"Of course!" I exclaimed, as though the mention of tennis brought back to me full recollection of the incident. "It was at tennis that I saw her--last season when I was at the Palace Hotel. I remember now, quite well. Our Mediterranean fleet were lying there at the time, and there were lots of festivities, as there are every summer. Is your daughter now in England?"

"Oh, yes. She's up in London, but returns to-morrow."

"And are you going back to Italy soon?" I inquired.

"I hardly know. My movements are never very certain. I'm quite a creature of circ.u.mstances, and nowadays drift about with the wind of chance," he laughed.

"But this is a lovely old place," I remarked. "If I had it I should certainly not prefer a flat in a sun-baked Italian town, like Leghorn."

"Circ.u.mstances," he remarked simply, with a mysterious smile upon his grey face.

What, I wondered, was his meaning?

Did he really intend to convey that the circ.u.mstances of his dishonourable profession compelled him to hide himself in a small flat in that somewhat obscure town--obscure as far as English life went?

When he learnt that I knew some of his friends in Leghorn he became enthusiastic, and began to discuss the town and its notabilities. What did I think of the English parson? And whether I did not think that seeing the small English congregation the church ought not to be removed to some town with a larger English colony. It was absurd to keep a parson there for half a dozen people.

And while my sharp eyes were busy examining the photographs set among vases of fresh-cut flowers, I made replies and sometimes laughed at his witty criticisms of persons known to both of us in "the Brighton of Italy."

"What a contrast is the quiet rural life here, with all its old-world English tranquillity, to that of the gay, garish, sun-blanched _pa.s.seggiata_ of Leghorn, with its bright-eyed women, its oleanders, its noise, movement, the glare and strident music of the _cafe-chantants_, and the brightness of the newly discovered spa," I said.

He sighed, pursing his lips.

"Yes, Mr Leaf, you are quite right," he answered. "I love Italy, but I confess I very often long to be back here at Studland, in my own quiet old home. Lucie is always begging me to forsake the Continent and return. But it is impossible--utterly impossible."

"Why impossible?" I asked, looking into his deeply furrowed face.

"Well--there is a reason," was his response. "A strong reason, one of health, which induces--nay, compels me to live abroad. And I greatly prefer Italy to any other country."

Little did he dream that I had that secret doc.u.ment of the Italian Detective Department in my possession, or that I had learnt the truth from my friend Sampson, the friend of the young Chilian Carrera.

We were chatting on, having halted at the open window which looked across the old-fashioned garden with its rose arbours, moss-grown terrace and grey weather-beaten sundial, away to the park beyond, when I suddenly crossed to another table, whereon were other photographs.

One of them I thought I recognised even in the distance.

Yes! I was not mistaken! I took it in my trembling hand with a word of apology, and looked into the picture intently. Sight of it staggered me.

"Who is this?" I asked hoa.r.s.ely, and my host must, I think, have noticed the great change in my countenance.

"A friend of my daughter's, I think. Do you know her?"

"I knew her," I replied in a hard, low tone, for sight of that smiling face brought back to me all the bitter remembrance of a part that I would have fain forgotten. "It is Ella Murray!"

"Ah!--yes, that's her name. I recollect now," he said; and I saw by his face that he was interested. "I think they were at school together."

Again I looked upon the portrait of my dear dead love, my eyes fascinated, for I beheld there, at her throat, the small brooch I had given her on her birthday, a green enamelled heart with two hearts in diamonds entwined upon it.

Those sweet, wide-open eyes, clear blue and wondering like a child's, gazed out upon me; her well-formed lips were slightly parted, as though she were speaking again, uttering those soft words that had so charmed me when she was mine, and mine only. I recollected the dress, too, one she had worn one night at dinner at the big country-house where we had been fellow-guests. Every feature of that lovely face was indelibly photographed upon my memory. Through those dark years, after that paroxysm of grief that had overtaken me when I discovered her false, I had, sleeping and waking, seen that smiling countenance as before my vision. Even in death Ella was still mine.

That smile! Ah! did it not mock me? Had not Avarice and Death cheated me out of Happiness? A great darkness was over my mind, like the plague of an unending night.

I set my teeth, swallowed the lump that arose in my throat, and with a sigh replaced the photograph upon the table.

"A pretty face," remarked the man whose police record was in my possession.

"Yes, very," I remarked casually.

Ah! what a storm of bitter recollections surged through my burning brain.

Had she but lived and loved how different would my own wasted, aimless life have been!

Yes. She was, after all, my dear dead love--my Ella!

CHAPTER TEN.

MY OWN CONFESSION.

The "Lion" Inn was a pleasant, old-fashioned little hostelry overlooking the bay, with Bournemouth beyond the distant haze. My room was small and clean, with white dimity curtains and hangings, and framed religious texts upon the walls. As I sat at the window in the hour before my dinner was ready, I reflected upon the strange incidents of those past few days--a chain of curious circ.u.mstances that seemed to enmesh and to entangle me.

Lucie Miller--the girl whose peril was such a mysterious and yet deadly one--had actually known my Ella. That very fact seemed somehow as a further link between us. What, I wondered, did she know of those later days of my dead love's life? To me they were shrouded in mystery.

That cold winter's night in damp, dismal London, when I had met her in secret at the corner of Queen's Gardens, would ever remain in my memory.

She was staying with an aunt in Porchester Terrace, and we had always preserved the secret of our affection. She came dressed in black, wearing a thick veil and carrying a m.u.f.f in which was a bunch of violets. Her voice, when I greeted her, was, alas! not the same. Quick to recognise that something had occurred, I inquired the reason. Had she had any difference with her father or her aunt--as she sometimes had? No, she said, shaking her head, it was not that.

And then, almost in silence, we strolled on side by side over those wet shining London pavements through the quieter streets and squares of Bayswater, while I glanced wonderingly at her face showing pale behind her spotted veil. At last her trembling hand suddenly rested upon my wrist, and halting she turned to me. In hoa.r.s.e tones quite unusual to her she blurted forth the truth--the bitter truth that froze my heart.

I remember even the spot where we stood, beside a red letter-box at the corner of Chepstow Place. There the greatest blow of all my life fell upon me; and we parted.

I went straight along the Westbourne Grove, blinded by tears. She was to wed the very last man she ought to have chosen. The coa.r.s.e, fat-necked parvenu had bought her from her father with his gold won in gambles on the Stock Exchange. Yes, my Ella, my sweet-faced love, was not satisfied with the prospect of being the wife of a man comfortably off. Like so many other girls who are dazzled by the lights of life, she longed to shine as a hostess, to wear Paquin frocks and have her portraits in the papers. I was deeply disappointed with her, for, fool that I was, I really believed that she honestly loved me. How often, alas! is a man deceived! I was but one of thousands, after all. And yet I had adored her with all my heart and all my soul.

Away in the country the very song of the birds seemed to be in praise of her--she whose beauty was sweet and delicate as the petals of the flowers; chaste and sweet as the rose itself. Love to the looker-on may be blind, unwise, unworthily bestowed, a waste, a sacrifice, a crime; yet none the less is love the only thing that, come weal or woe, is worth the loss of every other thing; the one supreme and perfect gift of earth in which all common things of daily life become transfigured and divine.

I was crushed, benumbed, broken. At first my brain refused to accept her declaration that that meeting was to be our last, until she told me the truth in all its hideous detail, and that on the morrow her engagement was to be announced in the _Morning Post_. I opened my lips to upbraid her, but my tongue refused to utter a syllable of reproach.

I only bit my lips in silence. Ah! yes, I loved her!--I loved her!

From that moment we never again met. Next day I saw the announcement in the papers, and, disappointed and heart-broken, I went abroad, and it was a year after when one of my intimate friends, Jack Davies, a lieutenant on board the _Cornwall_, in a letter which I received at a lonely post-house on the snow-bound road in the extreme north of Russia, wrote those words which caused my heart to burst within me:--

"You recollect little Ella Murray, who was, with her stepmother, up at the Grainger's shoot two years ago? The poor little girl was engaged to some City fellow, an entire outsider, I heard, but I hear she caught typhoid at a hotel in Sheringham and died six months ago. A pity, isn't it? I rather liked her--so did you, I remember."

I stood at the door of that filthy, log-built place with the letter in my hand, gazing across the great snow-covered plain with its long row of telegraph-wires and verst-posts stretching away from Pokrovskoi to the grey horizon. My big bearded driver whispered to the post-house keeper, for both saw that I had received bad news. The man in sheepskins who kept the place went in without a word and returned with a gla.s.s of vodka. I recognised his kindly thought, gulped down the spirit, and mounting into the sledge drove on--on, whither I did not care. Ella--my own dear Ella was dead!

All this came back vividly to me on that evening as I ate my dinner alone in the little inn at Studland, and then in the golden sunset strolled by the sea--that same wide, mysterious sea beside which I had so long ago declared my love. She lived then, smiling, sighing, loving.

But now, alas! she was no more. Of her memory there only remained that shadowy picture that I had seen in Miller's drawing-room, the portrait of the dead that smiled upon me in such mocking happiness.

I threw myself upon a bank and watched the glorious crimson and purple of the summer afterglow. Yes, the face of the world was for me now changed. The past had been full enough of bitterness, what, I wondered, did the future contain? Ah! if I could have but known at that moment!

Yet perhaps after all the Divine power is merciful in keeping from us the happiness and tragedy that lie before.

Till the summer twilight darkened into night I sat therefore before the sea, smoking and thinking. The dark vista of silent waters before me harmonised with my thoughts. Mine was, alas! a wasted, useless life, I had never known one moment's financial worry, and yet I had somehow never found happiness. In my life where I might be, at home or abroad, there was always something wanting--the love of a good woman.