Hilda Wade, a Woman with Tenacity of Purpose

“And the other thing?”

“Well, that was about the mountaineer’s homing instinct. I have often noticed it. I could give you fifty instances, only I didn’t like to speak of them before Lina. There was Williams, for example, the Dolgelly man who killed a game-keeper at Petworth in a poaching affray; he was taken on Cader Idris, skulking among rocks, a week later. Then there was that unhappy young fellow, Mackinnon, who shot his sweetheart at Leicester; he made, straight as the crow flies, for his home in the Isle of Skye, and there drowned himself in familiar waters. Lindner, the Tyrolese, again, who stabbed the American swindler at Monte Carlo, was tracked after a few days to his native place, St. Valentin, in the Zillerthal. It is always so. Mountaineers in distress fly to their mountains. It is a part of their nostalgia. I know it from within, too: if I were in poor Hugo LeGeyt’s place, what do you think I would do? Why, hide myself at once in the greenest recesses of our Carnarvonshire mountains.”

“What an extraordinary insight into character you have!” I cried. “You seem to divine what everybody’s action will be under given circumstances.”

She paused, and held her parasol half poised in her hand. “Character determines action,” she said, slowly, at last. “That is the secret of the great novelists. They put themselves behind and within their characters, and so make us feel that every act of their personages is not only natural but even—given the conditions—inevitable. We recognise that their story is the sole logical outcome of the interaction of their dramatis personae. Now, I am not a great novelist; I cannot create and imagine characters and situations. But I have something of the novelist’s gift; I apply the same method to the real life of the people around me. I try to throw myself into the person of others, and to feel how their character will compel them to act in each set of circumstances to which they may expose themselves.”

“In one word,” I said, “you are a psychologist.”

“A psychologist,” she assented; “I suppose so; and the police—well, the police are not; they are at best but bungling materialists. They require a CLUE. What need of a CLUE if you can interpret character?”

So certain was Hilda Wade of her conclusions, indeed, that Mrs. Mallet begged me next day to take my holiday at once—which I could easily do—and go down to the little bay in the Hartland district of which she had spoken, in search of Hugo. I consented. She herself proposed to set out quietly for Bideford, where she could be within easy reach of me, in order to hear of my success or failure; while Hilda Wade, whose summer vacation was to have begun in two days’ time, offered to ask for an extra day’s leave so as to accompany her. The broken-hearted sister accepted the offer; and, secrecy being above all things necessary, we set off by different routes: the two women by Waterloo, myself by Paddington.

We stopped that night at different hotels in Bideford; but next morning, Hilda rode out on her bicycle, and accompanied me on mine for a mile or two along the tortuous way towards Hartland. “Take nothing for granted,” she said, as we parted; “and be prepared to find poor Hugo Le Geyt’s appearance greatly changed. He has eluded the police and their ‘clues’ so far; therefore, I imagine he must have largely altered his dress and exterior.”

“I will find him,” I answered, “if he is anywhere within twenty miles of Hartland.”

She waved her hand to me in farewell. I rode on after she left me towards the high promontory in front, the wildest and least-visited part of North Devon. Torrents of rain had fallen during the night; the slimy cart-ruts and cattle-tracks on the moor were brimming with water. It was a lowering day. The clouds drifted low. Black peat-bogs filled the hollows; grey stone homesteads, lonely and forbidding, stood out here and there against the curved sky-line. Even the high road was uneven and in places flooded. For an hour I passed hardly a soul. At last, near a crossroad with a defaced finger-post, I descended from my machine, and consulted my ordnance map, on which Mrs. Mallet had marked ominously, with a cross of red rink, the exact position of the little fishing hamlet where Hugo used to spend his holidays. I took the turning which seemed to me most likely to lead to it; but the tracks were so confused, and the run of the lanes so uncertain—let alone the map being some years out of date—that I soon felt I had lost my bearings. By a little wayside inn, half hidden in a deep combe, with bog on every side, I descended and asked for a bottle of ginger-beer; for the day was hot and close, in spite of the packed clouds. As they were opening the bottle, I inquired casually the way to the Red Gap bathing-place.

The landlord gave me directions which confused me worse than ever, ending at last with the concise remark: “An’ then, zur, two or dree more turns to the right an’ to the left ‘ull bring ‘ee right up alongzide o’ ut.”

I despaired of finding the way by these unintelligible sailing-orders; but just at that moment, as luck would have it, another cyclist flew past—the first soul I had seen on the road that morning. He was a man with the loose-knit air of a shop assistant, badly got up in a rather loud and obtrusive tourist suit of brown homespun, with baggy knickerbockers and thin thread stockings. I judged him a gentleman on the cheap at sight. “Very Stylish; this Suit Complete, only thirty-seven and sixpence!” The landlady glanced out at him with a friendly nod. He turned and smiled at her, but did not see me; for I stood in the shade behind the half-open door. He had a short black moustache and a not unpleasing, careless face. His features, I thought, were better than his garments.

However, the stranger did not interest me just then I was far too full of more important matters. “Why don’t ‘ee taake an’ vollow thik ther gen’leman, zur?” the landlady said, pointing one large red hand after him. “Ur do go down to Urd Gap to zwim every marnin’. Mr. Jan Smith, o’ Oxford, they do call un. ‘Ee can’t go wrong if ‘ee do vollow un to the Gap. Ur’s lodgin’ up to wold Varmer Moore’s, an’ ur’s that vond o’ the zay, the vishermen do tell me, as wasn’t never any gen’leman like un.”

I tossed off my ginger-beer, jumped on to my machine, and followed the retreating brown back of Mr. John Smith, of Oxford—surely a most non-committing name—round sharp corners and over rutty lanes, tire-deep in mud, across the rusty-red moor, till, all at once, at a turn, a gap of stormy sea appeared wedge-shape between two shelving rock-walls.

It was a lonely spot. Rocks hemmed it in; big breakers walled it. The sou’-wester roared through the gap. I rode down among loose stones and water-worn channels in the solid grit very carefully. But the man in brown had torn over the wild path with reckless haste, zigzagging madly, and was now on the little three-cornered patch of beach, undressing himself with a sort of careless glee, and flinging his clothes down anyhow on the shingle beside him. Something about the action caught my eye. That movement of the arm! It was not—it could not be—no, no, not Hugo!

A very ordinary person; and Le Geyt bore the stamp of a born gentleman.

He stood up bare at last. He flung out his arms, as if to welcome the boisterous wind to his naked bosom. Then, with a sudden burst of recognition, the man stood revealed. We had bathed together a hundred times in London and elsewhere. The face, the clad figure, the dress, all were different. But the body—the actual frame and make of the man—the well-knit limbs, the splendid trunk—no disguise could alter. It was Le Geyt himself—big, powerful, vigorous.

That ill-made suit, those baggy knickerbockers, the slouched cap, the thin thread stockings, had only distorted and hidden his figure. Now that I saw him as he was, he came out the same bold and manly form as ever.

He did not notice me. He rushed down with a certain wild joy into the turbulent water, and, plunging in with a loud cry, buffeted the huge waves with those strong curving arms of his. The sou’-wester was rising. Each breaker as it reared caught him on its crest and tumbled him over like a cork, but like a cork he rose again. He was swimming now, arm over arm, straight out seaward. I saw the lifted hands between the crest and the trough. For a moment I hesitated whether I ought to strip and follow him. Was he doing as so many others of his house had done—courting death from the water?

But some strange hand restrained me. Who was I that I should stand between Hugo Le Geyt and the ways of Providence?

The Le Geyts loved ever the ordeal by water.

Presently, he turned again. Before he turned, I had taken the opportunity to look hastily at his clothes. Hilda Wade had surmised aright once more. The outer suit was a cheap affair from a big ready-made tailor’s in St. Martin’s Lane—turned out by the thousand; the underclothing, on the other hand, was new and unmarked, but fine in quality—bought, no doubt, at Bideford. An eerie sense of doom stole over me. I felt the end was near. I withdrew behind a big rock, and waited there unseen till Hugo had landed. He began to dress again, without troubling to dry himself. I drew a deep breath of relief. Then this was not suicide!

By the time he had pulled on his vest and drawers, I came out suddenly from my ambush and faced him. A fresh shock awaited me. I could hardly believe my eyes. It was NOT Le Geyt—no, nor anything like him!

Nevertheless, the man rose with a little cry and advanced, half crouching, towards me. “YOU are not hunting me down—with the police?” he exclaimed, his neck held low and his forehead wrinkling.

The voice—the voice was Le Geyt’s. It was an unspeakable mystery. “Hugo,” I cried, “dear Hugo—hunting you down?—COULD you imagine it?”

He raised his head, strode forward, and grasped my hand. “Forgive me, Cumberledge,” he cried. “But a proscribed and hounded man! If you knew what a relief it is to me to get out on the water!”

“You forget all there?”

“I forget IT—the red horror!”

“You meant just now to drown yourself?”

“No! If I had meant it I would have done it.... Hubert, for my children’s sake, I WILL not commit suicide!”

“Then listen!” I cried. I told him in a few words of his sister’s scheme—Sebastian’s defence—the plausibility of the explanation—the whole long story. He gazed at me moodily. Yet it was not Hugo!

“No, no,” he said, shortly; and as he spoke it was HE. “I have done it; I have killed her; I will not owe my life to a falsehood.”

“Not for the children’s sake?”

He dashed his hand down impatiently. “I have a better way for the children. I will save them still.... Hubert, you are not afraid to speak to a murderer?”

“Dear Hugo—I know all; and to know all is to forgive all.”

He grasped my hand once more. “Know ALL!” he cried, with a despairing gesture. “Oh, no; no one knows ALL but myself; not even the children. But the children know much; THEY will forgive me. Lina knows something; SHE will forgive me. You know a little; YOU forgive me. The world can never know. It will brand my darlings as a murderer’s children.”

“It was the act of a minute,” I interposed. “And—though she is dead, poor lady, and one must speak no ill of her—we can at least gather dimly, for your children’s sake, how deep was the provocation.”

He gazed at me fixedly. His voice was like lead. “For the children’s sake—yes,” he answered, as in a dream. “It was all for the children! I have killed her—murdered her—she has paid her penalty; and, poor dead soul, I will utter no word against her—the woman I have murdered! But one thing I will say: If omniscient justice sends me for this to eternal punishment, I can endure it gladly, like a man, knowing that so I have redeemed my Marian’s motherless girls from a deadly tyranny.”

It was the only sentence in which he ever alluded to her.

I sat down by his side and watched him closely. Mechanically, methodically, he went on with his dressing. The more he dressed, the less could I believe it was Hugo. I had expected to find him close-shaven; so did the police, by their printed notices. Instead of that, he had shaved his beard and whiskers, but only trimmed his moustache; trimmed it quite short, so as to reveal the boyish corners of the mouth—a trick which entirely altered his rugged expression. But that was not all; what puzzled me most was the eyes—they were not Hugo’s. At first I could not imagine why. By degrees the truth dawned upon me. His eyebrows were naturally thick and shaggy—great overhanging growth, interspersed with many of those stiff long hairs to which Darwin called attention in certain men as surviving traits from a monkey-like ancestor. In order to disguise himself, Hugo had pulled out all these coarser hairs, leaving nothing on his brows but the soft and closely pressed coat of down which underlies the longer bristles in all such cases. This had wholly altered the expression of the eyes, which no longer looked out keenly from their cavernous penthouse; but being deprived of their relief, had acquired a much more ordinary and less individual aspect. From a good-natured but shaggy giant, my old friend was transformed by his shaving and his costume into a well-fed and well-grown, but not very colossal, commercial gentleman. Hugo was scarcely six feet high, indeed, though by his broad shoulders and bushy beard he had always impressed one with such a sense of size; and now that the hirsuteness had been got rid of, and the dress altered, he hardly struck one as taller or bigger than the average of his fellows.

We sat for some minutes and talked. Le Geyt would not speak of Clara; and when I asked him his intentions, he shook his head moodily. “I shall act for the best,” he said—“what of best is left—to guard the dear children. It was a terrible price to pay for their redemption; but it was the only one possible, and, in a moment of wrath, I paid it. Now, I have to pay, in turn, myself. I do not shirk it.”

“You will come back to London, then, and stand your trial?” I asked, eagerly.

“Come back TO LONDON?” he cried, with a face of white panic. Hitherto he had seemed to me rather relieved in expression than otherwise; his countenance had lost its worn and anxious look; he was no longer watching each moment over his children’s safety. “Come back… TO LONDON… and face my trial! Why, did you think, Hubert, ‘twas the court or the hanging I was shirking? No, no; not that; but IT—the red horror! I must get away from IT to the sea—to the water—to wash away the stain—as far from IT—that red pool—as possible!”

I answered nothing. I left him to face his own remorse in silence.

At last he rose to go, and held one foot undecided on his bicycle.

“I leave myself in Heaven’s hands,” he said, as he lingered. “IT will requite.... The ordeal is by water.”

“So I judged,” I answered.

“Tell Lina this from me,” he went on, still loitering: “that if she will trust me, I will strive to do the best that remains for my darlings. I will do it, Heaven helping. She will know WHAT, to-morrow.”

He mounted his machine and sailed off. My eyes followed him up the path with sad forebodings.

All day long I loitered about the Gap. It consisted of two bays—the one I had already seen, and another, divided from it by a saw-edge of rock. In the further cove crouched a few low stone cottages. A broad-bottomed sailing boat lay there, pulled up high on the beach. About three o’clock, as I sat and watched, two men began to launch it. The sea ran high; tide coming in; the sou’-wester still increasing in force to a gale; at the signal-staff on the cliff, the danger-cone was hoisted. White spray danced in air. Big black clouds rolled up seething from windward; low thunder rumbling; a storm threatened.