Chapter II: THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY (continued)

Gilead re-entered the quiet little room with a feeling as if he were desecrating a woodland shrine. As yet he could not associate that figure of immortal loveliness with the piteous vision of the advertisement. He saw her risen to greet him, all warm and flushed, a maid, yet seeming young-motherly in the soft plenitude of her form, with evidences of some suppressed emotion in her eyes. Her drooped right hand held the telegram. She addressed him in a voice of sweet low embarrassment:--

“Your visit, I am afraid, was badly timed--for me. I am so sorry. It has reference, I understand, to my advertisement in the _Daily Post_. Will you please tell me in what way?”

She motioned him to seat himself, and herself sank somewhat languidly upon the sofa she had just quitted.

“I trust,” he began; but she stopped him:--

“Please do not speak of it. It was a momentary recurrence of a seizure which had overtaken me once before, and was due--”

She paused. “To the receipt of a telegram?” he suggested gently.

She turned her head away; then refaced him, with a deeper flush on her cheeks.

“I am quite recovered,” she said. “I am very much to blame for my weakness.”

“I beg you not to think me impertinent,” said Gilead. “Your servant volunteered the information.”

She smiled, a little wanly.

“Well, it is quite true,” she said; “and I can have no purpose in denying it.”

“You must pardon me,” said the young man, “if I associate this seizure somehow with the persecution complained of in your advertisement.”

She looked down, twisting the telegram in her lap in an agitated manner.

“Yes,” she said, in a low voice. “I must admit it.”

“Have you the least objection,” he asked earnestly, “to giving me your name?”

She hesitated a moment; then raised her eyes to his steadily.

“Would it not be right for you to acquaint me first,” she said, “of the object of your visit?”

“Here, as always,” he answered, with measured clearness, “to succour the unfortunate or unhappy.”

A little irrepressible sigh escaped her.

“Naturally,” he continued, “you will ask my credentials. Is it possible that you have heard mention of ‘Lamb’s Agency’?”

She shook her head slightly.

“It was founded,” said Gilead, “by a person having great wealth, and a keen desire to apply it to the most helpful uses. Any wronged or persecuted innocence has a first claim upon it, I may say. My name is Gilead Balm, and I represent the Agency in this instance.”

Her eyes opened upon him wonderingly.

“Does such an institution exist?” she murmured. “I am very fortunate.”

He bowed gravely.

“The good fortune is ours, madam, where our purpose is vindicated.”

“I understand you,” she said. “You must guard against the wiles of the unscrupulous?”

“An exhaustive investigation is the only way,” he said.

“That needs no apology,” she answered, flushing a little. “I cannot be blind to the fact that the terms of my advertisement invited some comment. I was indeed very distracted when I wrote it.”

“You will not, then,” said Gilead, “attribute to mere prying impertinence on my part a desire to ascertain the nature of this persecution, whether to arm myself for your protection against it, or--”

“Or,” she interrupted him, with a faint smile, “to form your own opinion as to the truth of my story?”

“As to our capacity for assisting you,” he corrected her, staidly and courteously.

“Thank you for putting it that way,” she said quietly. “My name is Vera Halifax. Were I to give you the outlines of my history, you would accept the statement as a confidence, I am sure?”

“Most certainly,” he answered.

“I mean a personal confidence,” said the girl.

“If you should desire it.”

“I do desire it, if you please. Ill-chosen as were, no doubt, the terms of my appeal, I never proposed to myself to enlarge upon them save to the sympathy which should seem to justify my trust by its practical sincerity. You will understand me, I am sure, Mr Balm, when I ask you how you propose to deal with my difficulties, if convinced of their reality?”

“Why, how can I answer,” he said, breaking into a smile, “until I know their nature?”

She looked down, toying with the telegraph form. “I should have thought,” she said, “that that mention of my poor accomplishments would have been sufficiently illuminating.”

“Pardon me, then,” he answered, “for being explicit. You are threatened, I am to assume, with a loss of livelihood?”

“Yes, utter,” she said low.

“Very well,” he answered. “Then you are to understand, please, that we will endeavour to compensate you in proportion as our estimate of the wrong you have suffered tallies with yours.”

“Compensate!” she exclaimed.

“I mean,” he said, “with all respect for your independence. You shall work for your living--if you desire it, at the Agency itself.”

She glanced at him swiftly, and away. There were signs of tears in her beautiful eyes.

“I can only acknowledge such consideration, such generosity,” she said, “with a full confession of the truth. Would you wish to hear it?”

“I seek it perpetually,” he answered, “and from many lips. If it is an ugly truth here, even yours shall not redeem it or win its pardon.”

She blushed deeply, and half averting her face, held out to him the telegram which had been responsible for her seizure.

“Will you glance at that first?” she murmured. “You will not understand it; but it will pave the way to an explanation.”

He took the paper from her hand, and read these four enigmatic words:--

“_Be prepared. Winsom Wyllie._”

“Winsom Wyllie!” he ejaculated in astonishment, looking up.

She shivered, and gave a little gulp.

“He is the cause, he is the cause!” she whispered, and appeared for the moment incapable of further speech. And then suddenly she collected herself.

“I must appear insane to you,” she said. “Perhaps it is true that an exaggerated fear has unhinged my mind for the moment. But I will tell you my story.”

“If you please,” he said; and she began:--

“My mother died when I was quite young, leaving me the sole charge of a preoccupied father. He was a man of science, devoted to the pursuit of insects, and for the greater part of his life was engaged in procuring material for his great work on the Butterflies of Europe. After my mother’s death, I was put to a school in Cheltenham, where I remained for a number of years, forgotten, but on the whole happy, doing fair credit to my training, and spending my holidays, for the most part, at the homes of the various mistresses. When I was eighteen, a chance visit to the Cotswold Hills reminded my father of my existence. He was growing old, and his eyesight dim, and it occurred to him that I might prove useful to him in his occupation. He took me from school, and thenceforth I was his companion and assistant in his varied journeyings at home and abroad. I had no other relation in the world, and no fixed home; but I confess I enjoyed the life, with its freedom from restraint, and its perpetual charms of change and open-air employment. My father, as each specimen was captured, was in the habit of sitting down and making on the spot an exact water-colour drawing of it to scale. This work, finding I had a natural facility with the brush, he deputed to me as also much of the netting of the insects themselves, at which, being active and clear-sighted, I soon proved myself an expert. I was quite happy and engrossed in my curious life until the day when there entered into it a stranger of an unusual and sinister cast. His name was Winsom Wyllie.”

She paused a moment in some agitation, and, putting her handkerchief to her lips, averted her face yet a little more.

“He professed a profound interest in the great work,” she continued presently, “and was indeed not a little forward in contributing to it. He attached himself to us, accompanied us everywhere, and quickly made himself indispensable to my father, who regarded his skill and courage with something approaching infatuation. There was no rock so high, no swamp so perilous, but Mr Wyllie would dare it in pursuit of valuable specimens. He seemed endowed with a demoniac energy, to possess a charmed life. He was wonderful, I admit; but there was always something about him that repelled me, that made me conscious of an instinctive antipathy in his presence. My dear father would habitually, when possible, revive and release the drugged insects after finishing with them; Mr Wyllie, on the contrary, would strip off their beautiful wings with a savage zest, or crush them between his coarse fingers into glittering meal. He was a dangerous man, and he always carried about with him, pinned into the inside crown of his flat-topped felt hat, a dried specimen of the moth called the Death’s Head. It was his piratical emblem, he would declare; and indeed it was a suitable one. Judge, then, of my horror and disgust, when I came to realize, as I did, that his pursuit all this time was not of my father’s interests, but of my father’s unhappy child!”

Her fair head drooped, and she spoke in a lower voice.

“I will not dwell upon the details of my discovery, but will hasten to the conclusion. Unthwarted by my declared aversion, confident in my father’s sympathy, this man made no secret, after his first avowal and repulse, of his intention to possess me. My father was blind to my misery and deaf to my protestations. The other held him in complete moral subjugation. I was at this time grown to be a woman, and of an age to assert myself. I was forming some wild scheme of escape, when the blow fell that for a while deprived me of my reason. One day my father, having rashly climbed a cliff-side in pursuit of a specimen, slipped, and was hurled lifeless at my very feet. The shock threw me into a cataleptic trance, from which I did not recover for several weeks.

“That occurred in Switzerland, in the Zermatt valley, and when I awoke to my senses it was to find myself lying in a little hospice at St Niklaus which latterly we had been making our headquarters, and Mr Wyllie assuming the sole charge of my fortune and destinies.

“I cannot describe the feelings with which I realized my unhappy orphaned position, or the intensified horror with which I regarded this man, now justified in some measure in claiming my gratitude. He had devoted himself, while I lay insensible, to my affairs and my comfort, and might have expected some acknowledgment; but I looked upon him with an indescribable loathing, which, struggle as I would, I could make but a poor show of concealing. He was fully conscious of my attitude, of course, and, finding all efforts to conciliate me useless, brought matters very quickly to a crisis. One day he asked me abruptly what I proposed doing for a living, if I persisted in my refusal to join my fortunes with his. I stared at him in amazement; when he informed me, with the utmost sang-froid, that, by a lately executed will, my father had left him all his small fortune (including the material for the book) in trust for me, provided that I married him within a year of the testator’s death, and to him solely, in the event of my rejecting that condition. Furthermore he acquainted me with the facts that a considerable undischarged debt lay to my discredit at the hospice, that, so far as he knew, I was entirely without means, and that if he came forward to assist me, it must be on the express stipulation that I would give myself to him in pledge for that accommodation, when he would hope to convince me in time of the wisdom and policy of my subscribing to the terms of the will.

“Mr Balm, I seemed to see in a flash the whole black depravity of the man. More, I remembered then that he had been on the hill with my father on the day of the fatal accident, and, in a fit of ungovernable passion and horror, I denounced him to his face. I accused him of having coerced my father into making the will, and then, in order to secure the permanency of its provisions, of tempting my unhappy parent to his destruction.

“I thought for a moment he would have killed me; and then he answered. I wish never again to invite a scene so appalling in its revelation of the secret abysses of wickedness. Utterly unnerved and overcome, I stammered out some propitiatory phrases, and escaped to my room. My only thought, my only hope was flight. I had a sum of money in my possession--for of late years my father had committed to me the business of our expenditure--and with that, and my small stock of jewels, I stole out in the grey of the next dawn, and made my way to Visp. I need not trouble you with the details of my flight--its happy accidents and living apprehensions. It is enough to say that I succeeded eventually in reaching London in safety. The experience of my later life had taught me wisdom and caution, and I was fortunate in keeping my head and my wits in somewhat bewildering circumstances. I parted with my jewels for a fair sum, and then, wishing to remove myself as far as possible from the likely arena of my persecutor’s enquiries, decided to bury myself in some obscure district of the suburbs, where I could rally my small forces, and think out the means to procure myself a livelihood. My travels combined with my early studies had made me fairly proficient in several European languages, and my father had always carried about with him for his correspondence a portable typewriter, which I had soon learned to manipulate. Finally, accident established me here, where I have now lived, in doubt and agitation, for a little over a week.”

She ended, and for a full minute a profound silence succeeded her narration.

“Pardon me,” said Gilead, then: “there is something more.”

“The telegram?” she answered, with a broken, most pitiful sigh. “O! Mr Balm, I can only assume that, ambiguous as I had supposed my advertisement to be, _he_ must have seen and profited by it to get upon my tracks. It reached me only shortly before your arrival, and upon its receipt I had a short return of the illness with whose first attack he had been so fatally associated. He may be even here now, close by, somewhere in the neighbourhood!”

She rose, with the word, in great agitation, and stood holding her hand to her bosom. Gilead rose also.

“I beg you to calm yourself,” he said. “What have you to fear from him?”

“Fear!” she whispered, with an awful significance. “Ah! you do not know him. He will _break_ me to his will.”

“No, that must not be,” said the young man. “Has this creature no permanent address?”

“Indeed none that I know of,” she faltered.

“And the will was indisputable?”

“Quite, I fear.”

“We might contest it upon the grounds of undue influence? And in the meantime--”

She gazed at him with her wide haunted eyes. Certainly the flowery lepidopteral ways had produced a very comely nymph.

“Yes?” she whispered.

“You must come with me, please.”

“Mr Balm!” she exclaimed in astonishment. “Do you know what you say?”

“Perfectly,” he answered, quite self-possessed. “By your own showing you invite your ultimate ruin by staying here. The man is obviously a villain, and if we cannot expose, we can defy him. I will make it my business to discover his whereabouts, and to pay-off your debt to him. In the meanwhile a lady member of our staff will procure you suitable lodgings near the Agency, and any obligation you may owe to us it shall be in your power to discharge by way of services to our office. To-morrow, one of our agents shall visit here to make such arrangements with your landlord as are necessary for acquitting you of your agreement with him, and to dismiss your servant. You can trust to my absolute honour and sincerity in the whole matter. It is for such purposes that we exist. You will greatly oblige me by consenting.”

She appeared genuinely moved and perplexed. She could find no answer for some moments.

“I don’t know what to say,” she murmured at last.

“Say nothing,” he answered; “but, if I may venture to suggest, make a little bag of your immediate necessaries, and come straight away with me. The rest can follow.”

While she was gone from the room a thing or two relative to the unreasoned extravagances of women _did_ occur to him. “Thus,” he thought, “they will, when in dire distress and within sight of absolute penury, rent a neat little furnished house and hire a servant, when cheap lodgings would have served all their purpose.” But he dismissed the reflection as bearing too hardly upon the small worldly-wisdom of one bred in comparative luxury, without experience, and very young in years--probably not much over twenty. And, for the rest, he contemplated with serene gratification his return from his first romantic quest in company with this visible beautiful earnest of its success.