The Wiles of the Wicked

He saw that I was extremely dubious about the date, therefore he led me back to the library, where there hung upon the wall a large calendar, which quickly convinced me.

Six; years had really elapsed since yesterday.

In that vexing and perplexing present I reflected upon the puzzling past. That happy dinner with Mabel at the Boltons, the subsequent discoveries in that drawing-room where she had sat at the piano calmly playing; her soft words of tenderness, and the subsequent treachery of that dog-faced man Hickman, all passed before me with extraordinary vividness. Yet, in truth, all had happened long ago.

Alas! I was not like other men. To the practical, level-headed man of affairs “To-day” may be sufficient, all-engrossing; but to the very large majority – a majority which, I believe, includes also many of the practical, the business of to-day admits of constant pleasant excursions into the golden mists of “long ago,” and many happy flights to the rosy heights of “some day.” Most of those who read this strange story of my life will remember with a melancholy affection, with a pain that is more soothing than many pleasures, the house wherein they were born, or at any rate the abode in which they passed the earlier years of their lives. The agonising griefs of childhood, the disappointments, the soul-racking terrors, mellowed by the gentle touch of passing years, have no sting for our mature sensibilities, but come back to us now with a pathos that is largely tinctured with amusement.

I stood there reviewing the past, puzzled, utterly unable to account for it. Age, the iconoclast, had shattered most of the airy idols which my youth had set up in honour of itself. I had lost six of the most precious years of my life – years that I had not lived.

Yet this man before me declared most distinctly that I had lived them; that I had enjoyed a second existence quite apart and distinct from my own self. Incredible though it seemed, yet it became gradually impressed upon me that what this man Gedge had told me was the actual, hideous truth, and that I had really lived and moved and prospered throughout those six unknown years, while my senses had at the same time remained dormant, and I had thus been utterly unconscious of existence.

But could such a thing be? As a prosaic man of the world I argued, as any one in his right mind would argue, that such a thing was beyond the bounds of possibility. Nevertheless, be it how it might, the undisputed fact remained that I had lapsed into unconsciousness on that winter’s night six years before, and had known absolutely nothing of my surroundings until I found myself lying upon the floor of the drawing-room of what was alleged to be my country house.

Six years out of a man’s life is a large slice. The face of the world changes considerably in that space of time. I found myself living a life which was so artificial and incongruous to my own tastes as to appear utterly unreal. Yet, as I made further inquiry of this man Gedge, every moment that passed showed me plainly that what he had said was the truth.

He related to me the routine of my daily life, and I stood listening agape in wonder. He told me things of which I had no knowledge; of my own private affairs, and of my business profits; he took big leather-bound ledgers from the great green-painted safe, and showed me formidable sums entered therein, relating, he explained, to the transactions at the office up in London. Some documents he showed me, large official-looking sheets with stamps and seals and signatures, which he said were concessions obtained from a certain foreign Government, and opened my private letter-book, exhibiting letters I had actually written with my own hand, but without having any knowledge of having done so.

These revelations took away my breath.

It could not be mere loss of memory from which I was suffering. I had actually lived a second and entirely different life to that I had once led in Essex Street. Apparently I had become a changed man, had entered business, had amassed a fortune – and had married.

Assuredly, I reflected, I could never have been in my right senses to have married that angular person with the powdered cheeks. That action, in itself, was sufficient to convince me that my brain had been unbalanced during those six lost years.

Alone, I stood, without a single sympathiser – without a friend.

How this astounding gap in my life had been produced was absolutely beyond explanation. I tried to account for it, but the reader will readily understand that the problem was, to me, utterly inexplicable. I, the victim of the treachery of that man Hickman, had fallen unconscious one night, and had awakened to discover that six whole years had elapsed, and that I had developed into an entirely different person. It was unaccountable, nay, incredible.

I think I should have grown confidential towards Gedge were it not that he apparently treated me as one whose mind was wandering. He believed, and perhaps justly so, that my brain had been injured by the accidental blow. To him, of course, it seemed impossible that I, his master, should know nothing of my own affairs. The ludicrousness of the situation was to me entirely apparent, yet what could I do to avert it?

By careful questions I endeavoured to obtain from him some facts regarding my past.

“You told me,” I said, “that I have many friends. Among them are there any persons named Anson?”

“Anson?” he repeated reflectively. “No, I’ve never heard the name.”

“Or Hickman?”

He shook his head.

“I lived once in Essex Street, Strand,” I said. “Have I been to those chambers during the time – the five years you have been in my service?”

Never, to my knowledge.

“Have I ever visited a house in The Boltons, at Kensington?”

“I think not,” he responded.

“Curious! Very curious!” I observed, thinking deeply of the graceful, dark-eyed Mabel whom I had loved six years before, and who was now lost to me for ever.

“Among my friends is there a man named Doyle?” I inquired, after a pause.

“Doyle? Do you mean Mr Richard Doyle, the war correspondent?”

“Certainly,” I cried excitedly. “Is he back?”

“He is one of your friends, and has often visited here,” Gedge replied.

“What is his address? I’ll wire to him at once.”

“He’s in Egypt. He left London last March, and has not yet returned.”

I drew a long breath. Dick had evidently recovered from fever in India, and was still my best friend, although I had had no knowledge of it.

What, I wondered, had been my actions in those six years of unconsciousness? Mine were indeed strange thoughts at that moment. Of all that had been told me I was unable to account for anything. I stood stunned, confounded, petrified.

For knowledge of what had transpired during those intervening years, or of my own career and actions during that period, I had to rely upon the statements of others. My mind during all that time had, it appeared, been a perfect blank, incapable of receiving any impression whatsoever.

Nevertheless, when I came to consider how I had in so marvellous a manner established a reputation in the City, and had amassed the sum now lying at my bankers, I reflected that I could not have accomplished that without the exercise of considerable tact and mental capacity. I must, after all, have retained shrewd senses, but they had evidently been those of my other self – the self who had lived and moved as husband of that woman who called herself Mrs Heaton.

“Tell me,” I said, addressing Gedge again, “has my married life been a happy one?”

He looked at me inquiringly.

“Tell me the truth,” I urged. “Don’t conceal anything from me, for I intend to get at the bottom of this mystery.”

“Well,” he said, with considerable hesitation, “scarcely what one might call happy, I think.”

“Ah, I understand,” I said. “I know from your tone that you sympathise with me, Gedge.”

He nodded without replying. Strange that I had never known this man until an hour ago, and yet I had grown so confidential with him. He seemed to be the only person who could present to me the plain truth.

Those six lost years were utterly puzzling. I was as one returned from the grave to find his world vanished, and all things changed.

I tried to reflect, to see some ray of light through the darkness of that lost period, but to me it seemed utterly non-existent. Those years, if I had really lived them, had melted away and left not a trace behind. The events of my life prior to that eventful night when I had dined at The Boltons had no affinity to those of the present. I had ceased to be my old self, and by some inexplicable transition, mysterious and unheard of, I had, while retaining my name, become an entirely different man.

Six precious years of golden youth had vanished in a single night. All my ideals, all my love, all my hope, nay, my very personality, had been swept away and effaced for ever.

“Have I often visited Heaton – my own place?” I inquired, turning suddenly to Gedge.

“Not since your marriage, I believe,” he answered. “You have always entertained some curious dislike towards the place. I went up there once to transact some business with your agent, and thought it a nice, charming old house.”

“Ay, and so it is,” I sighed, remembering the youthful days I had spent there long ago. All the year round was sunshine then, with the most ravishing snow-drifts in winter, and ice that sparkled in the sun so brilliantly that it seemed almost as jolly and frolicsome as the sunniest of sunlit streams, dancing and shimmering over the pebbles all through the cloudless summer. Did it ever rain in those old days long ago? Why, yes; and what splendid times I used to have on those occasions – toffee-making in the schoolroom, or watching old Dixon, the gamekeeper, cutting gun-wads in the harness-room.

And I had entertained a marked dislike to the place! All my tastes and ideas during those blank years had apparently become inverted. I had lived and enjoyed a world exactly opposite to my own – the world of sordid money-making and the glaring display of riches. I had, in a word, aped the gentleman.

There was a small circular mirror in the library, and before it I stood, marking every line upon my face, the incredible impress of forgotten years.

“It is amazing, incredible!” I cried, heart-sick with desire to penetrate the veil of mystery that enshrouded that long period of unconsciousness. “All that you have told me, Gedge, is absolutely beyond belief. There must be some mistake. It is impossible that six years can have passed without my knowledge.”

“I think,” he said, “that, after all, Britten’s advice should be followed. You are evidently not yourself to-day, and rest will probably restore your mental power to its proper calibre.”

“Bah!” I shouted angrily. “You still believe I’m mad. I tell you I’m not. I’ll prove to you that I’m not.”

“Well,” he remarked, quite calmly, “no sane man could be utterly ignorant of his own life. It doesn’t stand to reason that he could.”

“I tell you I’m quite as sane as you are,” I cried. “Yet I’ve been utterly unconscious these six whole years.”

“Nobody will believe you.”

“But I swear it to be true,” I protested. “Since the moment when consciousness left me in that house in Chelsea I have been as one dead.”

He laughed incredulously. The slightly confidential tone in which I had spoken had apparently induced him to treat me with indifference. This aroused my wrath. I was in no mood to argue whether or not I was responsible for my actions.

“A man surely can’t be unconscious, while at the same time he transacts business and lives as gaily as you live,” he laughed.

“Then you impute that all I’ve said is untrue, and is due merely to the fact that I’m a trifle demented, eh?”

“Britten has said that you are suffering from a fit of temporary derangement, and that you will recover after perfect rest.”

“Then, by taking me around this house, showing me those books, and explaining all to me, you’ve merely been humouring me as you would a harmless lunatic!” I cried furiously. “You don’t believe what I say, that I’m perfectly in my right mind, therefore leave me. I have no further use for your presence, and prefer to be alone,” I added harshly.

“Very well,” he answered, rather piqued; “if you wish I’ll, of course, go.”

“Yes, go; and don’t return till I send for you. Understand that! I’m in no humour to be fooled, or told that I’m a lunatic.”

He shrugged his shoulders, and muttering some words I did not catch, turned and left the library.

Chapter Twenty Two

Broken Threads

He is a faint-hearted creature indeed who, while struggling along some dark lane of life, cannot, at least intermittently, extract some comfort to himself from the thought that the turn must come at last – the turn which, presumably, will bring him out upon the well-metalled high-road of happy contentment.

I do not know that I was exactly faint-hearted. The mystery of it all had so stunned me that I felt myself utterly incapable of believing anything. The whole thing seemed shadowy and unreal.

And yet the facts remained that I was alive, standing there in that comfortable room, in possession of all my faculties, both mental and physical, an entirely different person to my old self, with six years of my past lost and unaccountable.

Beyond the lawn the shadow of the great trees looked cool and inviting, therefore I went forth, wandering heedlessly across the spacious park, my mind full of thoughts of that fateful night when I had fallen among that strange company, and of Mabel, the woman I had loved so fondly and devotedly.

Sweet were the recollections that came back to me. How charming she had seemed to me as we had lingered hand-in-hand on our walks across the Park and Kensington Gardens, how soft and musical her voice! how full of tenderness her bright dark eyes! How idyllic was our love! She had surely read my undeclared passion. She had known the great secret in my heart.

Nevertheless, all had changed. In a woman’s life half a dozen years is a long time, for she may develop from girl to matron in that space. The worst aspect of the affair presented itself to me. I had, in all probability, left her without uttering a word of farewell, and she – on her part – had, no doubt, accepted some other suitor. What more natural, indeed, than she should have married?

That thought held me rigid.

Again, as I strolled on beneath the rustling elms which led straight away in a wide old avenue towards where a distant village church stood, a prominent figure in the landscape, there recurred to me vivid recollections of that last night of my old self – of the astounding discovery I had made in the drawing-room at The Boltons.

How was I to account for that?

I paused and glanced around upon the view. All was quiet and peaceful there in the mid-day sunlight. Behind me stood the great white façade of Denbury; before, a little to the right, lay a small village with its white cottages – the villages of Littleham, I afterwards discovered – and to the left white cliffs and the blue stretch of the English Channel gleaming through the greenery.

From the avenue I turned and wandered down a by-path to a stile, and there I rested, in full uninterrupted view of the open sea. Deep below was a cove – Littleham Cove, it proved to be – and there, under shelter of the cliffs, a couple of yachts were riding gaily at anchor, while far away upon the clear horizon a dark smoke-trail showed the track of a steamer outward bound.

The day was brilliant. It was July in Devonshire, that fairest of all counties – and July there is always a superb month. The air, warm and balmy, was laden with the scent of roses and honeysuckle, the only sounds that broke the quiet were the songs of the birds and the soft rustling of the trees.

I sat there trying to decide how to act.

For the first time it occurred to me that my position was one of a certain peril, for if I did not act with tact and caution, that woman who called herself my wife, aided by that idiot Britten, might declare that I was mad, and cause me to be placed beneath restraint. Therefore, to gain my freedom, it was evidently necessary that I should act with discretion and keep my own counsel.

I looked around upon the fair panorama of nature spread before me. The world was six years older than when I had known it. What national events had, I wondered, happened in that time? Place yourself in my position, and picture to yourself the feeling of bewilderment that overcame me when I reflected upon what might or might not have transpired.

There crept over me a longing to escape from that place, the habitation of that awful woman with the powdered cheeks, and to return to London. All my life and pleasure had been centred in the giant capital, and to it I intended now to go back and seek, if possible, the broken thread of my history, which might lead me to an elucidation of the marvellous mystery.

The world around me, the calm blue sea, the cloudless sky, the green grass-lands, the soft whispering of the foliage seemed so peaceful that I could scarce believe that so much evil, so much of human malice, could exist. The tranquillity of my surroundings induced within me a quieter frame of mind, and I set to planning carefully how I might escape and return to London.

To endeavour to do so openly would, I saw, be to draw upon me the spies of my hideous wife. Was I not believed by all to be insane? Then certainly I should not be allowed to go at large without some one at my side.

I wanted to be alone. The presence of a second person entertaining suspicions as to my sanity would seriously hamper me, and prevent me prosecuting the inquiries I intended to institute regarding my past. No. To escape successfully I should be compelled to fly to London, and once there alter my appearance and assume another name. Search would undoubtedly be made for me, but once in London I felt confident in being able to foil any efforts of my wife’s agents.

Therefore I sat upon the stile and calmly matured my plans.

The chiming of a clock, apparently in the turret upon my own stables at Denbury, fell upon my ears. It struck one. Then the sharp ringing of a bell – the luncheon-bell – followed.

Gedge had told me that the place was near Budleigh-Salterton. Was it near enough, I wondered, for me to walk there, and was there a station? There might, I reflected, be a map in the library. I would be compelled to trace it out and seek my route, for I was absolutely ignorant of that corner of Devonshire.

Yes, my best policy, I decided, was to return to the house, act as indifferently as possible, and meanwhile complete my plans for escape.

I retraced my steps to the house by the path I had traversed, and upon the lawn was met by the man Gill, who announced —

“The luncheon-bell has rung, sir. I hope you feel a little better, sir.”

“Oh, much better,” I answered airily, and with an effort at self-possession followed him into the imitation old-oak dining-room, which Gedge had shown me during our tour of the place.

The woman with the powdered cheeks was already seated at the head of the table, erect and stately, with an expression of hauteur which ill became her.

“I hope you feel better after your walk,” she said, as I seated myself.

“Oh, much better,” I responded in a tone of irony. “The pain has practically passed.”

“You should really rest,” she said, in that squeaky, artificial tone which so jarred upon my nerves. “Do take the doctor’s advice.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to make a further unwriteable remark regarding the doctor, but I managed to control myself and reply —

“Yes, I think after luncheon I shall lie down for a little time. I have, however, some pressing letters to write first.”

“Let Gedge attend to your correspondence for to-day,” she urged, with that mock juvenility which rendered her so hideously ridiculous.

“No,” I responded. “I have, unfortunately, to attend to several pressing matters personally. Afterwards I will rest.”

“Do, there’s a dear,” she said.

I bit my lip. She nauseated me when she used that affectionate term. The only woman I loved was Mabel Anson, but whether she were still alive, or whether married, I knew not. The very thought that I was bound in matrimony to this woman sitting in the high-backed chair of carved oak was disgusting. I loathed her.

How I continued to eat the dishes Gill handed me I know not, nor do I remember what conversation passed between my pseudo-wife and myself as we sat there. Many were the abrupt and painful silences which fell between us.

She struck me as an ascetic, strong-minded woman, who, before others, fawned upon me with an affected devotion which in one of her age was ludicrous; yet when we were alone she was rigid and overbearing, with the positive air of one who believed me far beneath her alike in social station and in intellect. When Gill was absent she spoke in a hard, patronising tone, which so angered me that with great difficulty I retained my temper.

Yet it was my policy, I knew, to conceal my thoughts, and to lead her to believe that the words I had uttered, and my failure to recognise her, were owing to the blow I accidentally received, and that I was now, just as I had been before, her husband.

What a hollow sham that meal was! Now that I think of it I cannot refrain from smiling at my extraordinary position, and how I showed her delicate attention in order to the more impress her of my solicitude for her welfare.

When at last she rose it was with a hope that I would go to my room and rest.

I seized that opportunity.

“I shall,” I answered. “But don’t let them call me for dinner. I will have something when I awake. Britten has ordered perfect quiet.”

“Very well,” she answered. Then, turning to Gill, she said, “You hear. Mr Heaton is not to be aroused at dinner.”

“Yes, madam,” answered the man, bowing as we both passed out.

At once I walked along to the library, shut the door, and locked it.

I had much to do to prepare for my flight.

Yes, as I had expected, there was an ordnance map of the Teignmouth district tacked to the wall; and searching, I quickly found Denbury marked upon it, standing on the Exmouth road over the High Land of Orcombe, halfway between that place and Budleigh-Salterton. The South-Western Railway ran; I saw, from Exmouth to London, by way of Exeter, and my first impulse was to walk into Exmouth, and take train thence. The fact that I was probably known at that station occurred to me, therefore I made up my mind to avoid the terminus and join the train at Lympston, a small station further towards Exeter.

Taking up my pen I made a rough sketch-plan of my route, which passed Littleham church, then by the left-hand road struck across country, crossing the high-road to Exmouth at right angles, continuing through the village of Withycombe Raleigh, and keeping straight on until it joined the main road to Exeter. At the commencement of the village of Lympston it was necessary, I saw, to turn sharp to the left, and at the end of the road I should find the station, close to the river Exe.

In order to avoid mistaking the road and entering the town of Exmouth, I made a full and careful plan, which when completed I placed in my pocket. The distance, I calculated roughly, was between five and six miles over a road rather difficult to find without a map.

Among the books on the table I found a Bradshaw, with the page of local trains turned down, and from it learned that a train with connexion from London stopped at Lympston at 7:55 p.m., while the train in connexion with the up-mail from Exeter stopped there at 8:20. The latter I decided upon taking.

The fact that I had expressed my desire to sleep would prevent Gill coming to call me at the dinner hour, and by the time I was missed I should be well on my way to London.

The question of money occurred to me. I had noticed some loose gold and a couple of five-pound notes in one of the drawers which Gedge had opened, and having a duplicate set of keys in my pocket, I transferred the whole – a little under fourteen pounds – to my pocket.

Then I took out my cheque-book. It was too large to be carried in my pocket, therefore I tore out a couple of dozen or so, folded them, and placed them in an envelope.

I recognised that I could draw money with them, yet the bank need not know my whereabouts. If these people, who would, I suppose, call themselves “my friends,” made active search to find the fugitive “madman,” they would certainly obtain no clue from my bankers.