perhaps you weren't in London then."
"I have been in London for three months," he answered, raising his voice suddenly. "I know you are telling me a lie—by God! how dare you?"
"It is no lie," I replied; and sorry for him I was, for the tears were now running down his face like rain. "If you are the lady's husband, sir, it is you who ought to have the picture I have been carrying about with me since the day after Miss More died. I'll fetch it for you."
With this I ran upstairs to my room and took the photograph out of my box. I was away a couple of minutes, perhaps; but when I came down again he was still standing fingering his hat in the hall, and he didn't appear to have moved a foot since I left him. I was half frightened to give him the picture, so strange was his manner; but the dead woman had wished it, and I meant to respect her words.
"Here it is, sir," said I. "It was her wish that you should have it, and no thought of ours."
He made no answer, but snatched the frame out of my hand. His restless eyes seemed to fall upon the portrait for a minute, then to rest upon the floor, and after that again upon me! It was plain that his dazed brain was only beginning to find the truth.
"She was my wife," he said very slowly, after a long pause. "Oh, God, help me! I shall never hold her in my arms again."
He saw this, and thrusting the picture into his breast, he turned to leave the house.
"Shall I give my master any message, sir?" I asked.
"Tell him that I came here to strike him dead," said he; and, before I could answer, he had disappeared down the street.
It was the first and last time I ever saw Robert Hadley—for that was his full name; but ten days later he wrote a letter from Charing Cross Hospital to Sir Nicolas, and begged my master to go and see him. And this was the way his story came to us, and with it the story of Lilian More.
She had married him in Birmingham, a year after Sir Nicolas met her there. He was a well-to-do widower then, with one little child—a girl three years old; but six months after his marriage he began to nip with his business acquaintances, and in a year he was a confirmed dipsomaniac. Business, friends, wife, and child—all these became nothing to him. He went down the ladder of self-respect fast, until he had no longer a home, and his wife was driven to get what sort of a living she could as a play-actress. That he made her life a hell to her I have no sort of doubt; but while the child lived, the woman was content to work and to slave for love of it. What she put up with from the man's temper and brutality and jealousies God only knows; for his affection for her was strong to the last, and I believe he would have shot any man who spoke twice to her. At the time we first met her in London he was in a private hospital; but the child was dead—killed by a blow of his, as more than one whisperer says, though God forbid that I should charge him with it. Be that as it may, the little one's death robbed Lilian More of all she cared to live for; and the end was what I have told.
But of all the women I ever met, she was the sweetest and the truest—and that I will say with my last breath.
CHAPTER V
THE JUSTIFICATION OF RODERICK CONNOLEY
It is my business in these memoirs to speak chiefly of the many strange things which happened to Sir Nicolas Steele during the last three or four years I served him; but I do not know why that should prevent me saying a last word here about Roderick Connoley, the barrister, and the many queer stories he told us during our stay in London and afterward in Paris. How far he believed these stories, what foundation in fact they had, it is not for me to decide. That he had lived a curious life, I knew well; that he had lost his left hand in his boyhood was a truth which my eyes told me unmistakably. But how he came to lose it, if his own account is not to be believed, is a thing I am not competent to speak about.
It was a year after the death of Lilian More that we met this remarkable man again; and then we ran against him quite by accident in Paris, where we had been living some months, and allowing London to forget that we existed. He came almost every day to the Hôtel de Lille, where we were stopping; and it was there that he gave my master the manuscript of the following story, which contains his own account of his deformity. Sir Nicolas declared at that time that he would send the writing to one of the London papers; but he never did so, and when I left him in Russia last year, I took the pages with me to America. In this way I am able to give the tale without altering a line or a word that Roderick Connoley wrote, and, for my part, I say this—that a stranger tale of an accident I never read.
THE