Again Doria rouses Robert Redmayne from the grave; again he challenges you! A thousand simple and safe ways had offered to dispose of Albert Redmayne. The region in which he chose to live and his own trusting and ingenuous character had alike made him the easiest possible prey of any human hunter; but Michael's vanity has grown by what it feeds on. He is an artist, and he desires to complete his masterpiece with all due regard to form. It must be fashioned to endure and take its place forever in the highest categories of crime. His pride rebels against the line of least resistance. All shall end on the same large pattern in which it was originally conceived. He courts danger and creates difficulty that his ultimate achievement may be the more august.

"So the forgery is trotted out once more; and it is not enough that Jenny shall report to her uncle the advent of Robert Redmayne beside Como. An independent witness is demanded and a.s.sunta Marzelli sees the big man with the red mustache, red hair and red waistcoat. She also records the tremendous shock to her mistress that resulted from this sudden apparition. Remember that Jenny's husband was still supposed by Albert to be in Turin. Then the old game is played; Doria presently arrives in person; they toy with their subject; they enrich it with details; awaken the alarm of their unhappy victim and send for you, designing to treat you in the same manner as before.

"Nor does Albert's appeal to me hasten their operations. Who is Peter Ganns? A famous American bull. Good! They will have another victim at their chariot wheels. It shall be an international triumph. Albert Redmayne must be murdered before an audience worthy of the occasion. The combined detective forces of the States, of Italy, of England, shall seek Robert Redmayne and succour Albert; but the one shall evade capture, the other perish under their eyes."

He turned to Brendon. "And they brought it off--thanks to you, my son."

"And paid for it--thanks to you," answered Mark.

"We are but men, not machines," answered the elder. "Love thrust a finger into your brain and created the inevitable ferment. Of course Pendean was lightning quick to win his account from that. He may have even calculated upon it when he made Jenny beg your aid at the outset. He knew what men thought of her; he had doubtless taken stock of you at Princetown and probably learned that you were unmarried. So, when time has pa.s.sed and you can look back without a groan, you will take the large view and, seeing yourself from the outside, forgive yourself and confess that your punishment was weightier than your error."

In gathering dusk the train thundered through the valley of the Rhine while, above, the mountain summits melted upon the night. A steward looked into the carriage.

"Dinner is served, gentlemen," he said. "I will, if you please, make your beds while you are absent."

They rose and went together to the saloon carriage.

"I'm dry, son, and I've sure earned a drink," said Peter.

"You've earned a vast deal more than I or any man can ever pay you, Ganns," said Brendon.

"Don't say it, or think it. I've done nothing that you wouldn't have done if you had been free. And always remember this: I shall never blame you, even when I think with dearest affection of my old friend. I shall only blame myself, because the final, fatal mistake was mine--not yours. I was the fool to trust you and had no excuse for doing so. You were not to be trusted for a moment just then, and I ought to have known it. 'Twas our limited capability that made you err, that made me err, that made Michael Pendean err. The best laid plans of mice and men--you know, Mark. The villain mars his villainy; the virtuous smudge their white record; the deep brain suddenly runs dry--all because perfection, in good or evil, is denied to saints and sinners alike."

CHAPTER XVIII

CONFESSION

During the autumn a.s.sizes, Michael Pendean was tried at Exeter and condemned to death for the murders of Robert, Bendigo and Albert Redmayne. He offered no defence and he was only impatient to return to his seclusion within the red walls of the county jail, where he occupied the brief balance of his days with just such a statement as Peter Ganns had foretold that he would seek to make.

This extraordinary doc.u.ment was very characteristic of the criminal.

It possessed a sort of glamour; but it failed of real distinction and the quality proper to greatness, even as the crimes it recorded and the man responsible for them. Pendean's confession revealed an insensibility, a faulty sense of humour, an affectation and a love for the glittering and the grandiose that robbed it of any supreme claim in the annals or literature of murder. The doc.u.ment ended with an a.s.surance that Michael would never die at the hands of his fellow man. He had repeated this a.s.sertion on several occasions and every conceivable precaution was taken to prevent evasion of his sentence--an issue to be recorded in its proper place.

Here is his statement, word for word as he wrote it.

MY APOLOGIA

"_Hearken, ye judges! There is another madness besides, and it is before the deed. Ah! Ye have not gone deep enough into this soul!

Thus speaketh the red judge: 'Why did this criminal commit murder?

He meant to rob.' I tell you, however, that his soul hungered for blood, not booty: he thirsted for the happiness of the knife!_"

And again:

"_What is this man? A coil of wild serpents at war against themselves--so they are driven apart to seek their prey in the world._"

So wrote one whose art and wisdom are nought to this rabbit-brained generation; but it was given to me to find my meat and drink within his pages and to see my own youthful impressions reflected and crystallized with the brilliance of genius in his stupendous mind.

Remember I, who write, am not thirty years old.

As a young man without experience I sometimes asked myself if some spirit from another order of beings than my own had not been slipped into my human carcase. It seemed to me that none with whom I came in contact was built on, or near, my own pattern, for I had only met one person as yet--my mother--who did not suffer from the malady of a bad conscience. My father and his friends wallowed in this complaint. They declared themselves openly to be miserable sinners and apparently held that the one respectable att.i.tude for humanity at large. "Safety" was the only state to seek; "danger" the only condition to avoid. A very cowardice of curs are the Cornish!

I soon found, however, that history abounded in great figures who had thought and acted otherwise; and presently, in the light thrown from the theatre of the past, I recognized myself for what I was.

In what is comprehended under the general and vague term of "crime,"

everything depends upon the values of the individual performer; and again and again do we find that a criminal has struck before counting the cost to himself, or considering the unsleeping detectives, hidden in his own faulty heart and brain, who will sooner or later discover and denounce him.

The man of conscience, the man capable of remorse, the man who murders at the prompting of a temper uncontrolled--such will swiftly learn that however well the deed is done, a thousand baffling distractions, bred of their own inherent or acquired weakness, must arise to confound them. Remorse, for example, is always a first step to discovery, if not to confession; and any lesser uneasiness similarly tends to trouble of mind and consequent danger of body.

Those who hang, in truth deserve to do so; but they who strike, like myself, for reasons that success cannot shake and from a settled, farsighted resolution beyond the power of any emotion to a.s.sail, should be safe enough. We rejoice in the sublime mental gratification that follows success: it is our spiritual support, our sustenance and our reward.

What can offer an experience so tremendous as murder? What has science, philosophy, religion to give us comparable with the mysteries, dangers and triumphs of great crime? All are childish toys compared to it; and since, in any case, the next world will surely stultify our knowledge, confound our accepted truths, and reduce the wisdom of this earth to the prattle of childhood, I turned from physics and from metaphysics to action--and happening to taste blood early, tingled with the joy of it.

At fifteen years of age I killed a man, and found, in a murder undertaken for very definite reasons, a thrill beyond expectation.

It was as though I had drunk at a wayside spring and found an elixir. That incident is unknown; the death of my father's foreman, Job Trevose, has not been understood till now. He lived at Paul, a village upon the heights nigh Penzance, and his walk to his work took him by the coast-guard track along lofty cliffs. Among the fish-curing sheds one day, unseen, I chanced to hear Trevose speak of my mother to another man and declare that she did evil and dishonoured my father.

From that moment I doomed Trevose to death and, some weeks later, after many failures to win the right conditions, caught him alone in a sea fog as he returned homeward. There was not a soul on the cliff path but ourselves; and he was a small man, I a strong, big boy. I walked beside him for fifty paces, then fell behind, leaped at his neck and hurled him over the cliff in an instant. One yell he gave and dropped six hundred feet. Then I fled over meadows inland and returned home after dark. Neither I nor anybody else was ever a.s.sociated with the affair, and the death of Job Trevose has always been ascribed to misadventure--the easier to believe since he was not a temperate man.

From this experience I won, not remorse, but manhood. I rejoiced in what I had done. But I did not tell any living soul and only my wife ever heard the truth. Time pa.s.sed and I proceeded with my life in normal fashion, learning myself and increasing my understanding of human nature. I was never under any domination of pa.s.sion, but exercised great restraint and found that only by self-knowledge and self-command comes power. I did not seek forbidden fruit, but did not shun it. My life proceeded orderly; I chose the profession of dentist, as being likely to introduce me to people of a more interesting type than my father's acquaintance; and I kept an open mind for myself, but a shut mind for others.

My chief joy at this season was represented by my occasional visits to Italy with my mother. Already I felt that land to be my home and hated Cornwall and its bleak inhabitants. Then, at the psychological moment, a girl woke instincts until then dormant; I was faced with rarest good fortune and discovered a kindred spirit of the opposite s.e.x. That any woman lived who could see with my eyes, or share my contempt of the trammels set round life, I did not believe until I met with Jenny Redmayne. Women had never interested me, save in the case of my mother, and I had seen none other with her large heart, tolerance, humour and indifference to convention.

Then a chance friend, the brainless Robert Redmayne, brought his niece to spend her school holiday with him and I discovered in the seventeen-year-old schoolgirl a magnificent and pagan simplicity of mind, combined with a Greek loveliness of body that created in me a convulsion. From the day that we met, from the hour that I heard her laugh at her uncle's objection to mixed bathing, I was as one possessed; and my triumphant joy may be judged, though never measured, when I perceived that Jenny recognized in me the complement and precious addition unconsciously sought of her own spirit.

That spirit she had scarcely understood; but now its clean and fierce white light shone in secret for me alone. We loved one another devotedly from the first understanding; and each fresh find in the heart of the other drew us together with increasing worship and pa.s.sion. We were probably the most exquisite man and woman, the most original, beautiful, fearless and distinguished, that had ever come together in the benighted township of Penzance. People stared at us sometimes as though we were a faun and nymph; but they did not guess that our hearts were formed to match our wondrous bodies.

Fire leaped to fire and before the girl finished her education we were dedicated to each other forever.

What she saw in me was my extraordinary masculine beauty, combined with an intellect that set good and evil in their places and soared, by native instinct, above both. What I discovered in her was an att.i.tude of mind so inquiring and so lawless, so utterly devoid of any familiar prejudice or mother-taught opinion, that I felt as the finder of a priceless jewel unstained by earth or heaven. Her intellect was pure and not vitiated by any superst.i.tion; she revealed a healthy thirst for experience; she adored me and my att.i.tude to life. We made fascinating voyages of discovery into each others' hearts; we experimented from time to time on ordinary people; and we quickly discovered that we both possessed rare histrionic ability.

Indeed she had already entertained ambitions for the stage; but though her dead father would hardly have stood in her way, these ambitions were not encouraged by the three dolts, her uncles, who now supposed themselves to control her future. A glorious actress is lost to the world in my wife.

She had no secrets from me and I soon learned of her expectations; but it was not the prospect of the Redmayne money that shortened her uncles' lives. Jenny and I were never man-eaters; and, while my youthful experience in murder attracted her and increased her admiration for my qualities, it was not at that time in our minds to antic.i.p.ate events or quarrel with her relations.

Her grandfather still lived, when first I met her, and the extent or disposition of his wealth seldom entered our calculations. For we were then far too much in love to ponder the value of money, and our temperaments proved so distinguished that no sordid calculation ever wasted a moment of our time.

But a year pa.s.sed; Jenny was ready to wed me and begin life as my twin star; while I longed for her with a great longing. The situation cleared; her grandfather died; she would presently be the possessor of ample means and I already enjoyed an income from the business of Pendean and Trecarrow.

Then came the war and the sentence of death incidently p.r.o.nounced by that event upon the brothers Redmayne. Their own folly and lack of vision were alone responsible. The facts are familiar, but not the tremendous and shattering emotions I endured on being branded a coward and traitor to my country by these three patriotic idiots. I did not argue with them; it was enough that Jenny swiftly awakened to even a bitterer hatred and a deeper fury of resentment than myself. They had roused the sleeping tempest and our lightning now became only a question of time.

Was I the man to make carrion of myself in national quarrels! Was I the man to sacrifice my glorious life because besotted and third-rate minds, blinded by their own ignorance and fooled by cleverer statesmen than themselves, had suffered England to drift into war with Germany? Was I a sheep to be slaughtered for a government of Nonconformists? Should I consent to be mangled by the Boches because my fatuous country willed to trust the old gang? No!

I had long understood that war was certain; I had already ascended public platforms with that little company who warned the Empire and were derided for their pains by the ruling bats and moles. But to die for the salvation of this diplomatic trash, to suffer untold torments and ultimate extinction for that myopic crew of hypocrites known as the British government--Never!

I evaded active service with a heart drug, as did some thousands of other intelligent men. I kept a whole skin, stopped at home and received for my share the Order of the British Empire instead of a nameless grave. It was easy enough.

Before Jenny and I were married she knew that my outraged honour had doomed her family to extinction. But they would wait till the war was ended. Germany, indeed, might account for Robert Redmayne; and even the elderly Bendigo, who was appointed to a mine sweeper, might give his life for his country. Meantime we volunteered also and our record of service at Princetown Moss Depot is not to be a.s.sailed.