The Changeling

"But I fear he would do nothing for you."

"I came here – one day three weeks ago – you were away – I knew that. I gave Alice some secret information just for her own ear, not the kind of thing she would tell you."

"Get on, man!"

"I told her – you don't know, of course; I told her you ought to know – you suppose he's dead."

"Man! man!" said John.

"Alice's first husband – Anthony Woodroffe. You think he's dead. I told her where he was."

"Where?" Dick sat up, suddenly. "Anthony Woodroffe?"

"Why should I ask whether he's dead or alive?"

"That's what Alice said. As for me, I told her I was astonished. 'Alice,' I said, 'I did think you were respectable.'"

"What does this man mean?" asked Dick. "Anthony Woodroffe?"

"Well, boy," said John, "this chap brought us the news where he was. We thought, on the whole, there was no need to tell you – so we didn't tell you. I've been to see him. He's pretty comfortable."

"He is pretty comfortable," said Anthony's late companion between the boards. "If Abraham's bosom is better than the cold kerb, and softer than the doss-house, he is quite comfortable – for he died this morning."

"Where did he die?" asked Dick.

"In the Marylebone Workhouse Infirmary." The man got up and shuffled away. As he went out of the room, he held out his hand, and there was the chink of coin.

"My father dead!"

"Ay, lad, he's dead. What better for you and everybody? I've seen him, on and off, most days. He was a hardened sinner, if ever there was one."

"Dead! I have been taught to regard him with a kind of loathing; but – we can only have one father. Dead! In a workhouse infirmary!"

"He has left two sons. You are not the only one."

"Two sons. Yes" – concerning his half-brother Dick could not choose but speak vindictively – "the other will hear to-morrow who his father was. He shall hear also that his father is dead. He and I will be the mourners at the pauper's funeral."

CHAPTER XXIII.

ONE MORE ATTEMPT

"That man again!" Lady Woodroffe threw the card into the fire. "Tell him I will not see him. No. Let him come up."

It was Richard Woodroffe, proposing to make his last attempt. Before doing so, he had run down to Birmingham and seen the newly-found witness. He was a most trustworthy person; he picked out the photograph of Lady Woodroffe from a bundle of photographs; he remembered the case and the lady perfectly well. There was, therefore, no doubt possible that she had been in Birmingham at that time, and that she had lost her own son.

"Sir" – she sat up in her chair with angry eyes – "this is persecution! I have already given a patient hearing to your most impudent story."

"You have, Lady Woodroffe." Neither her angry looks nor her presence disconcerted him now. He was so perfectly certain of his cause, and of her shameless falsehood, that he stood before her at ease, and even with some appearance of dignity.

"I even took the trouble to invite your friend, the person for whom you profess to act, the woman with the delusion – "

"You did." He did not wait to be invited. He took a chair and sat down in it.

"In order to convince her of her absurdity."

"In which you failed. Because, after all your talk, there remained the solid fact – the death of Sir Humphrey's son."

"Sir Humphrey had one son only, who is still living. I was wrong in thinking that a plain statement of facts could move the poor mad woman. She brought with her a young person, who encouraged her to insult me. They even attempted to assault me, I believe. After the grossest abuse, they carried off a bundle of baby-linen, and things that I had treasured, for reasons which I fear you are incapable of understanding."

"No, Lady Woodroffe, on the contrary, I understand them very well. You brought them out on this occasion with the intention of showing this poor lady what I must venture to call your defiance."

"My defiance? Certainly; I accept the word. My defiance. You appear to be almost as polite as your friends, Mr. Woodroffe."

"You could not have chosen a more effective manner of announcing your intentions. 'There!' you said, 'these clothes which you made with your own fingers show that it is your boy; yet you shall not have him, and I defy you to prove that he is yours.'"

"You are correct on one point. I do defy you to prove that fact."

"Very well; I am here to-day to tell you that I have advanced one more step, and a very important step it is."

"Important or not, I defy you to prove the fact. This is not, however, exactly an acknowledgment. But I shall not argue with you; I believe I ought to hand you over at once to my lawyers, to be dealt with for conspiracy."

Richard Woodroffe smiled. "I wish you would," he said. "I should like nothing better than the publicity of an action."

"Oh," she groaned, "the pertinacity of the black-mailer!"

"I shall not be insulted, whatever you say. I am here to tell you that the proofs have now closed round you so completely, that there is not left, I verily believe, a single loophole of escape."

Lady Woodroffe rose with dignity. "You talk to me, sir – to me? – of escape and loophole. Go, sir – go to my solicitors."

"Certainly." Richard continued, however, to occupy his chair. "I will go to your solicitors whenever you please. I would rather go to them than come here. But for the sake of others, I would prefer that you should acknowledge the fact, and let the son go back to his mother. He is my own half-brother, but it is not fraternal affection that prompts me in this research, I assure you. If you refuse to hear me, I shall have to go to your solicitors through Mrs. Haveril's solicitors."

"Oh, go on, then!"

She sat down again, and crossed her hands in her lap, assuming something of the expression of a person bored to death by a very bad sermon.

"I have certain evidence in my hands, then" – he could not avoid a smile of satisfaction – "which connects you with the dead child – your child."

Lady Woodroffe caught her breath and started, as if in sudden pain.

"Go on, sir."

"I will tell you what it is. You arrived one evening at the Great Midland Hotel, Birmingham, with an Indian ayah and a child. You engaged three rooms – a sitting-room and two bedrooms; you explained that the child had been taken suddenly and alarmingly ill in the train; you sent out for a medical man; he came; he kept the maids running about with hot water, and the boys going out for remedies and prescriptions; he stayed with you all night, watching the case; in the morning your child was dead; three days afterwards you buried him. There is no monument over the child's grave, because you made an arrangement with the help of Dr. Robert Steele, and substituted another child for him, and you went away two or three days after the funeral, and disappeared. The rooms were taken in your name; the books of the hotel prove so much."

"Oh! This man is tedious – tedious – with his repetitions."

"I have been down to Birmingham again. I have now found an old waiter who remembers the circumstance perfectly well – Indian ayah and sick baby and funeral. He says he remembers you, but that I doubt. I have also found the medical man who was called in. He not only remembers the case, which he entered at the time in his note-book, but he also remembers you – "

"After four and twenty years – !"

" – and picked you out of a bundle of photographs. I think you will admit that this is an important step?"

She made no reply. Her face was drawn and twisted with the pain of listening.

"What is wanted now," Richard added, "is the connection of yourself and the child. If we fail there – "

"You will fail."

"We shall ask Sir Robert."

"You will fail."

"Then we shall give publicity to the case – I don't quite know how. All the world shall understand. You will have to explain – "

"All the world? It is the High Court of Justice that you must address. I shall look to the judge to protect me. Remember it is in my power to prove that I was in Scotland at that very time."

"On that very day when the child died?"

"On that very day," she replied, firmly and without hesitation.

"Lady Woodroffe, I cannot believe what you say."

"You can prove what you like," she repeated, "but you cannot prove that I bought the child."

"To speak plainly, I don't believe one word about your proving an alibi, Lady Woodroffe, any more than I believe that remarkably bold falsehood about the child's clothes. We shall prove the death of the child beyond a doubt. You can then, if you please, find out something that will amuse the world about Humphrey. As for the publicity – "

"Since you will only prove that a woman took my name, I care nothing. My reputation is not likely to be injured by such a story. Who will believe against my word – that I – Lady Woodroffe – a leader, sir, in a world of which you and your like know nothing – the world which advances humanity – the world of religion and of charity – the world which combats vice unceasingly – should condescend to a crime so ignoble and so purposeless?"

"I am not concerned with your credibilities, Lady Woodroffe. I learn that you made a large use of them with Mrs. Haveril, and only desisted when they proved a failure. Then you took to defiance."

"The publicity will fall upon the fashionable physician, the great man of science, the head of his profession, who will have to acknowledge that he found a child and bought it for a certain unknown person – a noble way for a young physician to earn a fee! The publicity will also fall upon the now notorious lady who has got up in the world since she sold her only child for fifty pounds, to keep it and herself out of the workhouse. No injurious publicity will fall upon me, other than the discovery of some woman who once took my name."

"You are identified by your photograph. You forget that."

"Can I? After four and twenty years? Can any woman of my age – forty-nine – be identified, by a stranger, with another woman of twenty-five or thereabouts? Now, Mr. Richard Woodroffe, what else have you got to say?"

"I have only this to say. I came here to-day, Lady Woodroffe, in the hope that what I have told you would show you the danger of your position. For the sake of this lady, who is worn almost to death by the anxiety of her situation, I hoped that you would confess."

"Confess! I to confess! You speak as if I were a common criminal."

"No," said Richard, "not common by any means."

Lady Woodroffe left her chair and stepped over to the fireplace. She looked older, and the authority went out of her very strangely. She laid her hand on the shelf, as if for support, and she spoke slowly – with no show of anger – slowly, and with sadness.

"I think, sir, I do think, that if you could consider the meaning of this charge to a person in my position, the suffering you inflict upon me, the mischief you may do to me, and I know not how many more, by persisting in this charge, you would abandon it."

"I cannot; I am acting for another."

"You are playing a game to win. I don't accuse you of sordid motives. You want to win."

"Perhaps I do."

"Have you asked yourself the simple question, whether it is possible for me to commit such a crime, and then to confess?"

"I have to win this game, Lady Woodroffe. I think I have won it."

"It is not won yet. And believe me, sir, it will not be won unless I choose."

"We can place you in a very awkward position, anyhow."

"Mr. Richard Woodroffe, you came here to make a final appeal to me; it is my turn to make a final appeal to you. I am a woman, as perhaps you know, of very considerable importance in the world. Such a charge as you bring against me would not only crush me, if it were proved, but it would dislocate or ruin a great many associations and institutions of which I am the very soul. Thousands of orphans, working girls, Magdalens, and sinners, would lose their best friend. I am their best friend; my tongue and my pen keep up the stream which flows in to their relief. Is it not possible for that woman to think of these things? Or, there is the boy. He is partly, I suppose, what he is by education, partly by his nature; take away from him his position as a gentleman of rank and family, send him out disgraced to make his own way in the world, and he will sink like lead. You call him your half-brother. Well, Mr. Woodroffe, he is not a young man of many virtues; in fact, he has many vices."

"That I can well believe."

"If he has seven devils now, after this disclosure he will have seventy-seven devils."

"That also I can well believe. But, of course, I do not think about him."

"Then, Mr. Woodroffe, can you not persuade that poor woman to go home, to be content with what she has seen and you have proved?"

"No, I cannot."

"Can you not remind her that she sold the child on the condition that she would never trouble about him, or seek to know where he might be living?"

"No, I cannot. She has seen her son; she knows who he is; she wants your acknowledgment. Give her that, and, I don't know, in fact, what will happen afterwards."

Lady Woodroffe sat down and sighed heavily. "Be it so," she said. "You will go on; you will do your worst."

Richard Woodroffe regarded her with a sense of pity, and even of respect. The woman had supported her position by a succession of shameless lies; she was now virtually confessing to him that they were lies. But she had so much to lose – her great position among religious and charitable people, her reputation, the respect which her blameless life and her great abilities had won for her. All these things were threatened.

"Madam," he said, his face full of emotion, "if it were only your son to be thought of, I would retire. But there is this poor lady, who is only kept alive, I believe, by the hope and belief that her son will be restored to her. Believe me, if I may speak of pity for you – "

"Pity?" She sprang to her feet with fire and fury in her cheeks and eyes. It is, happily, the rarest thing in the world to see a woman – I mean a woman of culture – overmastered by passion. Yet it lies there; it is always possible. In the heart of the meekest maiden, the most self-governed and most highly bred woman, there lies hidden the tigress, the fish-wife, the scold, the shrew. Formerly, whenever women were gathered together, they quarrelled; whenever they quarrelled, they fought – sometimes with fists, cudgels, brooms, chairs, sometimes with tongues. Men were so horribly frightened by the scolding wife, that they ducked her, put her in a cage, carried her round in a cart. The little word "pity" was the last drop in the cup. Lady Woodroffe raged and stormed at the unfortunate Richard. For the time her mind was beyond control; afterwards, he remembered that such a fit of passion showed the tension of her mind. He made no reply. When her torrent of words and threats was exhausted, she threw herself into her chair, and buried her face in her hands.

Then Richard quietly withdrew.

CHAPTER XXIV.

A HORRID NIGHT

Richard Woodroffe walked away with hanging head. A second time he had learned that his proofs might not be so convincing, after all. The defence set up by a woman of the highest social position, character, and personal influence, that she had never been in Birmingham in her life, that on the day of the alleged death of her child she was in Scotland, that she knew nothing of the person who was said to have assumed her name, could only be met by evidence concerning that person by an identification of that person with Lady Woodroffe by an old man, speaking of an event of four and twenty years ago, and by an alleged resemblance; as to the packet of clothes, that would certainly be no evidence at all. He himself was perfectly certain of the fact; there was no doubt left in his own mind. But would his proofs be accepted in a court of justice?

As he walked along with these heavy reflections, he was startled by a hand upon his shoulder – a thing which, in former times, caused the sufferer to swoon with terror, because it was the familiar greeting of the sheriff's officer, the man with a writ. That part of the officer's duty is now, however, gone. It was, in fact, the hand of Sir Robert Steele, who, his day's work finished, was taking the air.

"Dick," he cried, "I haven't seen you since – since – when?"

"Since the day when you made a study of heredity."

"Oh, you mean when you dined with me? Yes, Dick, my boy, I have heard things about you – the Strange Adventures of a Singer."

"Of course you have. Lady Woodroffe has told you."

"How you are fishing in troubled waters, and catching nothing. Yes, I have seen Mrs. Haveril – a most interesting woman; but she ought to go home and keep quiet. Keep her quiet, Dick. Put down your fishing-rod, and make that good lady sit down, and keep that good lady quiet."

"I will as soon as I have restored her son to her. We have found him, you know."

"You tell me so. You think it is Sir Humphrey Woodroffe, is it not?"

"We are perfectly certain it is. Lady Woodroffe has told you, I dare say, what we have done."

"Something – something. You are working, no doubt, in the interests of the second baronet?"

"Yes, oh yes." Dick grinned. "He is my half-brother, you know. I am anxious to restore him to his real rank, which is mine. He shall become what he is pleased to describe me – an outsider and a cad."

"Two Cains and no Abel. A slaughterous pair. Well, have you proved your case yet?"

"To our own satisfaction, perfectly. To the complete satisfaction of the world as soon as the story is told. For lawyers – well – there is one point lacking."

"That one point! That one point! Always that one point! It is like connecting your family with illustrious ancestry – always the one point wanting. I need not ask what that point is."

"No, because you are the person who can supply the link."

"Is that so?" asked the doctor, dryly. "Then, while you are waiting for that link, my dear Richard, I advise you to tie up your papers and go back to legitimate business." He stopped, because they were arrived at his own door. "Come in," he said. "Now then, my dear boy, sit down and let us have it out. First of all, however, understand that you cannot establish that link. You say that I am the only person who can supply it. Well, if that is so, remember that I shall not."

"You mean, will not."

"Just as you like. The distinction between will and shall is sometimes too subtle for the rules of syntax."

"But, my dear Sir Robert, just consider what a lot I can prove. Lady Woodroffe goes to a hotel in Birmingham. She drives in hurriedly; her child is ill. She sends for a medical man. She takes two bedrooms and a sitting-room. She has an ayah. The medical man stays with her the whole night. In the morning the child dies – "

"How do you know all these things?"

"By the note-book of the man who was called in, by the books of the hotel, by the evidence of the medical man himself, by the evidence of a waiter who remembers the case, by the register of deaths."

"All this looks strong, I admit."

"So that we can actually prove the death of Sir Humphrey's only son. And we can call upon Lady Woodroffe to inform us who is the man calling himself Sir Humphrey's only son."

"You prove that a woman calling herself Lady Woodroffe did all these things."

"And we can produce a witness who will swear to her identity."

"After all these years I doubt if you could – if that evidence would be received. I admit that you have a case. As it is, you could make a cause célèbre. You are able to make things horribly uncomfortable for Lady Woodroffe; and you are able to inspire the young man, her son, with a lively animosity against yourself."

"I don't mind that in the least. I shall go and see him. I shall say, 'You are my half-brother. You are first cousin to a collection of common folk, whose commonness will rejoice your heart. I will introduce you to them. You shall take tea with them – the tea of shrimps, periwinkles, and watercress, that you have yet to learn – and to love.' I shall exhaust myself in congratulations."

"With the domestic affections I never interfere. Here, however, is a difficulty. You say 'we' will do this and that. Who is 'we'? You yourself? Suppose you spring all this upon the world? And suppose nobody takes any notice?"

"I may advertise the whole history, and offer a reward for the discovery of the identification of the woman."

"But nobody can identify Lady Woodroffe."

"My old doctor – "

"Your old doctor would break down. Lady Woodroffe has only to deny absolutely that she is the woman. Counsel can always suggest – man in India – another woman – assumption of name – real wife with her father, Lord Dunedin – letters to prove it – old nobleman swears it. Venerable old nobleman – ever seen him? – rather like Abraham."

"Well, we shall find some way of forcing the history upon the public. And a certain event has just happened which may give me an opportunity."

"What is that?"

"My father is dead. He died yesterday. He was also Humphrey's father."

"Oh, I am sorry."

"No one need express any sorrow on that account. As he left my mother when I was a baby, I have never seen him. I did not know that he was in England. It appears that he has been a sandwich-man for some time. And he died in a pauper infirmary. As for myself, I feel neither shame nor grief; he was to me, as to you, a stranger. But perhaps I can use the event in order to give publicity to our story, if we must court publicity."

"Well, let us hope – But go on."

"As for Lady Woodroffe, she has actually confessed the thing."

He then proceeded to tell the story of the child's clothes.

The doctor became thoughtful. The audacity of showing and claiming the clothes astonished him.

"It isn't evidence, Dick," he said.

"No; but it's complete proof to the true mother."

"Perhaps – to her."

Sir Robert, in fact, admitted everything. But at this stage a mere admission of the kind meant nothing.

"It was a strange thing to do," said the doctor. "There is the audacity of despair about it. She had quite forgotten the fact that the register of deaths contained the name of the boy. If it had been a common name, it would have mattered little. She did not tell me that the child died in Birmingham. That doctor – what is his name? Ah! I don't know him. Does he know the meaning and bearing of his evidence?"

"I believe not. He will not talk, however. He has undertaken to preserve absolute silence until he is called upon to speak."

"Keep the power of disclosure in your own hands, Dick. Above all things, do that. Why did she produce the child's clothes? Woman's wit is hard to follow. 'My word against all the world,' she meant, I believe. As if she must be believed on her bare assertion, against all the facts that could be brought against her. It was her pride. Like all female leaders, she is incredibly proud. She means to stand up and deny. On the other hand, the situation is harassing; there are points in the case which make it almost impossible – "

"The goings-on of my ill-conditioned brother, I suppose?"

"Perhaps – perhaps. I wish she had told me when and how the child died."

They dined together. Over an excellent bottle of Chateau Mouton they exchanged further confidences.

"My dear Dick," said the doctor, "it's a serious situation. You propose to cover a woman of the highest reputation with infamy. She says, in effect, 'You are quite right. I am that infamous person. But prove it.' You want to restore to another most amiable and honourable woman her son, and he would break her heart in a year. You want me to identify the lady, and thereby to confess my share in a transaction which might be made to look like complicity in a fraud and a conspiracy. I told her at the time that it looked like substitution, though she called it adoption. Well, I can imitate the lady's frankness; that is to say, I do not in so many words confess the truth, but I show it; I allow you to conclude that the thing is true. And, like the lady, I defy you. You will find out nothing more. And if you were to put me in the box – if you were to make me tell the truth about that infernal babe – never, never would I confess to knowing the name of the lady. And without that evidence you can never prove your case."