Detection by Gaslight (9 page)

“Maria, Maria!” called Mrs. Brown, “don't run away; we sha'n't stay here for more than a minute or so.”

Her words met with no response. The woman did not so much as turn her head.

Loveday stood at the entrance of the old summer-house. It was considerably out of repair, and most probably was never entered by anyone save Maria Lisle, its unswept, undusted condition suggesting colonies of spiders and other creeping things within.

Loveday braved them all and took her seat on the bench that ran round the little place in a semi-circle.

“Do try and overtake the girl, and tell her we shall be gone in a minute,” she said, addressing Mrs. Brown. “I will wait here meanwhile. I am so sorry to have frightened her away in that fashion.”

Mrs. Brown, under protest, and with a little grumble at the ridiculousness of “people who couldn't look other people in the face,” set off in pursuit of Maria.

It was getting dim inside the summer-house now. There was, however, sufficient light to enable Loveday to discover a small pocket of books lying in a corner of the bench on which she sat.

One by one she took them in her hand and closely scrutinized them. The first was a much read and pencil-marked Bible; the others were respectively, a “congregational hymn-book,” a book in a paper cover, on which was printed a flaming picture of a red and yellow angel, pouring blood and fire from out a big black bottle, and entitled “The End of the Age,” and a smaller book, also in a paper cover, on which was depicted a huge black horse, snorting fire and brimstone into ochre-coloured clouds. This book was entitled “The Year Book of the Saints,” and was simply a ruled diary with sensational mottoes for every day in the year. In parts, this diary was filled in with large and very untidy handwriting.

In these books seemed to lie the explanation of Maria Lisle's love of evening solitude and the lonely old summer-house.

Mrs. Brown pursued Maria to the servants' entrance to the house, but could not overtake her, the girl making good her retreat there.

She returned to Loveday a little hot, a little breathless and a little out of temper. It was all so absurd, she said; why couldn't the woman have stayed and had a chat with them? It wasn't as if she would get any harm out of the talk; she knew as well as everyone else in the village that she (Mrs. Brown) was no idle gossip, tittle-tattling over other people's affairs.

But here Loveday, a little sharply, cut short her meanderings.

“Mrs. Brown,” she said, and to Mrs. Brown's fancy her voice and manner had entirely changed from that of the pleasant, chatty lady of half-an-hour ago, “I'm sorry to say it will be impossible for me to stay even one night in your pleasant home. I have just recollected some important business that I must transact in Brighton to-night. I haven't unpacked my porte-manteau, so if you'll kindly have it taken to your garden-gate, I'll call for it as we drive past—I am going now, at once, to the inn, to see if Mr. Clampe can drive me back into Brighton to-night.”

Mrs. Brown had no words ready wherewith to express her astonishment, and Loveday assuredly gave her no time to hunt for them. Ten minutes later saw her rousing Mr. Clampe from a comfortable supper, to which he had just settled himself, with the surprising announcement that she must get back to Brighton with as little delay as possible; now, would he be good enough to drive her there?

“We'll have a pair if they are to be had,” she added. “The road is good; it will be moonlight in a quarter of an hour; we ought to do it in less than half the time we took coming.”

While a phaeton and pair were being got ready, Loveday had time for a few words of explanation.

Maria Lisle's diary in the old summer-house had given her the last of the links in her chain of evidence that was to bring the theft of the cheque home to the criminal.

“It will be best to drive straight to the police station,” she said; “they must take out three warrants, one for Maria Lisle, and two others respectively for Richard Steele, late Wesleyan minister of a chapel in Gordon Street, Brighton, and John Rogers, formerly elder of the same chapel. And let me tell you,” she added with a little smile, “that these three worthies would most likely have been left at large to carry on their depredations for some little time to come if it had not been for that ridiculous ghost in Fountain Lane.”

More than this there was not time to add, and when, a few minutes later, the two were rattling along the road to Brighton, the presence of the man, whom they were forced to take with them in order to bring back the horses to East Downes, prevented any but the most jerky and fragmentary of additions to this brief explanation.

“I very much fear that John Rogers has bolted,” once Loveday whispered under her breath.

And again, a little later, when a smooth bit of road admitted of low-voiced talk, she said:

“We can't wait for the warrant for Steele; they must follow us with it to 15, Draycott Street.”

“But I want to know about the ghost,” said Mr. Clampe; “I am deeply interested in that ‘ridiculous ghost.'”

“Wait till we get to 15, Draycott Street,” was Loveday's reply; “when you've been there, I feel sure you will understand everything.”

Church clocks were chiming a quarter to nine as they drove through Kemp Town at a pace that made the passers-by imagine they must be bound on an errand of life and death.

Loveday did not alight at the police station, and five minutes' talk with the inspector in charge there was all that Mr. Clampe required to put things en train for the arrest of the three criminals.

It had evidently been an “excursionists' day” at Brighton. The streets leading to the railway station were thronged, and their progress along the bystreets was impeded by the overflow of traffic from the main road.

“We shall get along better on foot; Draycott Street is only a stone's throw from here,” said Loveday; “there's a turning on the north side of Western Road that will bring us straight into it.”

So they dismissed their trap, and Loveday, acting as cicerone still, led the way through narrow turnings into the district, half town, half country, that skirts the road leading to the Dyke.

Draycott Street was not difficult to find. It consisted of two rows of newly-built houses of the eight-roomed, lodging-letting order. A dim light shone from the first-floor windows of number fifteen, but the lower window was dark and uncurtained, and a board hanging from its balcony rails proclaimed that it was “to let unfurnished.” The door of the house stood slightly ajar, and pushing it open, Loveday led the way up a flight of stairs—lighted halfway up with a paraffin lamp—to the first floor.

“I know the way. I was here this afternoon,” she whispered to her companion. “This is the last lecture he will give before he starts for Judæa; or, in other words, bolts with the money he has managed to conjure from other people's purses into his own.”

The door of the room for which they were making, on the first floor, stood open, possibly on account of the heat. It laid bare to view a double row of forms, on which were seated some eight or ten persons in the attitude of all-absorbed listeners. Their faces were upturned, as if fixed on a preacher at the farther end of the room, and wore that expression of rapt, painful interest that is sometimes seen on the faces of a congregation of revivalists before the smouldering excitement bursts into flame.

As Loveday and her companion mounted the last of the flight of stairs the voice of the preacher—full, arrestive, resonant—fell upon their ear; and, standing on the small outside landing, it was possible to catch a glimpse of that preacher through the crack of the half-opened door.

He was a tall, dignified-looking man, of about five-and-forty, with a close crop of white hair, black eye-brows and remarkably luminous and expressive eyes. Altogether his appearance matched his voice: it was emphatically that of a man born to sway, lead, govern the multitude.

A boy came out of an adjoining room and asked Loveday respectfully if she would not like to go in and hear the lecture. She shook her head.

“I could not stand the heat,” she said. “Kindly bring us chairs here.”

The lecture was evidently drawing to a close now, and Loveday and Mr. Clampe, as they sat outside listening, could not resist an occasional thrill of admiration at the skilful manner in which the preacher led his hearers from one figure of rhetoric to another, until the oratorical climax was reached.

“That man is a born orator,” whispered Loveday; “and in addition to the power of the voice has the power of the eye. That audience is as completely hypnotised by him as if they had surrendered themselves to a professional mesmerist.”

To judge from the portion of the discourse that fell upon their ear, the preacher was a member of one of the many sects known under the generic name, “Millenarian.” His topic was Apollyon and the great battle of Armageddon. This he described as vividly as if it were being fought out under his very eye, and it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that he made the cannon roar in the ears of his listeners and the tortured cries of the wounded wail in them. He drew an appalling picture of the carnage of that battlefield, of the blood flowing like a river across the plain, of the mangled men and horses, with the birds of prey swooping down from all quarters, and the stealthy tigers and leopards creeping out from their mountain lairs. “And all this time,” he said, suddenly raising his voice from a whisper to a full, thrilling tone, “gazing calmly down upon the field of slaughter, with bent brows and folded arms, stands the imperial Apollyon. Apollyon did I say? No, I will give him his right name, the name in which he will stand revealed in that dread day, Napoleon! A Napoleon it will be who, in that day, will stand as the embodiment of Satanic majesty. Out of the mists suddenly he will walk, a tall, dark figure, with frowning brows and firm-set lips, a man to rule, a man to drive, a man to kill! Apollyon the mighty, Napoleon the imperial, they are one and the same——”

Here a sob and a choking cry from one of the women in the front seats interrupted the discourse and sent the small boy who acted as verger into the room with a glass of water.

“That sermon has been preached before,” said Loveday. “Now can you not understand the origin of the ghost in Fountain Lane?”

“Hysterics are catching, there's another woman off now,” said Mr. Clampe; “it's high time this sort of thing was put a stop to. Pearson ought to be here in another minute with his warrant.”

The words had scarcely passed his lips before heavy steps mounting the stairs announced that Pearson and his warrant were at hand.

“I don't think I can be of any further use,” said Loveday, rising to depart. “If you like to come to me to-morrow morning at my hotel at ten o‘clock I will tell you, step by step, how I came to connect a stolen cheque with a ‘ridiculous ghost.'”

 

“We had a tussle—he showed fight at first,” said Mr. Clampe, when, precisely at ten o‘clock the next morning, he called upon Miss Brooke at the Métropole. “If he had had time to get his wits together and had called some of the men in that room to the rescue, I verily believe we should have been roughly handled and he might have slipped through our fingers after all. It's wonderful what power these ‘born orators,' as you call them, have over minds of a certain order.”

“Ah, yes,” answered Loveday thoughtfully; “we talk glibly enough about ‘magnetic influence,' but scarcely realise how literally true the phrase is. It is my firm opinion that the ‘leaders of men,' as they are called, have as absolute and genuine hypnotic power as any modern French expert, although perhaps it may be less consciously exercised. Now tell me about Rogers and Maria Lisle.”

“Rogers had bolted, as you expected he would have done, with the six hundred pounds he had been good enough to cash for his reverend colleague. Ostensibly he had started for Judæa to collect the elect, as he phrased it, under one banner. In reality, he has sailed for New York, where, thanks to the cable, he will be arrested on his arrival and sent back by return packet. Maria Lisle was arrested this morning on a charge of having stolen the cheque from Mrs. Turner. By the way, Miss Brooke, I think it is almost a pity you didn't take possession of her diary when you had the chance. It would have been invaluable evidence against her and her rascally colleagues.”

“I did not see the slightest necessity for so doing. Remember, she is not one of the criminal classes, but a religious enthusiast, and when put upon her defence will at once confess and plead religious conviction as an extenuating circumstance—at least, if she is well advised she will do so. I never read anything that laid bare more frankly than did this diary the mischief that the sensational teaching of these millenarians is doing at the present moment. But I must not take up your time with moralising. I know you are anxious to learn what, in the first instance, led me to identify a millenarian preacher with a receiver of stolen property.

“Yes, that's it; I want to know about the ghost: that's the point that interests me.”

“Very well. As I told you yesterday afternoon, the first thing that struck me as remarkable in this ghost story was the soldierly character of the ghost. One expects emotionally religious people like Freer and his wife to see visions, but one also expects those visions to partake of the nature of those emotions, and to be somewhat shadowy and ecstatic. It seemed to me certain that this Napoleonic ghost must have some sort of religious significance to these people. This conviction it was that set my thoughts running in the direction of the millenarians, who have attached a religious significance (although not a polite one) to the name of Napoleon by embodying the evil Apollyon in the person of a descendant of the great Emperor, and endowing him with all the qualities of his illustrious ancestor. I called upon the Freers, ordered a pair of boots, and while the man was taking my measure, I asked him a few very pointed questions on these millenarian notions. The man prevaricated a good deal at first, but at length was driven to admit that he and his wife were millenarians at heart, that, in fact, the prayer meeting at which the Napoleonic ghost had made its first appearance was a millenarian one, held by a man who had at one time been a Wesleyan preacher in the chapel in Gordon Street, but who had been dismissed from his charge there because his teaching had been held to be unsound. Freer further stated that this man had been so much liked that many members of the congregation seized every opportunity that presented itself of attending his ministrations, some openly, others, like himself and his wife, secretly, lest they might give offence to the elders and ministers of their chapel.”