"She retains that hold upon me, sir," I answered curtly.

"You are making a grave mistake in life, my dear c.u.mberledge," he went on, in his old genial tone, which I had almost forgotten. "Before you go further, and entangle yourself more deeply, I think it is only right that I should undeceive you as to this girl's true position. She is pa.s.sing under a false name, and she comes of a tainted stock.... Nurse Wade, as she chooses to call herself, is a daughter of the notorious murderer, Yorke-Bannerman."

My mind leapt back to the incident of the broken basin.

Yorke-Bannerman's name had profoundly moved her. Then I thought of Hilda's face. Murderers, I said to myself, do not beget such daughters as that. Not even accidental murderers, like my poor friend Le Geyt. I saw at once the prima facie evidence was strongly against her. But I had faith in her still. I drew myself up firmly, and stared him back full in the face. "I do not believe it," I answered, shortly.

"You do not believe it? I tell you it is so. The girl herself as good as acknowledged it to me."

I spoke slowly and distinctly. "Dr. Sebastian," I said, confronting him, "let us be quite clear with one another. I have found you out. I know how you tried to poison that lady. To poison her with bacilli which _I_ detected. I cannot trust your word; I cannot trust your inferences.

Either she is not Yorke-Bannerman's daughter at all, or else...

Yorke-Bannerman was NOT a murderer...." I watched his face closely.

Conviction leaped upon me. "And someone else was," I went on. "I might put a name to him."

With a stern white face, he rose and opened the door. He pointed to it slowly. "This hospital is not big enough for you and me abreast," he said, with cold politeness. "One or other of us must go. Which, I leave to your good sense to determine."

Even at that moment of detection and disgrace, in one man's eyes, at least, Sebastian retained his full measure of dignity.

CHAPTER VI

THE EPISODE OF THE LETTER WITH THE BASINGSTOKE POSTMARK

I have a vast respect for my grandfather. He was a man of forethought.

He left me a modest little income of seven hundred a-year, well invested. Now, seven hundred a-year is not exactly wealth; but it is an un.o.btrusive competence; it permits a bachelor to move about the world and choose at will his own profession. _I_ chose medicine; but I was not wholly dependent upon it. So I honoured my grandfather's wise disposition of his worldly goods; though, oddly enough, my cousin Tom (to whom he left his watch and five hundred pounds) speaks MOST disrespectfully of his character and intellect.

Thanks to my grandfather's silken-sailed barque, therefore, when I found myself practically dismissed from Nathaniel's I was not thrown on my beam-ends, as most young men in my position would have been; I had time and opportunity for the favourite pastime of looking about me. Of course, had I chosen, I might have fought the case to the bitter end against Sebastian; he could not dismiss me--that lay with the committee.

But I hardly cared to fight. In the first place, though I had found him out as a man, I still respected him as a great teacher; and in the second place (which is always more important), I wanted to find and follow Hilda.

To be sure, Hilda, in that enigmatic letter of hers, had implored me not to seek her out; but I think you will admit there is one request which no man can grant to the girl he loves--and that is the request to keep away from her. If Hilda did not want ME, I wanted Hilda; and, being a man, I meant to find her.

My chances of discovering her whereabouts, however, I had to confess to myself (when it came to the point) were extremely slender. She had vanished from my horizon, melted into s.p.a.ce. My sole hint of a clue consisted in the fact that the letter she sent me had been posted at Basingstoke. Here, then, was my problem: given an envelope with the Basingstoke postmark, to find in what part of Europe, Asia, Africa, or America the writer of it might be discovered. It opened up a fine field for speculation.

When I set out to face this broad puzzle, my first idea was: "I must ask Hilda." In all circ.u.mstances of difficulty, I had grown accustomed to submitting my doubts and surmises to her acute intelligence; and her instinct almost always supplied the right solution. But now Hilda was gone; it was Hilda herself I wished to track through the labyrinth of the world. I could expect no a.s.sistance in tracking her from Hilda.

"Let me think," I said to myself, over a reflective pipe, with feet poised on the fender. "How would Hilda herself have approached this problem? Imagine I'm Hilda. I must try to strike a trail by applying her own methods to her own character. She would have attacked the question, no doubt,"--here I eyed my pipe wisely,--"from the psychological side. She would have asked herself"--I stroked my chin--"what such a temperament as hers was likely to do under such-and-such circ.u.mstances.

And she would have answered it aright. But then"--I puffed away once or twice--"SHE is Hilda."

When I came to reconnoitre the matter in this light, I became at once aware how great a gulf separated the clumsy male intelligence from the immediate and almost unerring intuitions of a clever woman. I am considered no fool; in my own profession, I may venture to say, I was Sebastian's favourite pupil. Yet, though I asked myself over and over again where Hilda would be likely to go--Canada, China, Australia--as the outcome of her character, in these given conditions, I got no answer. I stared at the fire and reflected. I smoked two successive pipes, and shook out the ashes. "Let me consider how Hilda's temperament would work," I said, looking sagacious. I said it several times--but there I stuck. I went no further. The solution would not come. I felt that in order to play Hilda's part, it was necessary first to have Hilda's head-piece. Not every man can bend the bow of Ulysses.

As I turned the problem over in my mind, however, one phrase at last came back to me--a phrase which Hilda herself had let fall when we were debating a very similar point about poor Hugo Le Geyt: "If I were in his place, what do you think I would do?--why, hide myself at once in the greenest recesses of our Carnarvonshire mountains."

She must have gone to Wales, then. I had her own authority for saying so.... And yet--Wales? Wales? I pulled myself up with a jerk. In that case, how did she come to be pa.s.sing by Basingstoke?

Was the postmark a blind? Had she hired someone to take the letter somewhere for her, on purpose to put me off on a false track? I could hardly think so. Besides, the time was against it. I saw Hilda at Nathaniel's in the morning; the very same evening I received the envelope with the Basingstoke postmark.

"If I were in his place." Yes, true; but, now I come to think on it, WERE the positions really parallel? Hilda was not flying for her life from justice; she was only endeavouring to escape Sebastian--and myself. The instances she had quoted of the mountaineer's curious homing instinct--the wild yearning he feels at moments of great straits to bury himself among the nooks of his native hills--were they not all instances of murderers pursued by the police? It was abject terror that drove these men to their burrows. But Hilda was not a murderer; she was not dogged by remorse, despair, or the myrmidons of the law; it was murder she was avoiding, not the punishment of murder. That made, of course, an obvious difference. "Irrevocably far from London," she said. Wales is a suburb. I gave up the idea that it was likely to prove her place of refuge from the two men she was bent on escaping. Hong-Kong, after all, seemed more probable than Llanberis.

That first failure gave me a clue, however, as to the best way of applying Hilda's own methods. "What would such a person do under the circ.u.mstances?" that was her way of putting the question. Clearly, then, I must first decide what WERE the circ.u.mstances. Was Sebastian speaking the truth? Was Hilda Wade, or was she not, the daughter of the supposed murderer, Dr. Yorke-Bannerman?

I looked up as much of the case as I could, in un.o.btrusive ways, among the old law-reports, and found that the barrister who had had charge of the defence was my father's old friend, Mr. Horace Mayfield, a man of elegant tastes, and the means to gratify them.

I went to call on him on Sunday evening at his artistically luxurious house in Onslow Gardens. A sedate footman answered the bell.

Fortunately, Mr. Mayfield was at home, and, what is rarer, disengaged.

You do not always find a successful Q.C. at his ease among his books, beneath the electric light, ready to give up a vacant hour to friendly colloquy.

"Remember Yorke-Bannerman's case?" he said, a huge smile breaking slowly like a wave over his genial fat face--Horace Mayfield resembles a great good-humoured toad, with bland manners and a capacious double chin--"I should just say I DID! Bless my soul--why, yes," he beamed, "I was Yorke-Bannerman's counsel. Excellent fellow, Yorke-Bannerman--most unfortunate end, though--precious clever chap, too! Had an astounding memory. Recollected every symptom of every patient he ever attended. And SUCH an eye! Diagnosis? It was clairvoyance! A gift--no less. Knew what was the matter with you the moment he looked at you."

That sounded like Hilda. The same surprising power of recalling facts; the same keen faculty for interpreting character or the signs of feeling. "He poisoned somebody, I believe," I murmured, casually. "An uncle of his, or something."

Mayfield's great squat face wrinkled; the double chin, folding down on the neck, became more ostentatiously double than ever. "Well, I can't admit that," he said, in his suave voice, twirling the string of his eye-gla.s.s. "I was Yorke-Bannerman's advocate, you see; and therefore I was paid not to admit it. Besides, he was a friend of mine, and I always liked him. But I WILL allow that the case DID look a trifle black against him."

"Ha? Looked black, did it?" I faltered.

The judicious barrister shrugged his shoulders. A genial smile spread oilily once more over his smooth face. "None of my business to say so,"

he answered, puckering the corners of his eyes. "Still, it was a long time ago; and the circ.u.mstances certainly WERE suspicious. Perhaps, on the whole, Hubert, it was just as well the poor fellow died before the trial came off; otherwise"--he pouted his lips--"I might have had my work cut out to save him." And he eyed the blue china G.o.ds on the mantelpiece affectionately.

"I believe the Crown urged money as the motive?" I suggested.

Mayfield glanced inquiry at me. "Now, why do you want to know all this?"

he asked, in a suspicious voice, coming back from his dragons. "It is irregular, very, to worm information out of an innocent barrister in his hours of ease about a former client. We are a guileless race, we lawyers; don't abuse our confidence."

He seemed an honest man, I thought, in spite of his mocking tone. I trusted him, and made a clean breast of it. "I believe," I answered, with an impressive little pause, "I want to marry Yorke-Bannerman's daughter."

He gave a quick start. "What, Maisie?" he exclaimed.

I shook my head. "No, no; that is not the name," I replied.

He hesitated a moment. "But there IS no other," he hazarded cautiously at last. "I knew the family."

"I am not sure of it," I went on. "I have merely my suspicions. I am in love with a girl, and something about her makes me think she is probably a Yorke-Bannerman."

"But, my dear Hubert, if that is so," the great lawyer went on, waving me off with one fat hand, "it must be at once apparent to you that _I_ am the last person on earth to whom you ought to apply for information.

Remember my oath. The practice of our clan: the seal of secrecy!"

I was frank once more. "I do not know whether the lady I mean is or is not Yorke-Bannerman's daughter," I persisted. "She may be, and she may not. She gives another name--that's certain. But whether she is or isn't, one thing I know--I mean to marry her. I believe in her; I trust her. I only seek to gain this information now because I don't know where she is--and I want to track her."

He crossed his big hands with an air of Christian resignation, and looked up at the panels of the coffered ceiling. "In that," he answered, "I may honestly say, I can't help you. Humbug apart, I have not known Mrs. Yorke-Bannerman's address--or Maisie's either--ever since my poor friend's death. Prudent woman, Mrs. Yorke-Bannerman! She went away, I believe, to somewhere in North Wales, and afterwards to Brittany. But she probably changed her name; and--she did not confide in me."

I went on to ask him a few questions about the case, premising that I did so in the most friendly spirit. "Oh, I can only tell you what is publicly known," he answered, beaming, with the usual professional pretence of the most sphinx-like reticence. "But the plain facts, as universally admitted, were these. I break no confidence. Yorke-Bannerman had a rich uncle from whom he had expectations--a certain Admiral Scott Prideaux. This uncle had lately made a will in Yorke-Bannerman's favour; but he was a cantankerous old chap--naval, you know autocratic--crusty--given to changing his mind with each change of the wind, and easily offended by his relations--the sort of cheerful old party who makes a new will once every month, disinheriting the nephew he last dined with. Well, one day the Admiral was taken ill, at his own house, and Yorke-Bannerman attended him. OUR contention was--I speak now as my old friend's counsel--that Scott Prideaux, getting as tired of life as we were all tired of him, and weary of this recurrent worry of will-making, determined at last to clear out for good from a world where he was so little appreciated, and, therefore, tried to poison himself."

"With aconitine?" I suggested, eagerly.

"Unfortunately, yes; he made use of aconitine for that otherwise laudable purpose. Now, as ill luck would have it"--Mayfield's wrinkles deepened--"Yorke-Bannerman and Sebastian, then two rising doctors engaged in physiological researches together, had just been occupied in experimenting upon this very drug--testing the use of aconitine.

Indeed, you will no doubt remember"--he crossed his fat hands again comfortably--"it was these precise researches on a then little-known poison that first brought Sebastian prominently before the public. What was the consequence?" His smooth, persuasive voice flowed on as if I were a concentrated jury. "The Admiral grew rapidly worse, and insisted upon calling in a second opinion. No doubt he didn't like the aconitine when it came to the pinch--for it DOES pinch, I can tell you--and repented him of his evil. Yorke-Bannerman suggested Sebastian as the second opinion; the uncle acquiesced; Sebastian was called in, and, of course, being fresh from his researches, immediately recognised the symptoms of aconitine poisoning."

"What! Sebastian found it out?" I cried, starting.