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She had recoiled into the narrow hall, driven by anuncontrollable revulsion.]
THE SHADOW OF THE ROPE
BY E.W. HORNUNG
ILLUSTRATED BY HARVEY T. DUNN
1906
TO MY FRIENDEDWARD SHORTT
CONTENTS
Chapter
I. The End of Their Life
II. The Case for the Crown
III. Name and Nature
IV. The Man in the Train
V. The Man in the Street
VI. A Peripatetic Providence
VII. A Morning Call
VIII. The Dove and the Serpent
IX. A Change of Scene
X. A Slight Discrepancy
XI. Another New Friend
XII. Episode of the Invisible Visitor
XIII. The Australian Room
XIV. Battle Royal
XV. A Chance Encounter
XVI. A Match for Mrs. Venables
XVII. Friends in Need
XVIII. "They Which Were Bidden"
XIX. Rachel's Champion
XX. More Haste
XXI. Worse Speed
XXII. The Darkest Hour
XXIII. Dawn
XXIV. One Who Was Not Bidden
XXV. A Point to Langholm
XXVI. A Cardinal Point
XXVII. The Whole Truth
XXVIII. In the Matter of a Motive
ILLUSTRATIONS
She had recoiled into the narrow hall, driven by an uncontrollablerevulsion.
"I will!" she answered through her teeth--and she swept past him out ofthe room.
"I'll tell you who I thought it was at first," said he, heartily.
The Shadow of the Rope
CHAPTER I
THE END OF THEIR LIFE
"It is finished," said the woman, speaking very quietly to herself. "Notanother day, nor a night, if I can be ready before morning!"
She stood alone in her own room, with none to mark the white-hot pallorof the oval face, the scornful curve of quivering nostrils, the drylustre of flashing eyes. But while she stood a heavy step wentblustering down two flights of stairs, and double doors slammed upon theground floor.
It was a little London house, with five floors from basement to attic,and a couple of rooms upon each, like most little houses in London; butthis one had latterly been the scene of an equally undistinguished dramaof real life, upon which the curtain was even now descending. Although athird was whispered by the world, the persons of this drama were reallyonly two.
Rachel Minchin, before the disastrous step which gave her that surname,was a young Australian lady whose apparent attractions were onlyequalled by her absolute poverty; that is to say, she had been born atHeidelberg, near Melbourne, of English parents more gentle thanpractical, who soon left her to fight the world and the devil with noother armory than a good face, a fine nature, and the pride of anyheiress. It is true that Rachel also had a voice; but there was neverenough of it to augur an income. At twenty, therefore, she was already agoverness in the wilds, where women are as scarce as water, but wherethe man for Rachel did not breathe. A few years later she earned a berthto England as companion to a lady; and her fate awaited her on board.
Mr. Minchin had reached his prime in the underworld, of which he alsowas a native, without touching affluence, until his fortieth year.Nevertheless, he was a travelled man, and no mere nomad of the bush. Asa mining expert he had seen much life in South Africa as well as inWestern Australia, but at last he was to see more in Europe as agentleman of means. A wife had no place in his European scheme; ahusband was the last thing Rachel wanted; but a long sea voyage, anuncongenial employ, and the persistent chivalry of a handsome,entertaining, self-confident man of the world, formed a combination asfatal to her inexperience as that of so much poverty, pride, and beautyproved to Alexander Minchin. They were married without ceremony on thevery day that they arrived in England, where they had not an actualfriend between them, nor a relative to whom either was personally known.In the beginning this mattered nothing; they had to see Europe and enjoythemselves; that they could do unaided; and the bride did it only themore thoroughly, in a sort of desperation, as she realized that thebenefits of her marriage were to be wholly material after all.
In the larger life of cities, Alexander Minchin was no longer the idleand good-humored cavalier to whom Rachel had learned to look forunfailing consideration at sea. The illustrative incidents may beomitted; but here he gambled, there he drank; and in his cups everyvirtue dissolved. Rachel's pride did not mend matters; she was a thoughttoo ready with her resentment; of this, however, she was herself aware,and would forgive the more freely because there was often some obviousfault on her side before all was said. Quarrels of infinite bitternesswere thus patched up, and the end indefinitely delayed.
In the meantime, tired of travelling, and impoverished by the husband'sfollies, the hapless couple returned to London, where a pure fluke withsome mining shares introduced Minchin to finer gambling than he hadfound abroad. The man was bitten. There was a fortune waiting forspecial knowledge and a little ready cash; and Alexander Minchin settleddown to make it, taking for the nonce a furnished house in a modestneighborhood. And here it was that the quarrelling continued to itsculmination in the scene just ended.
"Not another day," said Rachel, "nor a night--if I can be ready beforemorning!"
Being still a woman with some strength of purpose, Mrs. Minchin did notstop at idle words. The interval between the slamming of doors below andanother noise at the top of the house was not one of many minutes. Theother noise was made by Rachel and her empty trunk upon the loftiest andthe narrowest flight of stairs; one of the maids opened their door aninch.
"I am sorry if I disturbed you," their mistress said. "These stairs areso very narrow. No, thank you, I can manage quite well." And they heardher about until they slept.
It was no light task to which Rachel had set her hand; she was goingback to Australia by the first boat, and her packing must be done thatnight. Her resolve only hardened as her spirit cooled. The sooner herdeparture, the less his opposition; let her delay, and the callousnessof the passing brute might give place to the tyranny of the normal man.But she was going, whether or no; not another day--though she woulddoubtless see its dawn. It was the month of September. And she was notgoing to fly empty-handed, nor fly at all; she was going deliberatelyaway, with a trunk containing all that she should want upon the voyage.The selection was not too easily made. In his better moods the creaturehad been lavish enough; and more than once did Rachel snatch from draweror wardrobe that which remained some moments in her hand, while theincidents of purchase and the first joys of possession, to one who hadpossessed so little in her life, came back to her with a certainpoignancy.
But her resolve remained unshaken. It might hurt her to take hispersonal gifts, but that was all she had ever had from him; he had nevergranted her a set allowance; for every penny she must needs ask and lookgrateful. It would be no fault of hers if she had to strip her fingersfor passage-money. Yet the exigency troubled her; it touched her honor,to say nothing of her pride; and, after an unforeseen fit ofirresolution, Rachel suddenly determined to tell her husband of herdifficulty, making direct appeal to the capricious generosity which hadbeen recalled to her mind as an undeniably redeeming point. It was truethat he had given her hearty leave to go to the uttermost ends of theearth, and highly probable that he would bid her work her own way. Shefelt an impulse to put it to him, however, and at once.
She looked at her watch--it at least had been her mother's--and thefinal day was already an hour old. But Alexander Minchin was a latesitter, as his young w
ife knew to her cost, and to-night he had told herwhere he meant to sleep, but she had not heard him come up. The roomwould have been the back drawing-room in the majority of such houses,and Rachel peeped in on her way down. It was empty; moreover, the bedwas not made, nor the curtains drawn. Rachel repaired the firstomission, then hesitated, finally creeping upstairs again for cleansheets. And as she made his bed, not out of any lingering love for him,but from a sense of duty and some consideration for his comfort, therewas yet something touching in her instinctive care, that breathed thewife she could have been.
He did not hear her, though the stairs creaked the smallness of thehour--or if he heard he made no sign. This discouraged Rachel as shestole down the lower flight; she would have preferred the angriest sign.But there were few internal sounds which penetrated to the little studyat the back of the dining-room, for the permanent tenant was the widowof an eminent professor lately deceased, and that student had protectedhis quiet with double doors. The outer one, in dark red baize, made analarming noise as Rachel pulled it open; but, though she waited, nosound came from within; nor was Minchin disturbed by the final entry ofhis wife, whose first glance convinced her of the cause. In theprofessor's armchair sat his unworthy successor, chin on waistcoat, anewspaper across his knees, an empty decanter at one elbow. Somethingremained in the glass beside the bottle; he had tumbled off before theend. There were even signs of deliberate preparations for slumber, forthe shade was tilted over the electric light by which he had beenreading, as a hat is tilted over the eyes.
Rachel had a touch of pity at seeing him in a chair for the night; butthe testimony of the decanter forbade remorse. She had filled it herselfin the evening against her husband's return from an absence ofmysterious length. Now she understood that mystery, and her facedarkened as she recalled the inconceivable insult which his explanationhad embraced. No, indeed; not another minute that she could help! And hewould sleep there till all hours of the morning; he had done it before;the longer the better, this time.
She had recoiled into the narrow hall, driven by an uncontrollablerevulsion; and there she stood, pale and quivering with a disgust thatonly deepened as she looked her last upon the shaded face and theinanimate frame in the chair. Rachel could not account for the intensityof her feeling; it bordered upon nausea, and for a time prevented herfrom retracing the single step which at length enabled her to shut bothdoors as quietly as she had opened them, after switching off the lightfrom force of habit. There was another light still glowing in the hall,and, again from habit, Rachel put it out also before setting foot uponthe stairs. A moment later she was standing terror-stricken in the dark.
It was no sound from the study, but the tiniest of metallic rattles fromthe flap of the letter-box in the front door. The wind might have doneit, for the flap had lost its spring; and, though the noise was notrepeated, to the wind Rachel put it down, as she mounted the stairs atlast in a flutter that caused her both shame and apprehension. Her nervewas going, and she needed it so! It should not go; it should not; and asif to steady it, she opened the landing window, and spent some minutesgazing out into the cool and starry night. Not that she could see veryfar. The backs of houses hid half the stars in front and on either hand,making, with the back of this house and its fellows, a kind of squareturned inside out. Miserable little gardens glimmered through anirregular network of grimy walls, with here and there a fair tree inautumnal tatters; but Rachel looked neither at these nor at the starsthat lit them dimly. In a single window of those right opposite a singlelamp had burnt all night. It was the only earthly light that Rachelcould see, the only one of earth or heaven upon which she looked; andshe discovered it with thanksgiving, and tore her eyes away from it witha prayer.
In time the trunk was packed, and incontinently carried downstairs, byan effort which left Rachel racked in every muscle and swaying giddily.But she could not have made much noise, for still there was no sign fromthe study. She scarcely paused to breathe. A latchkey closed the doorbehind her very softly; she was in the crisp, clean air at last.
But it was no hour for finding cabs; it was the hour of the scavengerand no other being; and Rachel walked into broad sunlight before shespied a solitary hansom. It was then she did the strangest thing;instead of driving straight back for her trunk, when near the house shegave the cabman other directions, subsequently stopping him at one witha card in the window.
A woman answered the bell with surprising celerity, and a face firststartled and then incensed at the sight of Mrs. Minchin.
"So you never came!" cried the woman, bitterly.
"I was prevented," Rachel replied coldly. "Well?"
And the monosyllable was a whisper.
"He is still alive," said the woman at the door.
"Is that all?" asked Rachel, a catch in her voice.
"It is all I'll say till the doctor has been."
"But he has got through the night," sighed Rachel, thankfully. "I couldsee the light in his room from hour to hour, even though I could notcome. Did you sit up with him all night long?"
"Every minute of the night," said the other, with undisguised severityin her fixed red eyes. "I never left him, and I never closed a lid."
"I am so sorry!" cried Rachel, too sorry even for renewed indignation atthe cause. "But I couldn't help it," she continued, "I really could not.We--I am going abroad--very suddenly. Poor Mr. Severino! I do wish therewas anything I could do! But you must get a professional nurse. And whenhe does recover--for something assures me that he will--you can tellhim--"
Rachel hesitated, the red eyes reading hers.
"Tell him I hope he will recover altogether," she said at length; "mind,altogether! I have gone away for good, tell Mr. Severino; but, as Iwasn't able to do so after all, I would rather you didn't mention that Iever thought of nursing him, or that I called last thing to ask how hewas."
And that was her farewell message to the very young man with whom ahole-and-corner scandal had coupled Rachel Minchin's name; it was to bea final utterance in yet another respect, and one of no slight orprivate significance, as the sequel will show. Within a minute or two ofits delivery, Rachel was on her own doorstep for the last time, deftlyand gently turning the latchkey, while the birds sang to frenzy in aneighboring garden, and the early sun glanced fierily from the brassknocker and letter-box. Another moment and the door had been flung wideopen by a police officer, who seemed to fill the narrow hall, with acomrade behind him and both servants on the stairs. And with littlefurther warning Mrs. Minchin was shown her husband, seated much as shehad left him in the professor's chair, but with his feet raised stifflyupon another, and the hand of death over every inch of him in the broadnorth light that filled the room.
The young widow stood gazing upon her dead, and four pairs of eyes gazedyet more closely at her. But there was little to gather from thestrained profile with the white cheek and the unyielding lips. Not a cryhad left them; she had but crossed the threshold, and stopped thatinstant in the middle of the worn carpet, the sharpest of silhouettesagainst a background of grim tomes. There was no swaying of the lissomefigure, no snatching for support, no question spoken or unspoken. Inmoments of acute surprise the most surprising feature is often the wayin which we ourselves receive the shock; a sudden and completedetachment, not the least common of immediate results, makes ussometimes even conscious of our failure to feel as we would or should;and it was so with Rachel Minchin in the first moments of her tragicfreedom. So God had sundered whom God had joined together! And this wasthe man whom she had married for love; and she could look upon his clayunmoved! Her mind leapt to a minor consideration, that still made hershudder, as eight eyes noted from the door; he must have been dead whenshe came down and found him seated in shadow; she had misjudged thedead, if not the living. The pose of the head was unaltered, the chinupon the chest, the mouth closed in death as naturally as in sleep. Nowonder his wife had been deceived. And yet there was somethingunfamiliar, something negligent and noble, and all unlike the livingman; so t
hat Rachel could already marvel that she had not at oncedetected this dignity and this distinction, only too foreign to herhusband as she had learnt to know him best, but unattainable in thenoblest save by death. And her eyes had risen to the slice of sky in theupper half of the window, and at last the tears were rising in her eyes,when they filled instead with sudden horror and enlightenment.
There was a jagged hole in the pane above the hasp; an upset of ink onthe desk beneath the window; and the ink was drying with the dead man'sblood, in which she now perceived him to be soaked, while the newspaperon the floor beside him was crisp as toast from that which it had hiddenwhen she saw him last.
"Murdered!" whispered Rachel, breaking her long silence with a gasp."The work of thieves!"
The policemen exchanged a rapid glance.
"Looks like it," said the one who had opened the door, "I admit."
There was a superfluous dryness in his tone; but Rachel no more noticedthis than the further craning of heads in the doorway.
"But can you doubt it?" she cried, pointing from the broken window tothe spilled ink. "Did you think that he had shot himself?"
And her horror heightened at a thought more terrible to her than all therest. But the constable shook his head.
"We should have found the pistol--which we can't," said he. "But shot heis, and through the heart."
"Then who could it be but thieves?"
"That's what we all want to know," said the officer; and still Rachelhad no time to think about his tone; for now she was bending over thebody, her white hands clenched, and agony enough in her white face.
"Look! look!" she cried, beckoning to them all. "He was wearing hiswatch last night; that I can swear; and it has gone!"
"You are sure he was wearing it?" asked the same constable, approaching.
"Absolutely certain."
"Well, if that's so," said he, "and it can't be found, it will be apoint in your favor."
Rachel sprang upright, her wet eyes wide with pure astonishment.
"In my favor?" she cried. "Will you have the goodness to explainyourself?"
The constables were standing on either side of her now.
"Well," replied the spokesman of the pair, "I don't like the way thatwindow's broken, for one thing, and if you look at it you'll see what Imean. The broken glass is all outside on the sill. But that's not all,ma'am; and, as you have a cab, we might do worse than drive to thestation before more people are about."