“He was brought to me in January, 1902, and I saw at once that any attempt to instil education into this unpromising receptacle was foredoomed to failure. I had many consultations with Mr. Havelock and Dr. Stalletti, who was also in bad odour with the authorities, and it was at one of these conferences that Dr. Stalletti put forward his theory—namely, that supposing he had a child in his care of sufficiently tender age, he could destroy its identity, not by any act of cruelty, but by suggestion or by some kind of hypnotism. Dr. Stalletti’s theory was that, if the vital forces are inhibited in one direction, they will find abnormal expression in another, and it was his desire to create what he called the perfect man, strong, obedient, having no will of his own, but subservient to the will of another. To this conclusion, he said, the biologists of the world were tending, and just as the bee delegated its reproductive functions to one queen bee, so the time would come when the world would be populated by unthinking workers, dominated by a number of select brains, reared and cultured for the purpose of exercising that authority. He promised that he would destroy the identity of the young Lord Selford so that, to all intents and purposes, he would cease to exist as a human unit, without actually endangering the life and safety of the conspirators, as would be the case if the child were made away with.
“I confess I was in favour of this scheme, but Mr. Havelock was for a long time opposed, because, as he told us, he was not satisfied that the experiment would be a success. Dr. Stalletti undertook, if he had a suitable subject, to prove it within three months; and after we had discussed the matter, Mrs. Cawler said she would put at the doctor’s disposal one of her two nephews. Mrs. Cawler herself was childless, but she had the care of two children which had been put in her charge by her dead brother, who had also left a small sum for their maintenance. The child was transferred to Gallows Hill Cottage, and at the end of three months, though I did not see the result of the experiment, Mr. Havelock told me that it had been successful and he had agreed to Selford leaving my care.
“I had already begun to draw on the revenues of the estate, but thinking that my position might be a precarious one if the boy was taken away from me, and if I had no actual proof that others shared my guilty knowledge, I asked that a legal agreement should be drawn up and filed in some place where we could all see it at the same time, but to which nobody else had access. I further asked that a statement in which we all admitted our share of responsibility should be kept in a similar place. There were long discussions about this. Stalletti was indifferent, Havelock was worried, and it was Mrs. Cawler who suggested the plan which we eventually followed.
“I have told you that a tomb had been prepared for Lord Selford. It was that which had once been occupied by the founder of the house, and the door was ordered but was not in place when he died. He was, in point of fact, buried in Vault 6, the first on the left as you enter the tombs. Havelock immediately jumped at the idea. He had received the keys from the makers; the door had been hung; and there was, in the tomb itself, a place where such a document could be kept. We agreed eventually that it should take the shape which now appears.
“It was difficult to explain to Silva, who had a small knowledge of English but a great fund of low cunning, that we were not trying to incriminate him to save ourselves. But, fortunately, I had acquired in my student days a knowledge of the Portuguese language, and was able, as will be seen herewith, to make a literal translation of this statement, which will be found on the final ten pages of the book and which has been signed by us all.
“At the moment of writing, Lord Selford is ‘under tuition’ at Gallows Hill, and from my own observation it seems that, both in the case of Mrs. Cawler’s nephew and in that of Lord Selford, the experiment has been highly successful. Already these boys come and go at the doctor’s wish, make no complaint, and can endure even the rigours of a severe winter with the lightest clothes without any apparent discomfort. Since this first line was written, I have married Mrs. Cawler, such an arrangement commending itself to Havelock and Stalletti …’
(The next few words were half obliterated by a savage black line that had been drawn through them, but Dick managed to decipher: ‘… although I had other plans for my future, I agreed.’)
“It is extremely unlikely that our scheme will ever be detected. The Selfords are without relatives, the nearest heir to the property being a distant cousin; but he is a rich man and is unlikely to inquire too closely into the whereabouts of his lordship. Mr. Havelock intends when the boy reaches a maturer age, to announce that he has gone abroad on an extensive tour.
“To the truth of the foregoing we, the undersigned, set our hands.”
Here followed the signatures, and on the next page began the Portuguese translation of the document.
XXXIII
“The letters that Havelock showed me,” said Dick, as they were driving back to town, “were, of course, written by himself. I discovered that the day
