Chapter X: Editorial

The mention of stone and quarry by Mr Richard Gaskett fits significantly enough here into the context of sinister events. They are to be found nowhere in more suggestive juxtaposition than in the island of Portland, where the great prison is.

One fair November morning the gates of this terrific stronghold were opened to discharge a time-expired convict. The man walked plump out of Hades into Elysium. Like many another expurgatus, he bore the scars of his cleansing indelibly printed on him. The governor of Hades, it must be remembered, fathered the Furies, and the business of the Furies is to lash, lash, irrespective of any consideration of moral deserts.

This prisoner had, for full twenty years, been persistently clamorous of his innocence--at first in Italian; later in Italian English; finally in a dialect hybrid of English and despair. He had forgotten his tongue, his personality, his meaning in the world: only the sense of a gigantic wrong remained with him.

For some time prior to his discharge he had been permitted to resume himself, to grow his hair and beard, so that he might never protest that he had been restored to existence a marked man. His hair and beard came white where they had been black; his face was the drawn grey face of an old man; he could resume nothing of his past whatever, not even that deadly conviction of injury, for that indeed had dwelt with him throughout. Save for it, he walked out of the gates reborn to age, not youth.

They had been glad enough to get rid of him. Even prison officialdom grows weary of kicking back into its kennel the caged and struggling wolf, so helplessly barred from his natural diet, and so naturally seeking an escape to it. This Antonio Geoletti had made more than one such attempt, and been ruinously flogged for it. He had suffered darkness, famine, solitary confinement, more than reason, his own or others, could comfortably consider; yet what was to be done with a man who could not be induced to accept an error of the law--if such, indeed, had been committed--with an accommodating philosophy? As a convict--which was solely how officialdom was called upon to regard him--he had been unspeakable--a very bad egg indeed. His good marks were nil; his livery of disgrace, when he was summoned to doff it, was still of the most conspicuous colour--the bright yellow which betokens the irreclaimable standard; it had been to the official discomfiture, no less than to his own, that his conduct had obliged the law to exact of him his full term of punishment. And in the end, the only profit was his: he crept out of Hades an unticketed man, free to pursue, unwatched, the solitary purpose that survived to him--vengeance on the authors of his unheard-of sufferings.

The question remained, were those beings still in being? Antonio never even put that question to himself. Vengeance is timeless. For all those twenty years of elsewise obliteration, the lust for it was as red in him at this day as when he had heard himself convicted on false evidence of a heinous offence, and had vainly striven, a foreigner and incoherent, to explain to the Court the real purport of a villain’s traducing. He could not believe for an instant that the God of his superstition had let the work of his legitimate hands be anticipated by another. No; the men remained to him somewhere. Only to find them!

I do not ask your sympathy for this Antonio Geoletti. If he had been convicted unjustly, he had been purposing a crime at the moment which merited a just conviction. He may have got his deserts indirectly; though, to be sure, there was no automatic standard for apportioning its exact term of punishment to either offence. The measures of the law are not even comparative measures, and many men all over the land are suffering under widely different sentences for a like crime. Only, self-consciousness of one evil-doing does not reconcile one to punishment for an imaginary other. That is human nature; and for all the moral purposes of this record, Antonio felt himself the divinely commissioned, though long wickedly withheld, minister of retribution. But at last his time was come.

It was the sense, the indelible haunting of this obligation which upheld him through all the terrific experience of his first re-emergence into the arena of living things. The pale November sunlight smote upon his eyes like the blast from a sudden-opened furnace; the speech of free people struck him as almost a sacrilege, being uttered unconcerned in this boundless temple of God’s own liberty; he blinked and staggered like a disentombed miner.

The prison frowned behind him; the island with its quarries smiled before. How often had he cursed those indurate blocks, symbols of the system to which he appealed in vain--thrown down his ringing tools upon them in a monstrous rage of helplessness, and turned to find a warder’s gun barrel at his head! Now they lay in the mist as soft as fairy bales, all their sinister weight drawn out of them, objects potentially suggestive of the noble fabrics in which each was to have its place. He heard a robin singing, and his eyes came wet with tears. Sobbing, God help him, like a woman, and always, and never changing, with that dream of blood in his heart, he crept out into the world.

How beautiful a thing it was, apart from its people! He had forgotten how soft the sunlight lay on it, how green the grass could grow, how fathomless was the blue of heaven. Limit and close obstruction were all he had known for so long. Even the daily tramp to the quarries had entailed a guard on speech and sight. Now he was free to gaze to drunkenness; to sing, if he would.

Yet it was a world no newer to him relatively than when he had last left it a double decade ago. He had not awakened like Rip Van Winkle to the repossession of his own. It was England the strange island which, in those far-distant days, he had scarcely crossed the Channel to see, and exploit, before he had been caught into the toils of its inexplicable laws, and put away to rage out his heart in an age-long confinement for a crime which he had never committed. Once, he recalled, he had been an astute Piedmontese rascal, a guide and porter at an hotel in the High Alps, who had suddenly, in bad times, elected to travel, with the purpose to sell to a certain person a certain secret, of which Fortune had made him the possessor. That was all done with; only the sense of the blood-lust, of the inherent vendetta, existed to identify him with that old Antonio Geoletti.

For the rest, he had seen so little of this England, that a twenty years’ hiatus in its history made no difference to him whatever. It was no stranger to him now than it had been then. He had found useful compatriots in it; he would find them, or others like them, again. One or two he had encountered in the course of his long punishment. He had their approximate addresses, and the addresses of a score of English “pals”--scoundrels, whose sympathies had naturally gravitated towards one who had not only been imprisoned for breaking the law, but who had broken over and over again the laws of imprisonment.

But he did not need these at present. One and all he dismissed them from his mind. To seek any out would be, he knew, to attract the attention of the police to himself. And he desired only to steal away and be forgotten--to pursue, unobserved and unsuspected, the single deadly purpose which haunted his soul. White, haggard, unmanned in all else but this, he might, as he stole on his way, have passed for the very personification of an inhuman Nemesis.

In his hugging and caressing of his monomania, it occurred to him presently that Fate had at least vouchsafed to him one compensation for his sufferings. They had disguised him effectively from recognition by his enemies. Who would think to identify this grizzled time-worn beast with the vigorous rogue who had been haled from the dock to a living death? He wondered sometimes that his enemies had never foreseen this crisis to their villainy--late, but inevitable in its arrival. Yet perhaps they had foreseen it, and calculated contemptuously upon the thousand possible accidents of time, or at least upon the taming influence of penal servitude. If that were so, that were well. He would not for all the world have his purpose suspected or provided against. Craft--a patient, unsleeping, unobtrusive craft--must guide all his footsteps henceforth.

He had some money in his pocket, hardly earned, but still in human justice not withheld. The last thing they wanted was to see him back at Portland. He would nurse every penny of it as if it were a jewel. Beyond this he had his railway ticket to London. It was there he wanted to go, he had said, and thither they had sent him. But not to Soho: no more of Soho for him!

* * * * * * * *

One wintry afternoon, a certain doctor came striding back from his rounds to his house in Doddington Grove, Kennington. It was a highly respectable street, with substantial dwellings on either side, and a double plantation of lime-trees on the pavement in front to justify to the world its title. The doctor was of a brisk, impatient manner, and he opened his door with a latch-key as if the second the act lost him were a second made unprofitable. Once inside, he turned up the gas in the hall--it was foggy twilight without--and hurriedly examined a slate, for engagements made during his absence. While he was reading, hat on head, his housemaid appeared.

“There’s a man waiting in the consulting-room, sir,” she said.

The doctor nodded, pondered a case or two, put the slate down, and went to his visitor.

“Hey!” he barked. “What’s your name?”

The man, who had risen on his’ entrance, stood motionless before him, his left hand pressed heavily upon his right, which, thickly bandaged, it seemed, he held against his chest. The fingers of the exposed hand were scarred and stunted; the face of the man was grey and rigid as a corpse’s--showing a grin of teeth, too; only the eyes in the face were piercingly alive like a crouching cat’s. He muttered something inaudible.

“What!” snapped the doctor. “Speak out. I can’t hear you.”

Again the stranger murmured.

“Hey!” said the doctor testily. “Can’t you speak louder? What is it? An accident--something the matter with your hand?”

He was of a quick nervous temperament, and harassed with much business. The figure before him was decent and respectable enough, but quite uneloquent of any sumptuary promise. And time with him meant money. He was opening his lips to speak again, and pretty summarily, to finish, when something in the stranger’s aspect, or attitude, arrested him. In an instant he had leapt, and, after a brief vicious struggle, had wrenched a knife from the man’s right hand. The apparent bandage on that had merely covered, it seemed, a deadly purpose. Geoletti, disarmed, stood quivering slightly, but otherwise impassive.

“I see,” said the doctor softly--“I see.” Watchful of the other, he glanced at the blade he had secured. It was a waspish sting of a thing, keen-tempered, folding into a handle which, when needed, became a hilt.

“Meant for me?” he inquired, lifting his brows. When bearded by a patient, he became frost and whipcord.

“No, no--not.” The words were spoken low, but distinct enough at last.

“For whom, then?”

The tip of Geoletti’s tongue travelled between his lips. He was evidently trying to master the reaction from a tremendous strain, and at the same time to find speech to lay the suspicion of any.

“For no one--no, that is the truth,” he whispered out at length.

The doctor tapped the blade in his hand peremptorily.

“A lie! Have you ever seen me before?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been to this house before?”

He dismissed the coming denial with a flick of his hand. His sharp merciless penetrativeness had its instant effect. The Italian responded to it automatic, like a close echo to the tap of a drum.

“Have you?”

“Yes.”

“When? How long ago?”

“Twenty year.”

The doctor was always one of those lucky downright people, who, quite scornful of the laws of defamation when they find a man meriting their chastisement, go through life speaking their minds with impunity.

“That was when my predecessor lived here,” he said shortly. “He was a drunken blackguard and worse--a disgrace to his calling. It has taken me fifteen years to build up a practice on the ruins of his infamy. His name was Blague. Was it him you knew?”

“Yes.”

“And meant to knife?”

“Yes.”

“I daresay. What had he done to you?”

The stranger’s eyes seemed suddenly to roll in his head. He clasped his hands convulsively to his breast. Words come from him in a broken stream:

“It was in this ver’ room--yes. I arrive by appointiment to meet wonn ozer--a zhentleman, yes, that I want to see--ver’ much I want to see him. I have a little word I wish to spik to him; and he send me message to com’ here, and he will follow to me. He not arrive when I arrive--no. I told to wait for him in zis room; and still it is a long time, and he not come. Zen presently there enter a yong woman, a paziente of Blague, and he shut us in togezer; and all quite sudden she begin to scream and tear herself. Then Blague he rush in, and I am accuse; and the coppar he com’ and drag me to the stazione, and I am accuse; and again before the judge I am accuse. And I try to spik the truth of what I com’ to Blague’s house for, and I am told it nozzing--no bearing on the case whatever, except it show me bad character. And the yong woman she swear against me--lies, lies, all; and I sent to prison for twen-ty year--for twen-ty year I sent. Zen I know zat Blague and ze zhentleman make zis op togezer, so to get rid of me; and I swear vengeance on zem. For twen-ty year though I wait, it sall com’ at last.”

The doctor was shutting up the dagger-knife very coolly as he listened.

“Not to one of them, at least, my friend,” he said. “Blague’s been dead of the horrors this ten years, and a good riddance to him.”

“Dead!”

The word seemed to stun the man.

“Yes, dead.”

“And ze ozer?”

“I know nothing of him, and don’t want to know.”

“His name----”

“I don’t wish to hear it. That’ll do. Here, take back your knife.”

Geoletti received the weapon in silence.

“You no help me?” he said presently in a slow voice.

“Certainly not. I become no party to this business. Besides, what were you here for?--blackmail it smells like. I daresay you got your deserts. Now be off with you.”

He made a rapid step, opened the door, and imperiously beckoned the man out. Geoletti, after a moment’s hesitation, stole softly into the hall, and disappeared thence into the fog.

“H’m,” thought the doctor, returning: “victim or not, there’s been black work there. I shouldn’t grudge that knife, I think, in the ribs of one of Blague’s confederates. Like as not he’ll get it; but I’ve neither business nor inclination to interfere. So far as I’m concerned, the matter’s ended.”

* * * * * * * * *

There was a board “To Let” up before a certain house in Eaton Square. Both the board, and the house which it advertised, appeared particularly decayed and out of repair. There were even windows broken in the latter; and what with its dingy walls, and flaking stucco, and the vision of a wrecked venetian blind or two dropping forlorn slats across the inner obscurity, the house looked actually frowsy for such a neighbourhood. Thither one morning came Geoletti and stealthily examined the legend painted on the board. “Apply to Foot & Liddel, Poultry,” he read with difficulty; and straightway, or as direct as persistent inquiry and answer could help him, betook himself to the house agent’s offices in the city. He was about to enter, when his hand on the varnished door caught his attention. After an instants thought, he withdrew, bought and donned a pair of cheap woollen gloves from a shop hard by, and returned to the swing doors.

A clerk at the broad counter within accepted him with an encouraging courtesy. It was the rule at Foot & Liddels. On the principle that dirt may hold much gold in solution, unexpected affluence was often found in the most unpromising-looking customers. Grubbiness, in consequence, was no bar to the firm’s affability. The youngest employé could quote of his knowledge the instance of a would-be client, who had shed fleas on the order-book all the time he was cheapening a marble mansion in Park Lane. He had had a nose like a tapir’s, and might have been held for a first example of gold dust in deposit, if he had exhibited any sign whatever of its ever having been washed out of him.

Geoletti asked if he might have an order to view the house in Eaton Square, and was answered, “Certainly,” by the polite young gentleman whom he accosted. Here, probably enough to the auctioneering view, was one of those self-made _contadini_, who, like the Brothers Gatti, had turned, in the profitable processes of time, a little ice-cream shop into a gilded and bemarbled saloon. Moreover the house in Eaton Square had for long, and for some inexplicable reason, remained a drug in the market. It would be a good stroke of business to let it to an Italian parvenu.

Geoletti, being asked for his name and address, gave both glibly, without a hint of premeditation. He was Antonio Geoletti of Portland; a quarry master, he said. Not the shadow of a chuckle in himself answered to this _espièglerie_ as he received his ticket. He looked across steadily at the young gentleman.

“Who own ze house? Who it belong to?” he asked.

“There is no tenant there at present,” said the clerk. “A Mr Dalston is the landlord.”

“Yes, yes,” said the Italian, a trifle too eagerly. “Can I see him--ze landlord--personally?”

The clerk became a little cold.

“We act for him, sir. You can approach him through us.”

“Ah! Zen he live--som’wheres near?”

“I am not at liberty to give his address. We are in a confidential position in these matters. If you like to write, we will forward your letter with pleasure.”

Again baffled!

Geoletti considered gloomily: then shook his head.

“Wait, while I see ze house,” he said; and walked off with his order. It directed him, for the key, to a caretaker on the opposite side of the Square. The woman offered to come with him; but he insisted on being alone. It was with a queer fury of the blood that he mounted the unwashed steps, and prepared to enter the deserted house.

The door, stuck to its lintel from disuse, snapped open with a dusty jar. Turning as he closed it, Geoletti saw an addressed letter lying among a litter of circulars and advertisements on the floor. He took it up, and read its superscription--M. Dalston, Esq., Eaton Square, London. Was there a possible way here to the knowledge he desired? Pondering a few moments, he suddenly woke to action, left the house, closing the door behind him, and, with the letter, found his way to the nearest post office.

“I find zis behind ze door--zere,” said he, pointing to the address on the envelope.

The clerk, who received the letter from him, glanced from it to him and back again suspiciously.

“Don’t understand,” he said. “_Where_ did you find it?”

“Zere,” said Antonio. “I go, wiz an order, to view an empty ’ouse, and zis have fall through the letter-box.”

The clerk whispered with another, nodded understandingly, and threw the letter on a shelf.

“All right” he said. “Should have been readdressed,” and prepared to go on with his work. That, one might say, was the post-office servant all over.

Antonio, patient and unoffended, essayed a hopeless question.

“Should be readdress?” he asked. “To where, zen?”

The clerk sniggered aloud to his next companion, a young lady, one of the newly emancipated sisterhood with a nose already above her station.

“That’s not your business,” said she. “We’ll see to it,” and the two ignored him ostentatiously.

Baffled again, and yet again!

Geoletti went back to the house. This time he made a thorough examination of it. It appeared just a repository for old dust and echoes. The only living things that inhabited there were mice and spiders; and what they thrived upon the Lord knew. The nozzles of the scullery taps were thick with brassy scum; the edges of the broken window-panes were yellow and blunted with the weather; there was an acrid deserted smell about everything. It was a large house, a property suggestive of handsome returns to its landlord; yet the atmosphere of it seemed costive with uninhabitableness. There are many such places in London, which, having every apparent advantage of position and accommodation, fail and fail to find a tenant. Certain ghosts, perhaps, are their bodiless caretakers; and these may resent the intrusion of their possible ousters. They do not want the scent of their hauntings crossed by lovelier and more desirable spirits.

Antonio went wandering, with a dull half aimlessness, up and down. Presently, in a small ground-floor room to the rear, his foot kicked against some paper. He wrenched up the rusty bar of the shutters, and let in a flood of squalid light.

The thing he had encountered was a torn catalogue. He stooped and secured it. It was a thickish quarto of flimsy paper, a long dictionary of houses, many illustrated with plates, advertised for sale or lease by the firm of Foot & Liddel.

A hope gripped him. Rapidly and hungrily, moistening his right-hand second finger, he swept over the pages. Suddenly, a mark arrested his eager review of them. It was pencilled against an entry, describing a property, the Lone Farm, situated in the neighbourhood of Market Grazing, Hampshire. The place was described as desirable, and cheap. Geoletti looked all round the room, noted its time-stained paper and ragged skirting, and came back to the catalogue. Then, very carefully and comprehensively, he went through the whole book page by page, and convinced himself that there was no other marked entry whatever.

Very jealously, then, he extracted the page containing this solitary clue, folded, and put it into the pocket which contained his folded knife. Two secret things, potential, possibly, of retribution. There was at least the hope.

He went quietly about the house, effacing every sign of his examination; then passed out into the street, crossed the Square, and returned the key to its custodian.

Thenceforth he was seen no more in London.