The address was found—Mrs. Malcolm, 97, Russell Square—and copied by Mr. Sampson, who thanked the old man for his courtesy and gave him his card, with the Midland Hotel address added in pencil. The short winter day was now closing in, and Sampson felt anxious to get Mrs. Treverton home.
“I might have gone to the parish register in the first instance,” he said, when they had left the undertaker’s, “but I thought we should get more information out of an old inhabitant, and so we have, for we’ve heard of this old lady in Russell Square.”
“Yes, I remember spending a week at her house,” said Laura. “How long ago it all seems. Like the memory of another life.”
“Lor’, yes,” said Sampson; “I remember when I was a little chap, at Dr. Prossford’s grammar school, playing chuck farthing. I’ve often looked back and wondered to think that little chap, in a tight jacket and short trousers, was an early edition of me.”
“You think the later editions have been improvements on that,” said Laura, smiling.
She was able to smile now. A heavy load had been suddenly lifted from her mind. What infinite relief it was to know that her father had never been the pitiful trickster—the crawling pensioner upon a woman’s bounty—that she had been taught to think him. Her heart was full of gratitude to heaven for this discovery—so easily made, and yet of such immeasurable value.
“Who can that man be?” she asked herself. “He must have been a friend of my father’s, in close companionship with him, or he would hardly have become possessed of my mother’s miniature, and of those letters and papers.”
She determined to go without delay to the house in Russell Square, in the hope—at best but a faint hope—of finding the old lady in black satin still among the living, and not represented by an entry in the ledger of some West End undertaking firm, or by a number in the dismal catalogue of a suburban cemetery.
XLIII
An Old Lady’s Diary
On the following afternoon Laura drove straight from the House of Detention to Russell Square. Her interview with her husband had been full of comfort. Mr. Leopold had been with his client, and Mr. Leopold was in excellent spirits. He had no doubt as to the issue of his case, even without Desrolles; and the detectives had very little doubt of finding Desrolles.
“A man of that age and of those habits doesn’t go far,” said the lawyer, speaking of this human entity with as much assurance as if he were stating a mathematical truth.
Laura got out of her cab before one of the dullest-looking houses in the big, handsome old square—a house brightened by no modern embellishment in the way of Venetian blind or encaustic flower-box, but kept with a scrupulous care. Not a speck upon the window panes, not a spot upon the snow-white steps, the varnish of the door as fresh as if it had been laid on yesterday.
The door was opened by an old manservant in plain clothes. Laura grew hopeful at the sight of him. He looked like a man who had lived fifty years in one service—the kind of man who begins as a knife-boy, and either stultifies a spotless career by going to America with the plate, or ends as a pious annuitant, in the odour of sanctity.
“Does Mrs. Malcolm still live here?” asked Laura.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Is she at home?”
“I will inquire, ma’am, if you will be kind enough to give me your card,” replied the man, as much as to say that his mistress was a lady whose leisure was not to be irreverently disturbed. She was to be at home, as it pleased her sovereign will, and according to the quality and claims of her visitor.
Laura wrote upon one of her cards, “Stephen Malcolm’s daughter, Laura,” while the ancient butler produced a solid old George the Second salver whereon to convey the card with due reverence to his mistress.
The address upon the card looked respectable, and so did Laura, and upon the strength of these appearances the butler ventured to show the stranger into the dining room, where the furniture was of the good old Brobdingnagian stamp, and there was nothing portable except the fire-irons. Here Laura waited in a charnel-house atmosphere, while Mrs. Malcolm called up the dim shadows of the past, and finally came to the determination that she would hold parley with this young person who claimed to be of her kindred.
The butler came back after a chilly interval, and ushered Mrs. Treverton up the broad, ghastly-looking staircase, where drab walls looked down upon a stone-coloured carpet, to the big, bare drawing-room, which had ever been one of the coldest memories of her childhood.
It was a long and lofty room, furnished with monumental rosewood. The chiffoniers were like tombs—the sofa suggested an altar—the centre table looked as massive as one of those Druidic menhirs which crop up here and there among the wilds of Dartmoor, or the sandy plains of Brittany. A pale-faced clock ticked solemnly on the white marble chimney piece, three tall windows let in narrow streaks of pallid daylight, between voluminous drab curtains.
In this mausoleum-like chamber, beside a dull and miserly-looking fire, sat an old lady in black satin—the very same figure, the very same gown, Laura remembered years ago: or a gown so like that it appeared the same.
“Aunt,” said Laura, approaching timidly feeling as if she were a little child again and doomed to solitary imprisonment in that awful room, “have you forgotten me?”
The old lady in black satin held out her hand, a withered white hand clad in a black mitten, and adorned with old-fashioned rings.
“No, my dear,” she replied, without indication
