CHAPTER I. IS MAINLY ABOUT RICHARD GOODRICK

“No; keep your money, my dear sir.”

“Then you refuse?”

“I do—absolutely.”

“Remember, I am making you a very substantial offer. Fifty thousand pounds is not to be gained every day.”

“Not if you offered me one hundred times the amount. I have never been open to bribery.”

“No, no; you can hardly call it bribery, Mr. Goodrick. I think——”

“I don’t know what you call it but bribery,” growled the thin, white-bearded old man seated in the easy chair by the fireplace. “I’ve really got nothing more to say to you. I wish you’d go—go away and leave me in peace.”

The other, a rather stout, red-faced, well-dressed man of about fifty, with a distinctly business-like air, made a quick gesture of impatience as he stood upon the shabby hearthrug opposite the old man.

“You’ve surely been left in peace long enough. For eighteen years you’ve lived in this stuffy little hole, hidden away from everybody. Everyone believes you to be dead—that you died, and carried your secret to the grave.”

“And if I did, what, in the name of Fate, does it matter to you—eh?” croaked old Mr. Goodrick.

“Well—are you acting honestly and fairly towards Gordon—or Maidee, and the rest?” queried his visitor.

“Fairly!” echoed the other, laughing. “That’s really capital—you, George Ravenscourt, talking of fairness and honesty! You offer me fifty thousand if I will—well, act in such a manner as will give a distinct advantage to your friends—eh? Ah! my dear sir, your reputation for honesty is well known—to me, at least, if not to some others.”

“It seems you are in a somewhat insulting mood to-day,” exclaimed the other hastily. “Some dealer has got the better of you, perhaps—sold you a bit of faked silver or spurious china.”

“Dealers, I think, know me a little too well to attempt fraud upon me,” snapped the old man in a thin, hoarse voice.

“But will nothing soften your heart towards those who have suffered by this long self-effacement of yours?” asked his visitor, appealing to him in a changed tone.

“No,” replied the yellow-faced, keen-eyed old fellow. “I dropped out of life purposely. I’ve lived here all these years in the back streets of Pimlico, because I had a motive.”

“What was your motive?”

“That’s my own affair,” was the sharp response; and the old man spread out his thin hands to warm them by the fickle flame of the meagre fire. “By a silly error, because I thought myself safe from recognition, I betrayed my continued existence. But even you, Ravenscourt, shall not tempt me to return to life—to face the past.”

“My dear Mr. Goodrick, after eighteen years the whole affair is forgotten. The public have very short memories. Try to recall the cause célèbre of the year before last, and you’ll have difficulty in recollecting the names of the parties concerned. You’re just a little too sensitive. Think, if you returned—what a difference in your position!”

“Yes,” croaked the old man; “here in Pimlico I’m known as Nosey Goodrick, of Charlwood Street. The boys in the street call after me, and the neighbours regard me, I think, as a harmless crank. What would they say if they knew—if they knew the truth?”

“What would the world say if they knew that you, whose great talents are perpetuated by that marble statue in Westminster, and whom thousands followed to the grave; you, for whom the whole country mourned, are here, still alive and active!”

“Hush!” cried the old fellow, glancing apprehensively at the closed door. “Mrs. Ayres may overhear! Please do not recall the past, Ravenscourt. It is all too painful. I’ve long ago forgotten it. Nowadays I am plain Richard Goodrick, and soon I shall die and be buried in some suburban cemetery in the name under which I have chosen so long to live.”

“No,” declared his visitor; “you don’t mean that. You’ll return. It is your duty to the nation. An excuse can easily be made.”

“Return—never, I tell you!” cried the old man fiercely, starting to his feet, exhibiting the fact that he was unusually tall and straight for his age. His white face was bony and narrow, with an exceptionally prominent nose, a shock of white hair, and long white whiskers. He was dressed in a loosely made suit of shabby grey whip-cord tweed, with a narrow stand-up collar and a seedy black cravat.

The room was a small back one on the ground floor, but so filled with curios of all descriptions that it had an appearance more like the shop of a dealer in antiques than a living-room. Dusty pictures, priceless china, ivories, miniatures, a piece or two of genuine Chippendale, bundles of rare prints, some savage weapons, an ancient bronze torso from Greece, a quantity of rusty mediæval damascened armour, a big case of stuffed birds, and other curios were heaped about the place, until there seemed only barely room to move in the centre.

Opposite the fire was a square table covered with a piece of old green serge in lieu of a cloth; the carpet was so threadbare that all pattern had, years ago, disappeared, while on the frayed horsehair sofa beneath the window lay piles of old newspapers.

The day was the seventeenth of January, 1908. The faint grey light of the short wintry afternoon struggling in increased the depressing cheerlessness of the place, for the outlook was upon a high blank wall.

The visitor gazed around, and shuddered at the miserable abode. For eighteen years that man before him, the bearer of one of the most honoured and renowned names in Great Britain—the man whose reputation was known in many corners of the globe—had lived there, silent, alone, and unsuspected; absorbed in various studies, reading his own obituary notices, and sneering at the fulsome praise which those who were his enemies in life bestowed upon him when they believed him dead and out of the way.

He had had the unusual experience of being able to judge impartially his own popularity. Aloof from the world he had known and wherein he had been a power, he had looked on and laughed in triumph at his own obsequies. As Richard Goodrick, a retired schoolmaster, he had lived there in the house of the worthy Mrs. Ayres and her husband, paying his weekly rent punctually, and pursuing a life clock-like in its regularity.

As an art collector he had once been world-famed, and was, of course, known personally to all the great dealers in London and Paris. So, after his “death,” he dare no longer visit them, being compelled to pursue his hobby of curio-collecting among the smaller shops and obscure dealers. For eighteen years he had lived alone in Charlwood Street, and it was said by the women who gossiped over their garden walls that for eighteen years he had never been known to smile.

As he stood before his visitor he betrayed the fact that he was a man of iron will, quick to decide, and very resolute. In his dark, piercing eyes, which age had not dimmed, shone a fire of anger at the suggestion his visitor had made.

“I tell you,” he repeated firmly, “that I shall never reveal my existence. I died—they have buried me, fools that they are, and put up a statue to perpetuate my memory. American tourists go and gaze upon it, and say: ‘Wal, he was a grand man, anyhow.’ And I’ve fooled them—fooled the world—for I’m still alive.”

“That’s just it! You have withheld your aid, which, if given, would—if you will pardon my remark—bring happiness to many.”

“Why should I bring happiness to many?” snapped the quick-tempered old fellow. “I am the odd man out of the game. I am dead, remember—dead, unless you betray me, Ravenscourt,” he added, looking his visitor straight and unflinchingly in the face.

“I shall not betray you. Surely you know me better than that!” said the other reproachfully.

“If you offer me fifty thousand, then it would be worth an equal sum to you to betray me,” said the old man, speaking very slowly and distinctly. “You are not so well off as you once were. The money would be useful to you.”

“It would,” admitted his visitor. “But not for double the sum would I betray my old chief—the man to whom I owe everything.”

“I believe you, Ravenscourt,” the old recluse said, after a pause. “I used to trust you long ago—and I’ll trust you now.”

“And you will take my advice, and accept the sum offered?”

“No, no!” he cried quickly. “Never that. You can never bribe me. As I have lived, so will I die—in silence.”

“Leave this wretched place,” urged his visitor. “It is unfitted to you—you who have lived the life of the great. It is a marvel how you have existed here all these years.”

“It satisfies all my requirements,” was the man’s calm reply. “I am friendless, it is true, but I have my books and my collection,” and he waved his thin hand across the narrow, stuffy little room. “What more can I desire in this the evening of my life? Do you know,” he added, “I would not exchange this quiet, uneventful existence in a back street in London for all the society gatherings, the yachting, the racing, the Riviera, and the grouse moors in Christendom. When I ‘died’ I gladly finished with it all.”

“Who knew the real secret of your death?” asked his visitor, interested.

“Finnimore.”

“Finnimore, your old valet? And he died ten years ago!”

“Yes. And only you, Ravenscourt, are now aware of the fact that I did not die. And you I trust to maintain the strictest silence.”

“You place me in a very difficult position,” the other said in dissatisfaction. “That night, a week ago, when, as I passed you in Whitehall, something in your face struck me as familiar—what it was I can’t tell—you knew that I had recognised you, and you cleverly evaded me. It was not until I employed Jewell, the private inquiry agent, that I was able to track you here to your hiding-place, and meet you face to face in daylight. Then I convinced myself of the astounding truth that you, for whom the whole country had mourned, were not dead, but actually lived!”

“Well, and have not other men, tired of life or crushed by some great sorrow or misfortune, done exactly the same thing as myself? I am not alone.”

“But—permit me to say so—you are not now acting with that high feeling of honesty and humanity with which you always acted throughout your brilliant career.”

“Because I do not return to my proper station!” exclaimed the old man angrily. “I am the proper judge of that, Ravenscourt! I am inexorable; I shall never leave here. Keep your fifty thousand pounds—and I will keep my secret.”

“And bring ruin upon us?”

“I regret, but I cannot depart from the course I laid down eighteen years ago.”

“You were not usually so cruel.”

“Not before the great blow fell upon me, George. It wrecked your life, ended my career, and hardened my heart,” he said slowly in a changed voice. “But don’t let us discuss it further. I’m glad to have seen you, though I’ve passed you often and often when you have failed to recognise me. But now please leave me—and forget that you have spoken with one who is ‘dead.’ ”

A deep shadow of pain crossed the face of his visitor. The men, standing together, seemed to fill the narrow, musty-smelling little apartment. From the smoke-blackened wall opposite an ugly Japanese mask grinned down upon them.

There was a movement outside the door, and Ravenscourt noticed how the old man started nervously and grew pale as his eyes turned apprehensively towards the door.

“I cannot forget that I have spoken with you,” said his visitor. “The hour I have spent here is the strangest one of my whole life—speaking with one whom the world has lost. True, I owe much to you, and it is in repayment of that I am here, offering you the sum of fifty thousand pounds if you will only consent to return and resume your place in society and in the world of London.”

Goodrick smiled bitterly and stroked his white beard.

“What do I want with fifty thousand pounds?” he asked. “Before I left the world I made long and careful preparation. I carried with me twenty thousand pounds, much of it in gold, because notes might have given me away. With some of that I have speculated in curios. The contents of this room”—and he waved his thin hand—“would fetch forty thousand if put up to auction. See!”—and he took out a small, ancient, leather-bound, illuminated manuscript in parchment—“this thirteenth-century volume from the Borghese collection would alone fetch fifteen hundred to two thousand at Sotheby’s any day. No; I do not want money. When I do—I have it here.”

“Aren’t you afraid of being robbed of your treasures?” queried his visitor, gazing around at the miscellaneous collection of antiques.

“Robbed? No. Who would dream that here, in this back room in Pimlico, are stored some of the best curios that have been in the market during the past fifteen years? Look at this Caxton,” and he opened a small, thin, black-letter book, “it is unique. No other copy of this work exists. The British Museum would gladly purchase it for almost any sum to-morrow—if they only knew of it!”

“And you actually refuse to act as I suggest?”

“I do!” cried the old man, the fire of resentment again in his eyes. “Go, Ravenscourt, guard my secret—and forget that you have seen or spoken with me. I am dead, remember—dead to all, even to you. And,” he added, looking at him meaningly, “you dare not betray me—remember!”

“But I——”

“There are no buts. Leave me. Farewell,” he said in a firm, authoritative tone as he stood erect, holding forth his long, bony hand.

For a moment his visitor hesitated. Then, seeing determination in the old man’s eyes, he took the proffered hand and bent over it with courtly gesture, accepting his dismissal with a sigh.

“If you reconsider your decision, remember that I am at any moment at your service,” he said.

“I shall never do that, Ravenscourt. Adieu—for always.”

And then the other, his voice choked by emotion, opened the door and passed down the narrow little hall and out into the street.

The old man listened till the front door slammed, then casting himself back into his arm-chair, held out his hands to the cheerless fire, and, nodding his head slowly in self-satisfaction, croaked aloud in a weak, thin voice:

“That man is my enemy. He knows the identity of Richard Goodrick! But he does not know his secret! Oh, no! no! He will never know that—never—never! He will die before that.”

CHAPTER II. THE NIGHT OF THE SEVENTEENTH

As Ravenscourt stood at the corner of Denbigh Street he hailed a passing taxi and drove to the Carlton Club, where he sat in a corner of the smoking-room, pretending to read, but pondering deeply.

If the truth were known regarding that man in concealment in Pimlico, what a sensation it would cause! The whole world would be amazed.

There, hanging at the farther end of the great room, was a fine portrait of the man now known as Richard Goodrick, painted by a celebrated R.A. a year before his death.

He turned and gazed upon it. Yes, there could be no mistaking the general outline of the features, though eighteen years of the life of a studious recluse had effected some marked changes. The portrait was that of one in the prime of manhood. To-day Goodrick was thin, wasted, white-haired and careworn.

“I wonder whether he will ever relent,” thought the grave-faced man seated by the club fire, heedless of his friends who came and went. “Why did he so cleverly disappear? Ah! that is a mystery. He admitted that he was a long time preparing for it. And yet his doctors, just before his ‘death,’ had declared him to be suffering from an incurable disease which must inevitably prove fatal. Did they lie? Were they also in the conspiracy?”

He recollected their names, and, rising, crossed the room and took down the “Medical Directory.” Then, after a search, he found that both were, alas! dead.

“Perhaps he paid them to make that alarming diagnosis!” he reflected, re-seating himself in his arm-chair. “He was a shrewd and clever man—one of the keenest, most far-seeing of our time. Yet he died at the very height of his popularity—at a moment when England could ill afford to spare him. He deceived us all—even his Sovereign, who sent a representative to place a wreath upon his coffin. And to-day I have seen and spoken with him—the man to whom I owe my fame, my fortune, my baronetcy—everything. I wonder—I wonder if I was mistaken a fortnight ago when I thought I passed that Italian priest, Don Mario, in the bustle of Oxford Street? The man, though he did not wear his clerical clothes, strangely resembled him. I wonder whether Goodrick and he are still friends—whether—but no! it would be impossible after what occurred. And yet,” he whispered aloud, “supposing Don Mario is still in London—supposing he thought fit to retaliate!”

He held his breath for a moment, pursed his lips, and the colour left his face.

“Don Mario! Padre Mario Mellini!” he repeated to himself.

Then, with a long sigh, he sat with his hands thrust deep into his trousers pockets, his eyes fixed immovably upon the fire, recalling strange incidents of the past.

A spare, wiry, clean-shaven man in black coat and grey trousers entered the room, and, noticing him, nodded, exclaiming: “How-do, Ravenscourt!”

It was Lord Llanarth, who had taken the place of the dead man, and who had risen to a pinnacle of fame almost as high as that occupied by his talented predecessor.

Ravenscourt started at sight of him. What would Llanarth think if he dared to rise and say that not two hours ago he had sat with the man whose tomb was in Westminster Abbey? But the seal of secrecy was upon his lips.

Llanarth crossed to him, and standing with his hands behind his back, asked him a question—his opinion upon a point which had arisen in Parliament on the previous night—to which he replied mechanically, without knowing what he said.

Then, finding Llanarth to be in a talkative mood, and eager to escape, he rose and declared that he must be going.

“See you at the Foreign Office reception to-night?” asked his lordship.

“Suppose so,” laughed the other, who, passing out, got his hat and coat and walked down Pall Mall to his house in Carlton House Terrace.

In the silence of his own fine library, the windows of which looked out upon the Mall, now bright with its long double row of lamps, he sat before the fire pondering—recalling every word which had fallen from the lips of Richard Goodrick.

The latter, too, was seated before his meagre fire in Pimlico, warming his hands and croaking in triumph.

Mrs. Ayres, a kindly, grey-haired person whose husband was employed in a wholesale drapery warehouse in St. Paul’s Churchyard, entered, bearing a tray with her lodger’s tea and toast. She found him staring straight before him, absorbed in his own thoughts. That day he had scarcely uttered a word to her.

He was a man of moods. His manner was sometimes strange. She thought she had of late detected a queer, unusual expression in his face, and had told her neighbours so. Nosey Goodrick was eccentric, and as such his odd fits of moroseness usually passed unnoticed.

If he did not speak, then she never addressed him, for well she knew the snappy, ill-natured reply she would obtain.

So she put down the tray upon the littered table, lit the gas, drew the blinds, and left him to his ruminations.

“The old fool!” growled her lodger as soon as his landlady had gone, and he turned and ate his tea with a relish.