Chapter XXXI: The Blind Guide

“A fit,” Lord Stratharden had said.

There was very little look of such a seizure on Mrs. Keith’s face as she let herself softly out of his house at five o’clock in the morning. She stood and shook her fist at the closed windows.

“A common drunken woman,” said she grimly. “That’s what ye made of me last night and ye’ll pay dear for it. It’s not me that will need a dram this night!”

She was off down the deserted street with amazing speed for an old woman who had been drunk overnight and had eaten nothing for eighteen hours.

She had no money and no idea where to go to find Buff Ogilvie; no hope either of getting much out of him if she did find him, since he was his father’s son.

“I’ll go first to that queer woman who’s lost her sister,” she thought with a hope she knew to be a lie that the missing girl might have got home again. But it was nearly nine o’clock before her weary old feet took her to Dolly’s door; she stood looking up and down the street with hungry eyes for Magdalen Clyde, and saw no one but a man crossing the end of the square. Her eldritch yell brought the tailor to his window, but he saw no one either. Keith--and Heaven knows how she got there--was round the corner and clawing the arm of a tall man in blue serge clothes.

“Ogilvie,” she panted. “How come ye here? I’ve--but it’s no matter! For the sake of the mother that bore ye, and ye know what her life was as I do, what have ye done with my dead master’s child?”

“Keith!” The man stared in bewilderment. Haggard-eyed, trembling with exhaustion, he hardly knew the stern old woman. It was no wonder that he thought her distraught. “You in London!”

“I’ve been here weeks; but let that go!” There were tears in her eyes that he had never seen soften. “It’s a black business, Ogilvie----”

“I don’t go by that name,” he cut her off with a half laugh. “I’m done with the breed, Keith. My mother’s name was Lovell, and so is mine.”

“I’m not concerned with what they call ye. Ye take a queer way to be done with yer blood when ye mix in this business. What have ye done with that girl I saw ye with--her they call Magdalen Clyde? She’s gone, and Ogilvie, or Lovell, or Stratharden, I’ll get even with ye if I scream hell down.”

“Gone?” exclaimed Lovell. “What do you mean?” He made a step to go back to Magdalen’s home, which he had never entered, and the old woman caught his coat.

“Are ye in it? By the mother that bore ye?” Her eyes seemed to bore into his.

“In it? In her going? I! By God”--and she had never known him to swear before a woman--“I don’t know what you mean!”

“I’ll tell ye, then,” she answered chokingly. “No, not here--and not at her house. Stratharden, if I know him, is there now. Have ye nowhere ye can take me? for I fear me I’ll drop before my work’s done.”

“Yes,” he briefly replied. He put his arm through hers and guided her. “But what are you saying about my father? What has he to do with her?”

But she could not answer, and at his door in Hare’s Rents he picked her up like a child and carried her to his room. If the blind woman’s door was open as he passed, he did not notice it, nor realize that the sound of his feet told that he carried a burden.

“Now,” he said, as he sat her down and shut the door, “begin! Where is Magdalen Clyde gone and what do you know about her? How did you know to come to me? or that I’m----”

“Then ye know it! Ye false-swearing----”

“That I’m going to marry her?” with an angry laugh. “Go on.”

“That----” The woman looked at him and the hard strength, the loyalty of him came home to her soul. “Ogilvie, Ogilvie,” she sobbed. “She’s ye’re cousin; she’s Ian’s, my Ian’s daughter. She’s Countess of Barnysdale.”

The Ogilvie who had forsworn his name stood dumb.

Out in the hall some one prayed in the breathing silence for hearing, with blind, fierce eyes.

“Ian’s daughter,” the man said stupidly. “He never had one.”

“Ye were told so,” said Mrs. Keith. “I should know, since I was at her bearing. And Stratharden, who stole from me what I’d found out about her, knows, too. Think ye, when I find her gone and the hair of her head torn from her, that I would not guess at Stratharden? It’s she that Ardmore belongs to, and once she’s gone, ye’ll see that, by hook or crook, Stratharden will oust that feckless body, her sister--show she was, maybe, never Lady Barnysdale at all.”

Lady Barnysdale--that sister of Dark Magdalen’s, to whom he had scarcely given a thought! And Stratharden--he knew what Keith only guessed at about that ousting of Dolly. Father of his or not, if Stratharden had dared to meddle with Dark Magdalen he should pay for it.

“Tell me all you know,” he said, and his face was not good to see. “About her going away, I mean. I don’t care who she is--till I get her back again.”

He walked up and down as she poured out her broken-backed, disconnected story; a thing of shreds and patches picked up here and there.

“You that know her,” she cried, “did ye not see that she was Ian over again? Did ye not mind the likeness in the chapel? I stood her beneath it, and I marked her line by line.”

“I never was in the chapel. Was it likely I would hear much of my uncle Ian?” His look was absent as if this part of the story was nothing to him. “It’s yesterday I want to know about. What made you think of Ah Lee?”

“Do ye no mind the heathen scent of him? In his clothes when ye passed him? It was there in the room where her bonny hair had caught in the chair he’d taken her from. Did ye ever smell the like of it but with him?”

She jumped up and caught him by the arm.

“Where are ye going?” She was afraid of the look on his face.

“To my father. Let me go, Keith. If what you’ve told me is true the sooner I’m with him the better.”

“To have him lie to ye as he lied to me--soft and quick. No, no! Go to her sister, Lady Barnysdale, and----Oh, man! do ye not see that all I’ve told ye’s but guesswork? We’ve got to get the girl in our hands and find out it’s true before ye face Stratharden down. And”--quickly, for he was not listening to her--“here is one who knows--a woman named Duplessis, that was----Heavens! who is that?”

He turned at the cry. Aunt Manette stood in the doorway, and there was nothing human in the look of her face.

“I--that woman!” she cried. “I--oh, yes, I listened, M. Lovell. It is my business more than yours. This woman here is right. I, who know it all, can tell you; though, till I heard to-day, I could not put it all together.”

“You!” Keith cried. “Madame Duplessis, that died----”

“That was blinded,” Aunt Manette corrected her, very softly.

Lovell looked from one to the other. They were speaking of things that were Greek to him.

“What have you to do with it?” he said to the French woman.

“I am her grandmother,” said Aunt Manette simply. “She is my Ninon’s child. And your servant here is right; where she is gone she was carried. I was last night in the passage, and there went past me, slowly and slowly, a man who carried a burden. And the scent from his clothes was one of the East, like sweet corruption. I, that am blind, stood there while he passed me by. Fool that I was never to know it was the Chinaman!”

The Chinaman! Why did she speak as if she knew the man? To Aunt Manette, in Hare’s Rents, “a Chinaman” should have come more naturally. Lovell looked from one old woman to the other, angry at their mysteries that he did not know.

The French woman ran to him with her unerring instinct.

“You are reasonable,” she cried; “we waste time. But tell me where it is that you are going.”

“Police.” There was enough of his father in him to make him careless whether he walked over his own flesh and blood, so that he had his dark love back again. That any woman should be at a Chinaman’s mercy sickened him; but that it was Magdalen sent him mad.

“Police,” said the blind woman with her hard daintiness, “will take time! We have no time. You and I, Mr. Lovell, will do better. If----You are Stratharden’s son! Swear to me that you love her; swear quickly--that I may trust you still!”

Lovell, who cared for no man’s will, obeyed her like a child. The man was sick to the core, and perhaps did it mechanically.

“As she loves me,” he ended very low. But Aunt Manette believed him. She pointed a white finger at Keith.

“Go to her sister,” said she; “stay with her. The sister who is a stranger and may not be true. Keep her under your hand--till we come.”

Keith nodded. Nunlike coif, strange name and all, she knew Madame Duplessis now, the woman that had overturned a throne.

And it was that woman, not humble Aunt Manette, that turned again to Lovell.

“I hate your father,” she said. “I hated his Chinaman. For years it has been my affair to know where they were that I might turn my hand against them; for between them they broke my Ninon’s heart. I that am blind will take you that are strong to that Chinese den where the police dare not go.”

“I’ll go alone. You can’t,” he roughly answered.

“And at midnight not have found it! Sainte Vierge! must I tell you that I, whom you think half bedridden, am a blessed saint to those slums you never see? Where you could not go I can take you. Night after night have I smoothed their dying in those dens for nothing? Shall I not go where I please in broad day?”

It would be fighting for two women instead of one, but he did not say so. He was mad to be off, and if she could guide him it would save time.

At her door she bade him wait; and came out again with a decent shawl over her head; an old blue shawl that would bring half-a-dozen ruffians to her back at the sight of it. She had not lied when she said she was a blessed angel in those slums.

“Take that,” she said, and put in his hand something that had an ugly glitter; “but do not use it unless you must. Trust your hands the good God made strong--for this day.”

He marveled, as Magdalen had done, at the way she threaded the streets with hardly a question; one hand on his arm, the other against the filthy houses they passed. And thus he forgot everything but Magdalen, for he who lived in Hare’s Rents and would have said he knew each inch of their neighborhood was lost after five hundred yards. Through filthy yards and unspeakable alleys the blind woman led him; by twists and turns, in sunlight and darkness--for twice they went in one door of a house and came out another--she hurried him on. He saw she counted her steps interminably, felt every greasy wall and doorway they went through, and when at last she stopped he stared.

They stood in a court, respectable after the reeking alleys they had threaded, an empty court with whole windows instead of broken ones; and a silence like death hung over their heads.

“Do not speak,” she muttered as she drew him swiftly into a doorway. “The place, each window, would be alive!”

She pushed the door, and it swung back on noiseless hinges. With her fingers on her lips she tapped on the blank wall at her side: five times--nine times--five times again.

No one answered, there was not a soul to be seen, but a door before them swung forward heavily. It had reason, for it was clamped with bronze outside and in.

There was still no sound, but there was something else. A burning, acrid smell that clutched the throat, a distressing heaviness. Lovell looked at her and she nodded. He saw that she scarcely breathed for caution, and she motioned in front of her.

Down a long narrow passage--and that Chinese smell that is like nothing else in heaven or earth came up it--was spotless matting; ranged down it were clean straw slippers in orderly rows; opposite them boots that might have touched his heart at another time. Thick and thin, worn to holes, the boots of men who starve and freeze half naked, that the “black smoke” may lift their souls to peace. There were decent shoes, too, of Chinamen who earned an honest livelihood, but most were the shoes of men who “move on” eternally.

At the look in the blind eyes he understood, and left his own shoes in the orderly rank; he shook his head at the slippers; he would shuffle in them.

Aunt Manette felt the negative. She stooped and hid a pair of slippers in her dress, lest the keepers of the house should count them. He saw that she did not mean to take off her own foot covering; it was one person who came in, not two.

Never in his life had Lovell felt anything so strong as that silent bidding to silence in the blind woman’s touch. For himself he would have stormed through the house, wrecked doors, fought--but he knew the woman in the blue shawl was a better guide than he.

One door they passed, and then another; a third they crept by inch by inch; for inside it men spoke in a strange tongue.

The passage sloped down, grew dark. The woman who was always in the dark moved surely; sometimes he felt her stoop and place his feet where they should go. Down and down they went, by stairs that were ladders, round corners; till in the black labyrinth he knew, as a brave man knows, that without Aunt Manette he would have come here in vain.

In the dark she stopped and listened. Very far off some one laughed--a wicked sound in that place. She drew him on a step or two, and held his hand while she felt above her on the wall.

“There,” she breathed in his ear. “Press up; in!” and as he did it some one laughed again.

“Quick!” directed the woman, and caught him that he might not fall forward, for the wall in front of him had slipped away like a card slides into a pack.

There was a dull light in front of them, a room horrible with hangings unspeakable; a man sitting half erect on a heap of mats.

“You!” said Lovell; and knew the laugh that answered him, though it was close instead of seeming miles away.

“So you’ve come,” said the bleached thing in the gaudy dressing-gown, without surprise.

“Mr. Churchill,” said Aunt Manette, who had half-closed the door behind her--and stood by it, a living wedge in the opening. “There is one--inside?”

He looked at her.

“Ask Ah Lee,” he said listlessly. “As for me, I’m dying. But I couldn’t die with those moans in my ears. It was part of the bargain that I should die in peace.”

Lovell cursed him; and some rag of manhood came back to Bertie Churchill, who had mortgaged his last copper to Ah Lee for a place to die in.

“Be civil, Ogilvie,” he said; “it won’t hurt you. You were my pal once, you know. It’s queer how things come back to you.”

“Look within,” said Aunt Manette from the door. “The middle panel, behind that embroidered devil.” It was a god, but her fingers found it the other thing.

From instinct Lovell pushed as he had been taught outside, but there was no light behind that curtain. In the dark he struck a match, and his heart shook in him. If this was where Magdalen Clyde should be----

“Is there nowhere else?” said he, and his voice was thick.

Manette Duplessis became white.

“Speak,” she said, low and fierce to Churchill.

“Did he bring a girl there last night? Or----”

She could not go on. She knew other places, but not as she knew this.

“I can’t smoke opium, you know,” said Churchill softly, “because of my lungs. But I let Ah Lee think I do. He thought I was dead with it last night, I suppose, for he came and stood over me. I hate the sight of him; so I kept my eyes shut, and he went in there.” It was like a corpse sitting up and talking. “After a long time some one moaned. I--you fool, Ogilvie----” and there was in his face some remembrance of a day long dead that kept the others still. “I was a gentleman once! I couldn’t stand that moaning. I went in there; a white girl with red hair moaned at me for Dolly, and I knew a Dolly long ago. I knew, also, that Ah Lee had no business with a white girl that cried. I gave her brandy, for I can drink if I can’t smoke, and----”

“You took her out?” Aunt Manette was heedless who heard her. “You took her out?”

As if it were Lovell’s voice alone that could galvanize him into coherency he stared at her.

“I took her out,” he repeated vacantly; “but they caught her at the door.”