“And now, my dear fellow,” said my host, when the first greeting was over, “you have no time to spare. We dine at eight, and there are people coming to meet you, so you must just get the dressing business over as quickly as may be. By the way, you will meet some acquaintances; the Biddulphs are coming, and Prendergast (Prendergast of the Skirmishers) is staying in the house. Adieu! Mrs. Jelf will be expecting you in the drawing-room.”
I was ushered to my room—not the blue room, of which Mr. Dwerrihouse had made disagreeable experience, but a pretty little bachelor’s chamber, hung with a delicate chintz and made cheerful by a blazing fire. I unlocked my portmanteau. I tried to be expeditious, but the memory of my railway adventure haunted me. I could not get free of it; I could not shake it off. It impeded me, it worried me, it tripped me up, it caused me to mislay my studs, to mistie my cravat, to wrench the buttons off my gloves. Worst of all, it made me so late that the party had all assembled before I reached the drawing-room. I had scarcely paid my respects to Mrs. Jelf when dinner was announced, and we paired off, some eight or ten couples strong, into the dining-room.
I am not going to describe either the guests or the dinner. All provincial parties bear the strictest family resemblance, and I am not aware that an East Anglian banquet offers any exception to the rule. There was the usual country baronet and his wife; there were the usual country parsons and their wives; there was the sempiternal turkey and haunch of venison. Vanitas vanitatum. There is nothing new under the sun.
I was placed about midway down the table. I had taken one rector’s wife down to dinner, and I had another at my left hand. They talked across me, and their talk was about babies; it was dreadfully dull. At length there came a pause. The entrées had just been removed, and the turkey had come upon the scene. The conversation had all along been of the languidest, but at this moment it happened to have stagnated altogether. Jelf was carving the turkey; Mrs. Jelf looked as if she was trying to think of something to say; everybody else was silent. Moved by an unlucky impulse, I thought I would relate my adventure.
“By the way, Jelf,” I began, “I came down part of the way today with a friend of yours.”
“Indeed!” said the master of the feast, slicing scientifically into the breast of the turkey. “With whom, pray?”
“With one who bade me tell you that he should, if possible, pay you a visit before Christmas.”
“I cannot think who that could be,” said my friend, smiling.
“It must be Major Thorp,” suggested Mrs. Jelf.
I shook my head.
“It was not Major Thorp,” I replied; “it was a near relation of your own, Mrs. Jelf.”
“Then I am more puzzled than ever,” replied my hostess. “Pray tell me who it was.”
“It was no less a person than your cousin, Mr. John Dwerrihouse.”
Jonathan Jelf laid down his knife and fork. Mrs. Jelf looked at me in a strange, startled way, and said never a word.
“And he desired me to tell you, my dear madam, that you need not take the trouble to burn the hall down in his honour this time, but only to have the chimney of the blue room swept before his arrival.”
Before I had reached the end of my sentence I became aware of something ominous in the faces of the guests. I felt I had said something which I had better have left unsaid, and that for some unexplained reason my words had evoked a general consternation. I sat confounded, not daring to utter another syllable, and for at least two whole minutes there was dead silence round the table. Then Captain Prendergast came to the rescue.
“You have been abroad for some months, have you not, Mr. Langford?” he said, with the desperation of one who flings himself into the breach. “I heard you had been to Russia. Surely you have something to tell us of the state and temper of the country after the war?”
I was heartily grateful to the gallant Skirmisher for this diversion in my favour. I answered him, I fear, somewhat lamely; but he kept the conversation up, and presently one or two others joined in, and so the difficulty, whatever it might have been, was bridged over—bridged over, but not repaired. A something, an awkwardness, a visible constraint remained. The guests hitherto had been simply dull, but now they were evidently uncomfortable and embarrassed.
The dessert had scarcely been placed upon the table when the ladies left the room. I seized the opportunity to select a vacant chair next Captain Prendergast.
“In Heaven’s name,” I whispered, “what was the matter just now? What had I said?”
“You mentioned the name of John Dwerrihouse.”
“What of that? I had seen him not two hours before.”
“It is a most astounding circumstance that you should have seen him,” said Captain Prendergast. “Are you sure it was he?”
“As sure as of my own identity. We were talking all the way between London and Blackwater. But why does that surprise you?”
“Because,” replied Captain Prendergast, dropping his voice to the lowest whisper—“because John Dwerrihouse absconded three months ago with s seventy-five thousand pounds of the company’s money, and has never been heard of since.”
John Dwerrihouse had absconded three months ago—and I had seen him only a few hours back! John Dwerrihouse had embezzled seventy-five thousand pounds of the company’s money, yet told me that he carried that sum upon his person! Were ever facts so strangely incongruous, so difficult to reconcile? How should he have ventured again into the light of day? How dared he show himself along the line? Above all, what had he been doing throughout those mysterious three months of disappearance?
Perplexing questions these—questions which at once suggested themselves to the minds of all concerned, but which admitted of no easy solution. I could find no reply to them. Captain Prendergast had not even a suggestion to offer. Jonathan Jelf, who seized the first opportunity of drawing me aside and learning all that I had to tell, was more amazed and bewildered than either of us. He came to my room that night, when all the guests were gone, and we talked the thing over from every point of view; without, it must be confessed, arriving at any kind of conclusion.
“I do not ask you,” he said, “whether you can have mistaken your man. That is impossible.”
“As impossible as that I should mistake some stranger for yourself.”
“It is not a question of looks or voice, but of facts. That he should have alluded to the fire in the blue room is proof enough of John Dwerrihouse’s identity. How did he look?”
“Older, I thought; considerably older, paler, and more anxious.”
“He has had enough to make him look anxious, anyhow,” said my friend, gloomily, “be he innocent or guilty.”
“I am inclined to believe that he is innocent,” I replied. “He showed no embarrassment when I addressed him, and no uneasiness when the guard came round. His conversation was open to a fault. I might almost say that he talked too freely of the business which he had in hand.”
“That again is strange, for I know no one more reticent on such subjects. He actually told you that he had the seventy-five thousand pounds in his pocket?”
“He did.”
“Humph! My wife has an idea about it, and she may be right—”
“What idea?”
“Well, she fancies—women are so clever, you know, at putting themselves inside people’s motives—she fancies that he was tempted, that he did actually take the money, and that he has been concealing himself these three months in some wild part of the country, struggling possibly with his conscience all the time, and daring neither to abscond with his booty nor to come back and restore it.”
“But