Dorothy's Double. Volume 1 of 3

'That, at least, Miss Hawtrey, will commit us to nothing afterwards, and I trust even yet we may find some way of avoiding the unpleasantness you feared.'

'I may as well go with you, Ned,' Mr. Hawtrey said; 'I have nothing particular to do this morning; a walk will do me good. I am getting bilious and out of sorts with all this worry, and would give a good round sum to be quietly down in Lincolnshire again. Dorothy evidently feels it a good deal more than I should have thought she would,' he went on as they left the house.

'It is a horribly annoying sort of thing to happen to anyone, Mr. Hawtrey; because it is so desperately difficult to meet anonymous slander of this sort, and of course her engagement makes it so much the worse for her.'

'Yes, that is the rub, Ned. I am not at all pleased with the fellow; he seems to think of nothing but the manner in which it affects himself. I have had, once or twice, as much as I could do not to let out at him. I had it on the tip of my tongue to say, "Confound it, sir! What the deuce do I care for you or your family? The ancestors through whom you got your title were doubtless respectable enough, and as far as I know, may, two or three generations back, have been washer-women, when our people had already held their estates hundreds of years." Of course, Dorothy takes his part, but my own belief is that it is he who is worrying her, quite as much as the scandal itself.

'Dorothy is not marrying for a title; she refused a higher one than his last autumn. I don't say that his being a lord might not have influenced her to some extent; I suppose all girls have vanity enough to like to carry off a man whom scores of others will envy her for, but I don't think that went very far with her. I believe that, as far as she knew of him, she liked him for himself; not, I suppose, in any desperate sort of way, but as a pleasant, gentlemanly sort of fellow of whom everyone spoke well, and whom she esteemed and thought she could be very happy with. She has no occasion to marry for money; of course my estate is, as I dare say you know, entailed, and will go to my cousin, Jack Hawtrey, who is a sporting parson down in Somersetshire – a good fellow, with a large family; but there will be plenty for her from her mother, besides my unentailed property.

'I cannot help thinking that Halliburn's worrying, and the very evident fact that he thinks more of the scandal as affecting his future wife than of her feelings in the matter, may have shown her that she had over-estimated him, and that although he may be a very respectable and well-behaved young nobleman, he is a selfish and shallow-minded fellow after all. Dorothy may say nothing now, but she is not the sort of girl to forgive that sort of thing, and I don't mind saying it to you, as an old friend, Ned, that I should not be at all surprised if, when once this affair is thoroughly cleared up, she throws Halliburn over altogether.'

Captain Hampton made no reply, but had his companion turned to look at him he could hardly have avoided noticing that the expression on his face expressed anything but sympathy with the tone of irritation in which he had himself spoken.

Mr. Slippen was in when they arrived at Clifford's Inn. The door was opened by him when they knocked, a proof that the boy was not at his post.

'Come in, Captain Hampton; I fancied that you would be down here.'

'This is Mr. Hawtrey, Mr. Slippen,' said Ned, as they followed him into his room; 'he thought he would like to talk over with you the plan of campaign.'

'I am glad you have come, sir; it is always more satisfactory to meet one's principal in matters of this kind; there is less chance of any mistake being made. It is surprising sometimes to find, after one is half through one's work, that one has been proceeding under an entirely false impression. One may think, for example, that one's client is bent upon carrying a matter out to the bitter end, and will not hear of anything of a compromise, and then one discovers that he is perfectly ready to condone everything, and to make every sacrifice to avoid publicity. Of course, if one had known that in the first place, it would have immensely facilitated matters.'

'I should be very glad to avoid publicity myself,' Mr. Hawtrey said, 'but unfortunately the matter has gone so far that I do not see how it can possibly be avoided.'

Mr. Slippen shook his head.

'I don't see, myself, at present,' he agreed, 'how the scandal is to be set at rest, except by the prosecution of its author – that is to say, if we can get evidence enough to prosecute him. Of course, if we had such evidence it would be easy enough to force him into making a complete retractation; but, if we did, such a retractation would hardly be satisfactory, as, supposing it were published, people would say, "How are we to know that this letter is written by the fellow who wrote the others? If it is the man, how is it that he is not prosecuted for it?" Certainly there would be a strong suspicion that he had been bought off.'

'I see that myself,' Mr. Hawtrey agreed. 'I don't see any other way of clearing the matter up except by putting him in the dock, though I would give a great deal to avoid it. My daughter is extremely averse to the idea of the publicity attending such an affair, and especially to having to appear as a witness, which is not surprising when one knows the outrageous licence given to counsel in our days to cross-examine witnesses.'

Captain Hampton noticed the sudden keen glance shot at his client from Mr. Slippen's eyes, followed by a series of almost imperceptible little nods, and was seized with a sudden and fierce desire to make a violent assault upon the unconscious detective.

'At any rate,' Mr. Hawtrey continued, 'I see nothing at present but to let the matter go on, and for you to obtain, if possible, some decisive proof of the man's connection with these letters. So far we have really only the most shadowy grounds for our suspicion against him.'

Again Mr. Slippen nodded, this time more openly and decisively.

'Quite the most shadowy, Mr. Hawtrey. I am far from saying that he may not be the man, but beyond his having, as I understand, a grievance of very many years' duration against yourself there is really nothing whatever to connect him with the affair.'

'Nothing, Mr. Slippen. It is, in fact, simply because there is no one else against whom we have even such slight grounds as this to go upon, that we suspect this fellow of being the author of these rascally communications.'

'You will understand, Mr. Hawtrey, that being employed by you I consider it my duty to let you know exactly the light in which the matter strikes me. Of course, I do not know the man as you do, but from what I have learnt from Captain Hampton he seems to be an unprincipled blackguard; a man who has been concerned in various shady transactions on the turf, and who has come down to the rank of the lowest class of betting men; a fellow who pays his bets when he has made a winning book on a race and is a welsher when he loses.

'Of course, it may be that such a man is of so vindictive a nature that he may have taken all this trouble simply to annoy you, but I cannot help thinking that if he had embarked upon it he would have played his hand so as not only to annoy but to extort money to cease that annoyance. Now the writer of these letters has certainly not done that. Had he had any idea of extorting money he would have sent some sort of private intimation to you, by means of a cautiously worded letter, to the effect that an arrangement could be made by which the thing could be put a stop to. You have received no such missive; therefore, if this man is the author he is simply a malicious scoundrel, and not, in this instance at any rate, a clever rogue, as I should certainly have expected to find him from his antecedents.'

'That is to say, you do not think he is the man?'

'Yes, I think it comes almost to that, Mr. Hawtrey. I do not know him, and, of course, he may be the man, but I own that I shall be a good deal surprised if I find that he is so. Still, in the absence of any other clue whatever, I propose to follow this up. It will be something at least to clear it out of the way and to have done with it. I shall detail my boy to watch the public-house till the man comes to it, and then to find out where he lives and what are his habits; to follow his footsteps and take note of every place where he posts a letter. We shall get, at any rate, negative evidence that way. If, for instance, a letter is posted in the south of London, and we know that on that day the man never went out of Islington, I think that it will be very strong proof that he has nothing to do with the matter. Of course the reverse would not be so convincing the other way; but if we had the coincidence, three or four times repeated, of the letter bearing the mark of a district in which he had dropped one into the post, we should feel that we were a long way towards proving his connection with the affair.'

'Quite so,' Mr. Hawtrey agreed; 'that will, as you say, either go far to confirm our suspicions, or will altogether clear the ground so far as he is concerned, and we must then look for a clue in some other direction altogether.'

That afternoon Captain Hampton, having nothing to do, made his way up to Islington. The lad was not to be put on the watch until the next morning, and he thought that he might see this man at the public-house he frequented, and perhaps glean something from any conversation he might have with the men he met there. After some inquiry as to the direction of Frogmore Street, he turned up the Liverpool Road, and had gone but a few hundred yards when his eye fell on a couple engaged in earnest conversation on the raised walk, on the opposite side of the street. He paused abruptly in his stride. One was unquestionably the man for whom he was seeking. He was better dressed than when he had seen him before, and had more the air of a gentleman, but there could be no question as to his identity. The other was as unmistakably Dorothy Hawtrey.

There was no question of an accidental likeness; it was the girl herself, and he recognised the dress as one he had seen her wear. Turning sharply on his heel he turned down a bye street, and came out into Upper Street. There were too many people here for him to think; he passed on, walking in the road at the edge of the pavement, to the Angel, and then turned down the comparatively quiet pavement of Pentonville Hill.

What could it mean? He could see but one solution, and yet he refused to accept it. To believe it was to believe Dorothy Hawtrey to be guilty of deception and lying. Was it possible that, after all, this man could have possessed letters of hers, and that she had been driven at last to meet him and redeem them? He remembered her pallor when she had heard that morning that this fellow's whereabouts had been discovered, and how she had urged that no steps should be taken against him. It had all seemed natural then; it seemed equally natural now under this new light – and yet he refused to believe it. So he told himself over and over again. That he had seen her in conversation with Truscott was undeniable; of that, at least, he was certain, but equally certain was it to him that there must be some other explanation of the meeting than that which had at first struck him. What could that explanation be? No answer occurred to him; he could hit upon no hypothesis consistent with her denial of any knowledge whatever of the writer of these letters.

He was at the bottom of the hill now; disregarding the hails of various cabmen, he crossed the road and made his way down through the squares. It was better to be walking than sitting still. He scarcely noticed where he was going, and was almost surprised when he found himself in Jermyn Street. He went upstairs, lighted a cigar, and sat down.

'What is coming to me?' he said to himself. 'I am generally pretty good at guessing riddles, and there must be some explanation of this mystery, if I can but hit upon it.'

But after thinking for another hour, the only alternative to the first idea that had occurred to him was that Dorothy, in her horror of the idea of a public trial and of being forced to appear in the witness box, had taken the desperate resolution to find this man herself, at the address he had mentioned to her and her father, to bribe him to desist from his persecution of her, and to warn him that unless he moved away at once the police would be on his track.

It was all so unlike the high-spirited child he had known, and the girl as he had believed her still to be, that it was difficult to credit that she would allow herself to be driven to take such a step as this, in order to escape what seemed to him a minor unpleasantness.

Still, as he told himself, there were men of tried bravery in many respects who were moral cowards, and it might well be that, though generally fearless, Dorothy might have a nervous shrinking from the thought of standing up in a crowded court, exposed to an inquisition that in many cases was almost a martyrdom. It was an awful mistake to have made. If the scoundrel had been bribed into silence now, he would be all the more certain to recommence his persecution later on, and after having once met with and paid him for his silence how could she refuse to do so when another demand was made?

One thing seemed to Ned Hampton unquestionable. He must maintain an absolute silence as to what he had seen – the harm was done now and could not be undone. He was certain that she had not noticed him, and could never suspect that he had her secret. As for himself there was nothing for him now but to stand aside altogether. Filled as he was with the deepest pity for Dorothy, he was powerless to help her. When the next trouble came it was her husband who would have to stand beside her, and to whom, sooner or later, she would have to own the false step she had taken.

He felt that at any rate it was out of the question that he should see her again at present. It was fortunate that he had retired from the investigation in favour of Mr. Slippen, and could therefore run away for a bit without seeming to have deserted Mr. Hawtrey. He had thought about hiring a yacht, and this would serve as a pretext for him to run down to Ryde. He could easily put away a fortnight between that town, Cowes, Southampton, and Portsmouth. As to the yacht he had no real intention now of looking for one. He must wait for a while and see what happened next. He was sure to meet men he knew at Southsea, and anything was better than staying in London.

He accordingly at once wrote a note to Mr. Hawtrey, saying that it would be some time before Slippen obtained such evidence against Truscott as would put them in a position to bring it home to him, and that as he could not be of any use for a time he had resolved to run down for a week to Southsea, and look round the various yards in search of a yacht of about the size he wanted, for a cruise of six weeks or two months, with the option of taking her up the Mediterranean through the winter. Then he wrote several letters of excuse to houses where he had engagements, and started the next morning by the first train for Portsmouth. He was a fortnight absent, and on his return called on Mr. Hawtrey at an hour when he knew that he was not likely to meet Dorothy.

'So you are back again, Ned? Your note took me quite by surprise, for you had said nothing as to your going away when I met you early in the day.'

'No, sir, it was a sort of sudden inspiration. I was sick of London, and had had a very dull time of it going about to races for three weeks before; so I thought that I would have a complete change, made up my mind at once, packed my portmanteau, and was off. Have you had any news from Slippen?'

'None. He has written to me two or three times; his last note came this morning, saying that his boy has been watching the public-house ever since, and that the man has certainly not been there. The boy is a sharp fellow and found that the fellow had called in there on the very day before he began his watch, and he also discovered by bribing a postman where he had lodged, but upon going there found he had given up his room on the same day he had last been at the public-house, and had left no address, nor had the people of the house the slightest idea where he had gone. I suppose the fellow took fright at the publicity there had been about the affair; at any rate, no more of those letters have come since. That is certainly a comfort, but it looks as if we were never going to get to the bottom of the mystery. Of course, it is extremely annoying, but I suppose we shall live it down. Halliburn offered a reward of a hundred pounds for the discovery of Truscott's, or as he calls him Marvel's, address. That was a week ago, and he has received no answer as yet, which is certainly a fresh proof that the fellow was the author of the letters. If not, he himself would have turned up and claimed the reward.'

'That is not quite certain, Mr. Hawtrey. He has doubtless been concerned in many other shady transactions, and may think he is wanted for some other affair altogether.'

'You are right, that may be so; I did not think of that. Still, it is strange the offer of a reward has brought no news of him. He must be well known to numbers of men who would sell their own father for a hundred pounds.'

'If he is really alarmed he may have changed his name, and gone to some part of the country where he is altogether unknown, or he may have crossed the Channel to some of the French or Belgian ports. There is a lot of betting carried on from that side, and he may manage to live there as he has lived here – by fleecing fools.'

Two days later, Hampton met the Hawtreys at a dinner-party. Dorothy was looking pale and languid, but at times she roused herself and talked with almost feverish gaiety. Lord Halliburn was there; he was sitting next to Dorothy, and seemed silent and preoccupied, and looked, Hampton thought, vexed when she had one of her fits of talking. When they had rejoined the ladies after dinner Hampton was chatting with the lady he had taken down, and who was an old friend of his family.

'Is it not awfully sad, this affair of Miss Hawtrey's?' she said. 'It is evidently preying on her health. I never saw anybody more changed in the course of a few weeks. Of course, everyone who knows her is quite certain that there is no foundation whatever for these wicked libels about her. Still, naturally, people who don't know her think that there must be something in it, and she must know, wherever she goes, that people are talking about it. It is terrible! I do not know what I should do were she a daughter of mine.'

'Yes, it is a most painful position; there does not seem any method by which these anonymous libels can be met and answered. The most scandalous part of the business is that any notice of a thing of this sort should get into the papers. The form in which it was noticed rendered it impossible to obtain redress of any kind; the statements contained as to the annoyance caused by these letters, and as to the nature of their contents, were accurate, and Mr. Hawtrey is therefore unable to take any steps against them. I have known Miss Hawtrey from the time that she was a little child; as you are aware they are my greatest friends, and I assure you that one's powerlessness in these days to take any step to right a wrong of this sort, makes me wish I had lived at any time save in the middle of the nineteenth century. A hundred years ago one would have called out the editor or proprietor, or whatever he calls himself, of a paper that published this thing, and shot him like a dog; four hundred years ago one would have sent him a formal challenge to do battle in the lists; if one had lived in Italy a couple of centuries back, and had adopted the customs of the country, one would have had him removed by a stab in the back by a bravo – not a manner that commends itself to me I own, but which, as against a man whose journal exists by attacking reputations is, I should consider, perfectly legitimate.'

'But he is not the chief offender in the case, Captain Hampton.'

'I don't know. The anonymous libeller could really have done no harm had it not been that there were organs that were ready to inform the world of his attacks upon this lady; the letters could have been burnt and none been any the wiser, and in time the annoyance would have ceased.'

'Do you think the author of these things will ever be found out?'

'I should hardly think so. It is clearly the outcome of malice on the part of some man or woman who has either a grudge against Mr. Hawtrey, his daughter, or Lord Halliburn, or of some one interested in breaking off Miss Hawtrey's engagement.'

'I don't think Lord Halliburn has behaved nicely in the matter,' Mrs. Dean said. 'If he had shown himself perfectly indifferent to the affair from the first, people would never have talked so much. It is his palpable annoyance that has more than confirmed these gossiping rumours.'