Chapter XIV: Two Interviews and a Discovery

It was with a feeling of intense suppressed excitement that I came down into the courts surrounding the inner tabernacle of that mystery which my heart was set and my nerves were strung upon resolving. I had had no difficulty in finding the place. Luck, the old spoiler, was in the way to smooth every present obstacle from my path. The ridiculous ease with which I had hit my goal, left me no lack of self-confidence in the question of successfully exploiting it. But there, it will be seen, I reckoned without my host; and in the meanwhile there were some surprises in store for me.

It was a most bitter morning. A north-east wind slashed at Old Paradise Street like the sword of the archangel. The flood moving beyond its outlet--the river of the land of gold--was as unlike Pison as one might conceive. Thick and resistless, it went by with a gloating sound, a sewer rather than a stream. The old palace on its embankment looked numb with cold. There was more life in the fried-fish shop round the corner than in all its historic stones.

I had inquired at this shop for Mother Carey’s number in the street. A slipshod girl, who was sweeping up the floor, gave it me, but with a reservation.

“Do you mean the old miser lady, ai?”

She was a dirty girl, but insolent with life--a reassurance in that deadly climate of Paradise.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Very likely. I only know that her name’s Carey, and that she lives in this street.”

She came to the door, broom in hand, and pointed me out the house. It was not far beyond--a dirty-faced little tenement, between a frowzy barber’s and a frowzy cobbler’s, but having a door and parlour windows of its own instead of a shop front.

“There’ll be what you want,” said the girl--“number six: but you won’t get in.”

“Why not?”

“Nobody does. She lives private and takes her beer on the chain.”

Her beer! Lady Skene’s mother! the parent of that cold and stately apparition--the stem from which that lovely rose had flowered!

Here was a startling beginning! But there was worse to come.

“Well,” I said stoutly, “there’ll be nothing lost by my trying, anyhow.”

The venture ran abroad somehow, for all the uninviting weather, and by the time I reached number six there were heads poking out of windows to canvas my repulse. I knocked at the door, and waited. After a quite reasonable interval a shuffling footstep sounded within, bolts were withdrawn, and the door opened a few inches, and grated on an iron tether.

“Who’s there?” said a querulous thin voice.

“I want to see Mother Carey,” I answered.

“She’s not in; she sees no one; she isn’t fit to be seen; go away!” said the voice, and the door came to sharply; but I had my foot ready.

“She’ll see Richard Gaskett, I’m sure,” I whispered through the crevice.

“Richard!”

An old, old snuffy beak, shining eyes, and a withered mouth agape showed in the crack; and there they dwelt for a full minute.

“What do you want of me?” she muttered at last.

“I want to ask you some things,” I said. “It might pay you to answer them.”

She lingered still a little; then I heard the chain grate stealthily in its socket, a lean talon shot out, and the next moment I was clawed into the passage, and the door slammed to behind me. A faint shout of laughter pursued me into the fastness.

It was close twilight within, filthy, noxious, indescribable. The narrow hall was bare of everything but stench and decay; the room into which the old horror motioned me was similarly furnished, but with first causes more in evidence. When, very cautiously, she had unbarred the window-shutters and let in a grudging thread of light, I was made conscious of the fact. There were a table here and a tattered chair or two, the stuffing of the latter rank from the contact of unclean generations. There were also piles of refuse, in the corners, under the rusty grate, dropping from a disembowelled cupboard, burst with its own noisome surfeit. The walls, hung with old daguerreotypes, old tinted lithographs, old records of a faded past--all in mouldering frames, and all, it appeared, illustrative of the one-time graces of a single simpering personality--were the cleanest places to be seen. Bugs were the _élite_ of Number six Old Paradise Street.

I felt utterly stupefied--bowled over by the shock of my surroundings. For the moment I could only gasp and suffer, until a violent fit of sneezing came to my relief. The old woman, standing before me, softly pawed at my waistcoat during the paroxysm, peering up into my face. Water and she were long strangers; a mildewed cap she wore, tied under her chin, seemed to have grown on her like a fungus on a tree stump; her dress was of the complexion and savour of tobacco rag. She was a _mignonne_ small-boned creature, and might even once--the Lord forgive me--have been pretty. Even now, old thread of fustiness as she was, there was an indescribable trick of jauntiness in her conduct of her creaking old body; and the frisky shuffle of her feet, in their mouldering slippers, seemed sometimes suggestive of a sort of St Vitus’s ballet dance.

She was taken with a rending fit of coughing while she held me. It seemed to rattle in her like the plaster inside crumbling walls where the rats are busy.

“So you’re Richard Gaskett, O the devil,” she said, when she could gasp out a word at length. “And you’ve come to look up your old grandma, eh?”

I had not regarded it in that light, and I was fain to tell her so. I had come to visit Mother Carey. She started on the word, and a sudden terror flew to her eyes.

“Who’s your mammy?” she cried shrilly, stepping back. “Tell me--quick, now.”

“Lady Skene is my mother,” I said.

“Ah!”

Her self-confidence returned. It had struck her, “all of a heap,” how she might have been beguiled into admitting some villain with a design on her hoardings. She approached me again, curiously.

“Eh!” she wondered. “So this is my Georgie’s child, is it, the deuce? And how does your mammy treat you, my pretty?”

“Lady Skene has got another son now,” I said. “Didn’t you know it?”

“I hear nothing, and I know nothing in these days, dovey the devil,” she answered. “So long as I’m given my little provision as her mother, Georgie’s welcome to make out her own life as she pleases for me. We usen’t to get on very well together, not always, her and me. She’d come to me in her troubles, she would, like her father’s own gal; but most times we lived apart.”

“She came to you when she was in trouble about me, I suppose?” I said.

She conned me a little, unanswering. The wintry pupils of her eyes seemed to sharpen like a cat’s.

“Not she--a married woman,” she protested cunningly.

“She was not married before she married Lord Skene,” I said. “I was born to her out of wedlock, and he was not allowed to know it.”

Again she was silent, panting a little; and suddenly she was seized with a second paroxysm of coughing.

“O dear! O dear!” she gasped, when she could speak. “O, the deuce and all! O, my lungs are like emery paper, and the joints of my bones gone scroopy. O, get me a chair, ducky, get me a chair! I’m all wore out with pain, I am, and I sha’n’t trouble anyone much longer. There, I shall be better in a minute--I can feel it passing. O the deuce and the devil!”

I helped her to seat herself, and stood over her while she recovered. When she did at length, she went on ejaculating, “O, the deuce and the devil!” in spasmodic whispers, until her speech found breath for further irrelevancies:

“Welcome to live as she likes for me O, the deuce and all!--in her fine castle, my pretty--so long as I’m left undisturbed in my little ’ouse--in my little O the devil ducky!”

I waited for the stream to run out, and then spoke again.

“Lord Skene was not allowed to know it, I say.”

She answered me, without looking up.

“I was no party to that, my dovey the deuce. I swear I wasn’t O, the devil! It was all Pugsley’s doing, the deuce and the devil take him!”

“Was it he, too,” I said, “who christened me out of a pint pot? You see I’ve found out something, old mother.”

She rocked to and fro--in a sort of obscene secret laughter, I could have fancied. It was as much as I could do to keep my wits steadily to the point at issue. In all the sure success of my pursuit, I had never foreseen any end to it like this, or even approaching it.

“Just like him,” she muttered. “He always called me that, a deuced providence.”

“Who called you?” I demanded sternly. “Who are you talking about?”

She wiped, or rather smeared her eyes with her sleeve. The old life in her, I believed, was foundering between craft and senility; but the ancient habit still predominated. Once more she spoke, and again away from the point.

“A proud creatur’ was my gal--Georgie was always proud above her station. She held herself aloof from the common sort, she did. Not that such beauties oughtn’t to command the best. But she made her mistake--there, I’ll own to it. It was all from her turning religious and trying to reform people, the deuce take her. And she’d have been left to suffer the consequences to this day if it hadn’t a’ been for me--a good mother though I say it, the devil and the deuce.”

“Old mother,” I said quietly, seeing that for some reason she hailed the term, “who was it helped her to that mistake? Tell me his name, and I’ll give you money.”

She paused suddenly in her sibilations. Her old face leered up at me with infinite acrimony.

“How much?” she snapped. “But, there--I dursen’t--it’s no bid.”

Something, some chord of ancient memory in me, tightened and quivered.

“My God!” I cried. “I remember now. It was you that had the care of me when I was a baby!”

“Ah!” she piped. “It was me, was it, Richard? And to think you should have growed to this, and all the understanding in you!”

“Wasn’t it you, I say?”

“You may say it with truth, dovey,” she answered. “She wanted me to adopt you altogether, did my daughter; but I just struck when I found I wasn’t to be included in her ladyship’s promotion. But I made her pay for it, I did--more than if I’d kept you; and then she and Pugsley had to put their deuced heads together, and account for you to his lordship in their own way.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know that.”

“You know it?” She lowered her frowzy noddle, mumbling to herself; then looked up fulsomely.

“Tell old Mother Carey, my pretty,” she coaxed, “just exactly how much you _do_ know.”

“That you were on the stage----” I began.

“Ah!” she leered across at the photographs on the wall; her horrible old feet drummed on the floor. “The stage, to be sure! My daughter could never come anigh me as a dancer--no, nor in looks, for that matter. There’s nothing criminal in being on the stage, ducky dear; and Georgie herself was born in wedlock.”

“That Lady Skene was taken from the boards by her husband,” I went on; but she interrupted me:

“There you’re wrong. It was Pugsley rescued her, as he called it, when she’d returned to them after your little affair, and who trimmed her up and made her meat for his lordship.”

“That you bought me my name of a publican--his name--for a pint of beer,” I continued.

She admitted that frankly, with a giggle.

“You had to have one, you know, deary. And to give you your mother’s might have let out things. And hasn’t this fine lordship, now, ever shown any curiosity about who was your father?”

“No,” I said. “The curiosity is all mine. Who was he?”

“_I_ don’t know,” she proclaimed blankly, and at once.

“You do,” I said sternly.

“No, I don’t,” she answered, suddenly truculent. “Why should I, now? The gal came to her mother in her trouble--that was all it mattered to me. She wouldn’t confess to the author of her shame, not she. She was always one of the silent sort. Ask the old deuce of a doctor, now--old Patterson, drat him--if he could ever get a word out of her.”

“I believe you are lying. I’ll pay you, I say.”

She skipped to her feet, with a little blasphemous screech.

“The deuce and the devil! O you” (sanguine) “spark! I don’t want your money. I believe you’re after mine. O I’ll rouse the neighbourhood if you don’t get out of this! A pretty gentleman, on my sinful word, to think to come and bleed his poor old grandmother to pay for his pop-lollies and opera-boxes! O burst my lungs if I don’t have the police on you! O the deuce get out!”

She was whipping herself to a frenzy, real or diplomatic. My efforts to quiet her were only so much oil on her old smouldering fire. She began to scream pipingly, and to drive me outward with vicious feeble blows. In the end, baffled and disappointed, I had to make an ignominious exit. The door slammed and the chain grated behind me.

The Street was awaiting my reappearance with interest. It greeted my expulsion with a howl of laughter, and pursued my retreat with a dropping fire of chaff. As I went on my way, I had leisure to reflect that I had extracted from Mother Carey everything that was of the least importance either to herself or me--just so much and no more. I had established the fact of her unsavoury existence, and that was the bare fruit of my enterprise.

But I had still one forlorn hope to follow; one last nearly blank little card to play. And, as Luck would have it, that card was to prove the fateful one. What a trumpery pip, to be sure, looks an ace--a one-shotted gun. Yet the fortress capitulates to it, the knaves shiver before it, whole rows of arrogant royalties go down to its bang.

Something that Mother Carey had let out (inadvertently, even fatuously, I could not but think) stuck in my mind. Impelled by a faint hope of promise in it, I made my way by the Albert Embankment and the South Lambeth Road to Stockwell, whence, from the Swan Tavern, I took a tram for Clapham. My purpose was to inquire about a certain problematic Dr Patterson, and it was my good fortune (_pace_ Luck) to learn not only that that respected practitioner was an existent actuality, but that he was still, after all these years, active in promoting the birth rate of his native suburb. I was even lucky enough to find him at home, in a very comfortable semi-detached house, of an old-time complexion, which faced the common on its south side. He had moved into this many years before, from a much smaller dwelling in Park Road down by the “Plough,” his practice having risen high in the interval on a modest foundation. So my informant--one of those garrulous terrors who _will_ volunteer more than they are asked to answer--confided to me.

I found the doctor a very complacent brisk little man, having spectacles, black side-whiskers supported by an ample collar, and a head as shiny and almost as bald as a gas globe.

“Now, sir, what can I do for you?” he said, having hurried into the room and made his bow.

I apologised, with some embarrassment, for my venturing to claim even a fraction of his precious time to a matter which, to put it brusquely, was unconnected with professional emoluments. Naturally enough, perhaps, he requested me thereupon to state my business with a reasonable brevity.

“It touches, sir,” I said, “upon the birth of a child some twenty or more years ago; at which birth, I believe, you assisted.”

“Wait,” he said. “A police case, is it?”

“Not,” I answered, venturing something, “if that can be avoided.”

“Well,” he said, “of whose child do you speak?”

“The mother was a young woman of the name of Carey. She lived in White Square.”

He lifted, and readjusted his spectacles; then, canvassing me over them, knitted his fingers lightly before him, and twiddled his thumbs.

“My memory, sir, is, I may say, retentive. The case recurs to me. What about it?”

“It is desired to find the father of that child.”

He shook his head, smiling.

“My dear sir, I am no clairvoyant. What is my position in these matters? I come, I see, I deliver. The mother is my sole concern.”

“You don’t know who he was?”

“Not from Adam.”

My face fell, obviously enough, I suppose.

“By the way,” he remarked casually, “you know, of course, that the child died very shortly after it was born?”

What was he saying in that matter-of-fact voice? what unimpassioned thunderbolt launching from the blue of his little spectacled eyes? A quick sharp vertigo seemed to seize my brain. I stared stupidly at him.

“Died!” I muttered. “O, you must be mistaken!”

“Wait,” he said. “I keep, and have always kept, a minute record of my cases. I can verify it in an instant.”

He went to a shelf, selected from it one of several thin manuscript volumes, and rapidly skipped over its leaves.

“Here it is,” he said. “February 7th, 1860: Carey (Georgina), White Square: obstetric: child, male; died two days later. Certified cause, atelectasis pulmonum.”

He shut the book with a snap, returned it to its shelf, and faced round on me, his hands under his coat tails.

“Anything more I can do for you?”

“But,” I stammered, “if--if the child died, it must have been buried?”

“Doubtless,” he answered; “but scarcely by me. Still, it was buried, I suppose.”

“You don’t know?”

“O, my dear sir! Think for a moment. White Square! and its reputation--but perhaps you are ignorant there. There are ways and places--for disposing economically of these superfluous defunct. I don’t assert anything; but I daresay you have read of them. The child died, that is all I can certainly state.”

I came to myself, and held out my hand gratefully.

“I am infinitely obliged to you, sir,” I said. “You have enlightened me on a very important point; and--and I am infinitely obliged to you.”

“Not at all,” he said. “Would you mind leaving your name and address?”

I hesitated a moment--and gave them.

“H’m! dear me!” he said. “There’s a person of that very name a patient of mine. Well, good-morning to you.”

Out in the street, I moved on like one in a dream.

“Dead!” I thought--“dead!”

I stopped suddenly, looking stupidly about me.

“Where am I?--Who am I?--Dead!”