He had all that money lying at his bank, and after trying all kinds of subterfuges to satisfy his conscience that he had as good a right to it as anybody – that if he had not won it some one else would – that people who gambled deserved no sympathy – that all was fair in money wars, as he dubbed gaming – and that he would do more good with the money than any one else – and the like, his conscience refused to be bamboozled and told him constantly that he had won that money by a clever piece of dishonourable sharping, and that he ought to be ashamed of himself.

And he was.

That was one non-appetiser; the other was his interview with the gardener the previous night, and over this, after waking with it ready to confront him, he had been metaphorically gnashing his teeth.

“How I could have made myself such an ass! How I could have been such an idiot as to run such risks! It is like dragging her down to be the common talk and gossip of the place. Why, I shall always be that scoundrel’s slave. What an idiot he must have thought me!”

No wonder the coffee tasted bitter, and that the bacon was too salt, while he thrust the butter away as rancid, and the bread as being dry.

“If it were not for one thing I’d – Well, Mrs Sarson?”

The landlady had run in hastily, looking pale and excited, and then stood speechless before him.

“Is anything the matter?” exclaimed Chris, the blood rising to his cheeks, as with boyish dread he seemed to read in his landlady’s eyes the fact that she knew of the past night’s escapade.

“Matter, indeed, sir! Then you have not heard?”

“Heard what?”

“Mr Gartram, sir – dead!”

“What!”

Chris Lisle sprang from his chair and stood feeling as if the room was swimming round him, while the landlady went on hurriedly.

“I’ve just this minute heard, sir. There was a dinner party; Doctor Asher and that Mr Glyddyr, who has the yacht, were there; and they say he was taken bad about eleven. Doctor Asher stopped, and, in the middle of the night, the new doctor was fetched, too.”

“Oh, it can’t be true,” cried Chris, and dashing out of the room he seized his hat and hurried along the street, but had not gone far before he was conscious of the fact that groups of people were standing about talking.

Further on he saw that shutters were closed; and as he reached the harbour there, lying off some distance was Glyddyr’s yacht, with a flag up, half-mast high, while, as soon as he came in sight of the Fort – Gartram’s pride – in place of the bright glistening windows, every opening had a dull dead look, and appeared to be staring at him blankly. There was no doubt now – every blind was drawn down.

Chris uttered a groan.

“My poor darling, it will break her heart! Poor old fellow! Cut off like that.”

Resentment, bitterness, died out in this great sorrow; and Chris could only see now the fine-looking, masterful, elderly man, who had always been his friend, till ambition had led him astray, and he had discarded the suitor who had grown up to love his child.

It seems too horrible! One of these terrible fits.

He was on his way up to ask to see Claude, and try to administer some consolation, but he paused. It would be an outrage to go now. It would be indecent to force his way there in disobedience to the wishes of the man who was lying blank and cold – blank and cold as the edifice he had so proudly reared with the money he had fought for so long.

“No,” thought Chris. “I must go back and write.”

In the manly frankness of his disposition, up to that moment, no thought of obstacle removed, or the future that lay before him, had come across his brain, till just then he caught sight of the gardener coming quickly along the town street, when, like a flash, came back to him the scene of the past night, and his discovery. Then, with the incongruity of human nature, there came a feeling of satisfaction in the thought that Gartram could never now sting him with contemptuous allusions to his wretched escapade, and that now he need not fear this man.

Momentary thoughts, which he chased away with a feeling of indignation against himself as he stopped the gardener.

“Is it – true?”

“Yes, sir. It’s true enough. He was a hard master, one as come down upon you awful if he see a weed; but I’d give that there right hand to have him alive and well before me now.”

Chris bowed his head and walked slowly back, to start aside and gaze fiercely in the eyes of the man whom he encountered a few yards farther on, for, as he was approaching the post-office, Glyddyr came out suddenly with a telegraph form in his hand.

The two young men paused as if arrested by some power over which they had no control, and as they stood gazing at each other, Chris, waiting for Glyddyr to speak, a crowd of thoughts flashed through his brain.

Claude – alone – her own mistress, what of your triumph now!

Very different were Glyddyr’s thoughts. Claude was somehow mixed up with them, but he read in his rival’s eye distrust, suspicion, and a hidden knowledge of his latest acts; and they passed on rapidly through his mind, till he saw Chris Lisle denouncing him as a murderer and about to seize him then.

Neither spoke, and after the long, intense gaze of eye into eye had lasted some moments, each went his way, one back to his yacht to try and make up his mind whether he ought to call at once, the other home to sit down and write to Claude, and tell her that he was always hers, and that in this, her terrible hour of affliction, he was longing to try and share her pain.

“And if I said that,” thought Chris, as he slowly tore up the letter, “she would think it an insult, and that I am triumphing over the dead.”

So Chris’s letter, full of the tender love he felt, never reached Claude’s hand.

Volume Two – Chapter Thirteen.
Glyddyr Communes with Self

Glyddyr gave the orders to unmoor and make sail, after a great deal of hesitation, and then countermanded those orders, and went down into his cabin. There he made the man who acted as steward and valet open for him a pint of champagne, which he tossed off as if suffering from a burning thirst.

That seemed to do him good. His hand ceased to shake, and the peculiar sensation of sinking passed off for the time as he sat by the cabin window, lit a cigar, and let it out again while he watched the Fort, with its drawn-down blinds, and thought over the last night’s proceedings.

“It was an accident,” he said to himself, “a terrible mistake, and all in vain. Good heavens! who could have thought that a little drop of clear white-looking stuff could have done that; and him so used to taking it.”

He shrank away from the window, dashed away his cigar and sat down there in the cabin, with his face buried in his hands.

“I ought to have summoned help when I saw how strange and cold he turned. It would have saved him, poor old fellow! I wouldn’t for all the world that it should have happened, it seems impossible, and I can’t even believe it yet.”

With a start of childish disbelief, he straightened himself and looked out of the cabin window, as if he had half-expected to see the blinds drawn up, and the Fort looking as usual.

But there was no change, and, with a groan of agony, he turned away and stamped his foot with impatient rage.

“Just like my cursed luck,” he cried. “Any one but me would have made a pot of money over Simoom. I could have made enough to free me from this wretched bondage, but now it’s just as if something always stood between me and success, and baulked all my plans.”

He let his head sink upon his hands, and sat thinking again, but only to raise himself in an angry fashion and ring the bell.

“You ring, sir?” said the steward at the end of a minute.

“Of course, I rang,” said Glyddyr with petulant rage. “You heard me ring, and knew I rang, or you wouldn’t have come. Well, where is it?”

“I beg pardon, sir?”

“I say, where is it?”

“Where is what, sir?”

“The pint of champagne I told you to bring.”

“Beg pardon, sir, I did bring it and you drank it.”

“What?” roared Glyddyr. “Yes, of course, so I did. I had forgotten. Bring me another.”

“Guv’nor on the house?” said one of the sailors.

“Hold your row. Upset over that affair up at the toyshop,” said the steward in a whisper, and he took in the fresh pint of wine.

“Set it down.”

“Yes, sir.”

The steward beat a retreat, and Glyddyr tossed off another glass, poured out the remainder, and sat gazing at it vacantly for a few minutes before taking it up, his hand once more trembling violently.

“If I weren’t such a cursed coward,” he said, “I could get on. He must have had a lot before, and that’s what did it. By George, it gives me the horrors!”

He tossed off the wine.

“No,” he muttered as he set down the glass; “it wasn’t what I gave him. It wasn’t enough, and to think now that there was all that lying ready to my hand, without my having the pluck to take what I wanted. I must have been a fool. I must have been mad.”

“Curse these bottles!” he cried, after a pause. “Pint? They don’t hold half – a wretched swindle. I believe there are thousands lying there; and I might have borrowed what I wanted, and all would have been well; but I was such a fool.”

“No, I wasn’t,” he cried, as if apostrophising someone. “How could I get it with that woman coming in and out, and the feeling on me that one of the girls might open the door at any moment. They’d have thought I meant to steal the cursed stuff. Then, too, it seemed as if he might wake up at any moment. Bah! How upset I do feel. That stuff’s no better than water.”

He rose angrily, and opened a locker, from which he took out a brandy decanter, and placed it on the table. “Let’s have a nip of you. I seem to want something to steady my nerves.”

He poured out a goodly dram and tossed it off.

“Ah, that’s better! One can taste you. Seems to take off this horrible feeling of sinking. – Poor old fellow! Seemed as if he would wake up. Never wake up again.”

He started up and looked sharply round, trembling violently; and then wiped his forehead with his hand.

“This will not do!” he muttered. “I mustn’t show the white feather. I’ve got nothing to fear. Nothing at all. Why should I have? It was an accident; I didn’t mean it. No: wouldn’t hurt a hair of the old man’s head – no, not a hair. Yes: it was an accident.”

He drew up his head and picked up the cigar he had thrown down, re-lit it, and after a puff or two, threw it down once more.

“Wretched trash!” he muttered, taking out his case and fiercely biting the end off another. One of Gellow’s best. “Ah,” he cried, as he brought down his fist upon the table heavily. “Only let me once get clear of that man! And I might have done it so easily,” he continued, as he lit the cigar, “so very easily, and been free of that cursed incubus for a time.”

He let his cigar go out again, and his head sank upon his hands as he stared in a maundering way at the cabin door.

“But it’s always my luck – always my luck; and I’m the most miserable wretch that ever crawled.”

There was no one present to endorse his words, as the maudlin tears rose to his eyes and dripped slowly down between his feet, nature seeming to distil the wine and spirits he had been imbibing all the morning ever since he had left the cot in which he had lain tossing in a fever of fear all through the night.

But after a time champagne and brandy had their effect, and the abject shivering man of half-an-hour before seemed to have grown defiant as to the future.

He was in the act of snapping his fingers with a half-tipsy laugh, when a boat bumped up against the side, and he heard a trampling on the deck, and the buzz of voices.

“What’s that?” he panted, completely sobered now, and trembling violently, as he suddenly turned to one of the most abject-looking and white-faced creatures it is possible to imagine. “What’s that?” he panted, with his voice trembling; and he took up the brandy to help himself again. “Bah! some boat has struck us. That’s all.”

“Beg pardon, sir,” said a voice; and the steward stood in the doorway.

“Yes; what is it?”

“Boat from the shore, sir, with a policeman in the stern and another man.”

“Policeman? Other man?” faltered Glyddyr in a low, faint voice; “what do they want?”

“You, sir,” said the man; and then, “Oh, here they are.”

Glyddyr sat back, staring at the men wildly.

“Well,” said the steward to himself; “I have seen the guv’nor a bit on, but this beats all. I say, you might have waited till you were asked to come down.”

This to a policeman who was stooping down to enter the cabin, while Glyddyr clutched the table, and held on, for the sickening sensation in his head threatened a complete collapse.

Volume Two – Chapter Fourteen.
Wimble finds a Curiosity

Any one who could have watched Michael Wimble shaving himself at early morn would have wondered whether the man were really sane, for, as he performed the operation upon himself, he worked as if it was for practice – to keep his hand in, just as acrobats and instrumentalists go through their tasks constantly, so as to keep a tight hold upon that which has taken them so much time and labour to acquire.

Being a barber, he considered that those who shaved should shave well, and that the wearing of moustache, or the very smallest morsel of whisker was but a wreak pandering to the savages who had introduced or followed the moustache movement in the time of the Crimean war.

“It’s filthy, that’s what it is, filthy,” Wimble used to say; “and how a man can go about with his face like the back of a wild beast, beats me.”

Consequently, soon after springing from his solitary bed, the owner of the Museum used to set light to a spirit lamp to boil a small shaving pot of water, and then, as there were signs of ebullitions at the side, the brush was dipped in, and the performance commenced with a tremendous lathering.

There were no half-measures. Wimble passed the brush deftly all over his quaintly wrinkled face, till masses of lather hung on to his ears, and covered his cheeks, so that only his eyes were seen. Then, as he glared at himself in a shaving glass, he set to and scraped and scraped his countenance all over, applied the brush again and again in obstinate places, and finished off by grinning hideously in the little mirror, as he stood, with the razor passing over the skin in a way that would have suggested horrors about to be perpetrated by a maniac, weary of his life, to any one who could have seen the process.

Clever as he was, too, in the manipulation, there were at times, however, suggestions that a looker-on might have been right in his ideas. As, for instance, upon the morning in question, when a slip or a pimple – it is needless to say which – necessitated the use of sponge and sticking-plaster.

Then the task was done, and Michael Wimble finished dressing, talking to himself rapidly the while, sundry words which were spoken more loudly than others, giving the key to the subject of the man’s thoughts – the old, old theme, love. Other words told too of disappointment and jealousy, and all this tended to make Mr Wimble go the wrong way when he started for his regular morning walk along the shore.

His way was always west, but he went east, so as to pass Chris Lisle’s lodgings; and as he did so, staring hard at the drawn-down blinds, and the chimney pot innocent as yet of smoke, he gnashed his teeth softly, for there were two new flowers in Chris’s bedroom window – a fuchsia and a geranium, in pots of dazzling red, and the mignonette box, full of nasturtiums, which flowed over and hung down, had been newly painted a delicate green.

Fresh attentions to the lodger. The previous week clean muslin curtains had been put up, and the week before there was a new cover over the little table in the window upon which lay the big History of England which Mrs Sarson had taken in, or been taken in with, in shilling numbers, by a book canvasser, and had bound afterwards for one pound fifteen and sixpence, gilt lettered, and blind tooled, the canvasser had said.

That table cover, when Wimble saw it through the half-open window, was composed of crochet work and green satin, and must have been the widow’s handiwork, and a delicate compliment to her lodger.

That was bad enough, but the two new flower pots in the bedroom window were beyond all bearing.

“But wait a bit,” said Wimble to himself. “I can wait;” and he went on, turned up the glen path, struck off to the left, where he reached the bridge, and, by passing along by the backs of the cottages, he made his way to the alley by the public-house at the harbour head, and from there round by the boats and down to the sea shore.

Mr Wimble thought of the widow, and walked fast, gathering shells and scraps of weeds washed up by the tide, and paused from time to time to examine fragments of driftwood and pieces of rotten rope.

Everything was thrown away though, for he had plenty of duplicates at home, and only exceptional finds were now worthy of a place in the museum.

So limpets, and turritellas, and pectens were passed as unworthy of notice. A pelican’s foot shell was transferred to his pocket, but nothing more; and growing quite low-spirited at last, for three reasons – his ill-luck, love, and the want of his breakfast – he turned at last, made for the cliffs, and came along close under the land, in and out among the rocks where the soft sand lay thick and smooth, past the hollows where the old boots and shoes were washed up in company with the other disjecta membra with which shore-dwellers insult the ocean, in the belief that the tide will play the part of scavenger and sweep everything away, a task that the sea mostly scorns.

And so it was that in sundry corners beneath the mighty granite rocks, piled high like titanic walls, Michael Wimble thought of the widow, and made his way among old baskets, fish-heads, scraps of worn-out netting and tangles of rusty steel, half-covered with rotten fabric suggesting female attire.

No objects these for his museum, for, though old, they were not old enough. Had a few centuries passed since they were cast into the waves, that would have made all the difference, and a thousand years would have made them treasures great as gold.

But it was a barren hunt that morning. There had been no storm to tear away the sand and sweep bare the rock, to leave exposed tarnished old coins once cast ashore from an Armada galley; no serpula encrusted gem; nothing worthy of notice; and Wimble, with his thoughts turning eagerly now from the widow and her lodger to the toast and the rasher of bacon, he passed over his bachelor rival and stepped out till he came beneath the rocky point upon which Gartram had built his home, and was half-way by when a ray of sunshine flashed from something lying among the rocks in a little patch of soft, dry sand.

It might be a diamond, or at least a crystal ground out of the rocks!

But it was only a clear phial bottle – short, unlabelled, tightly corked, and holding about a teaspoonful of some clear fluid at the bottom.

A disappointment; but a clean bottle was always useful, and, after a brief examination, the barber transferred it to his pocket, but not until he had removed the cork, sniffed, replaced it, and looked round, asking himself whether it had floated there in the last spring tide.

No; it seemed too fresh. The cork was too new and dry. It could only have come from about – been thrown from Gartram’s windows, and —

Wimble got no further in his chain of reasoning. The vacuum which his nature abhorred was giving him strong hints which he was glad to obey; and the breakfast he had that morning was excellent for a jealous man in love.

Afterwards he rose, took off his coat to put on his apron, found the bottle in his pocket, put it carelessly in a drawer to wait till it could be washed, and declared himself ready for business. He had not long to wait, for one of his regular customers came for a shave. “Heard the news, of course?”

“News? no,” said Wimble, stopping short in the stropping of a razor. “What news? What is it?”

“The King of the Castle – dead.”