The Changeling

"My defiance? Certainly; I accept the word. My defiance. You appear to be almost as polite as your friends, Mr. Woodroffe."

"You could not have chosen a more effective manner of announcing your intentions. 'There!' you said, 'these clothes which you made with your own fingers show that it is your boy; yet you shall not have him, and I defy you to prove that he is yours.'"

"You are correct on one point. I do defy you to prove that fact."

"Very well; I am here to-day to tell you that I have advanced one more step, and a very important step it is."

"Important or not, I defy you to prove the fact. This is not, however, exactly an acknowledgment. But I shall not argue with you; I believe I ought to hand you over at once to my lawyers, to be dealt with for conspiracy."

Richard Woodroffe smiled. "I wish you would," he said. "I should like nothing better than the publicity of an action."

"Oh," she groaned, "the pertinacity of the black-mailer!"

"I shall not be insulted, whatever you say. I am here to tell you that the proofs have now closed round you so completely, that there is not left, I verily believe, a single loophole of escape."

Lady Woodroffe rose with dignity. "You talk to me, sir – to me? – of escape and loophole. Go, sir – go to my solicitors."

"Certainly." Richard continued, however, to occupy his chair. "I will go to your solicitors whenever you please. I would rather go to them than come here. But for the sake of others, I would prefer that you should acknowledge the fact, and let the son go back to his mother. He is my own half-brother, but it is not fraternal affection that prompts me in this research, I assure you. If you refuse to hear me, I shall have to go to your solicitors through Mrs. Haveril's solicitors."

"Oh, go on, then!"

She sat down again, and crossed her hands in her lap, assuming something of the expression of a person bored to death by a very bad sermon.

"I have certain evidence in my hands, then" – he could not avoid a smile of satisfaction – "which connects you with the dead child – your child."

Lady Woodroffe caught her breath and started, as if in sudden pain.

"Go on, sir."

"I will tell you what it is. You arrived one evening at the Great Midland Hotel, Birmingham, with an Indian ayah and a child. You engaged three rooms – a sitting-room and two bedrooms; you explained that the child had been taken suddenly and alarmingly ill in the train; you sent out for a medical man; he came; he kept the maids running about with hot water, and the boys going out for remedies and prescriptions; he stayed with you all night, watching the case; in the morning your child was dead; three days afterwards you buried him. There is no monument over the child's grave, because you made an arrangement with the help of Dr. Robert Steele, and substituted another child for him, and you went away two or three days after the funeral, and disappeared. The rooms were taken in your name; the books of the hotel prove so much."

"Oh! This man is tedious – tedious – with his repetitions."

"I have been down to Birmingham again. I have now found an old waiter who remembers the circumstance perfectly well – Indian ayah and sick baby and funeral. He says he remembers you, but that I doubt. I have also found the medical man who was called in. He not only remembers the case, which he entered at the time in his note-book, but he also remembers you – "

"After four and twenty years – !"

" – and picked you out of a bundle of photographs. I think you will admit that this is an important step?"

She made no reply. Her face was drawn and twisted with the pain of listening.

"What is wanted now," Richard added, "is the connection of yourself and the child. If we fail there – "

"You will fail."

"We shall ask Sir Robert."

"You will fail."

"Then we shall give publicity to the case – I don't quite know how. All the world shall understand. You will have to explain – "

"All the world? It is the High Court of Justice that you must address. I shall look to the judge to protect me. Remember it is in my power to prove that I was in Scotland at that very time."

"On that very day when the child died?"

"On that very day," she replied, firmly and without hesitation.

"Lady Woodroffe, I cannot believe what you say."

"You can prove what you like," she repeated, "but you cannot prove that I bought the child."

"To speak plainly, I don't believe one word about your proving an alibi, Lady Woodroffe, any more than I believe that remarkably bold falsehood about the child's clothes. We shall prove the death of the child beyond a doubt. You can then, if you please, find out something that will amuse the world about Humphrey. As for the publicity – "

"Since you will only prove that a woman took my name, I care nothing. My reputation is not likely to be injured by such a story. Who will believe against my word – that I – Lady Woodroffe – a leader, sir, in a world of which you and your like know nothing – the world which advances humanity – the world of religion and of charity – the world which combats vice unceasingly – should condescend to a crime so ignoble and so purposeless?"

"I am not concerned with your credibilities, Lady Woodroffe. I learn that you made a large use of them with Mrs. Haveril, and only desisted when they proved a failure. Then you took to defiance."

"The publicity will fall upon the fashionable physician, the great man of science, the head of his profession, who will have to acknowledge that he found a child and bought it for a certain unknown person – a noble way for a young physician to earn a fee! The publicity will also fall upon the now notorious lady who has got up in the world since she sold her only child for fifty pounds, to keep it and herself out of the workhouse. No injurious publicity will fall upon me, other than the discovery of some woman who once took my name."

"You are identified by your photograph. You forget that."

"Can I? After four and twenty years? Can any woman of my age – forty-nine – be identified, by a stranger, with another woman of twenty-five or thereabouts? Now, Mr. Richard Woodroffe, what else have you got to say?"

"I have only this to say. I came here to-day, Lady Woodroffe, in the hope that what I have told you would show you the danger of your position. For the sake of this lady, who is worn almost to death by the anxiety of her situation, I hoped that you would confess."

"Confess! I to confess! You speak as if I were a common criminal."

"No," said Richard, "not common by any means."

Lady Woodroffe left her chair and stepped over to the fireplace. She looked older, and the authority went out of her very strangely. She laid her hand on the shelf, as if for support, and she spoke slowly – with no show of anger – slowly, and with sadness.

"I think, sir, I do think, that if you could consider the meaning of this charge to a person in my position, the suffering you inflict upon me, the mischief you may do to me, and I know not how many more, by persisting in this charge, you would abandon it."

"I cannot; I am acting for another."

"You are playing a game to win. I don't accuse you of sordid motives. You want to win."

"Perhaps I do."

"Have you asked yourself the simple question, whether it is possible for me to commit such a crime, and then to confess?"

"I have to win this game, Lady Woodroffe. I think I have won it."

"It is not won yet. And believe me, sir, it will not be won unless I choose."

"We can place you in a very awkward position, anyhow."

"Mr. Richard Woodroffe, you came here to make a final appeal to me; it is my turn to make a final appeal to you. I am a woman, as perhaps you know, of very considerable importance in the world. Such a charge as you bring against me would not only crush me, if it were proved, but it would dislocate or ruin a great many associations and institutions of which I am the very soul. Thousands of orphans, working girls, Magdalens, and sinners, would lose their best friend. I am their best friend; my tongue and my pen keep up the stream which flows in to their relief. Is it not possible for that woman to think of these things? Or, there is the boy. He is partly, I suppose, what he is by education, partly by his nature; take away from him his position as a gentleman of rank and family, send him out disgraced to make his own way in the world, and he will sink like lead. You call him your half-brother. Well, Mr. Woodroffe, he is not a young man of many virtues; in fact, he has many vices."