Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces

by Charles Felix

  CHAPTER XXX

  Who feeds on Hope alone makes but a sorry banquet; and for the next fewweeks Hope was all--or nearly all--that came Cleek's way.

  For some unexplained reason, Miss Lorne's letters--never very frequent,and always very brief--had, of late been gradually growing briefer: asif written in haste and from a mere sense of duty and at odd momentssnatched from the call of more absorbing things; and, finally, therecame a dropping off altogether and a week that brought no message fromher at all.

  The old restlessness, the almost outlived sense of personal injury andrebellion against circumstances, took hold of Cleek again when that timecame; and the soul of him drank deep of the waters of bitterness.

  So, then, it was all to be in vain, was it, this long struggle with theDevil of Circumstances, this long striving for a Goal? And after all,"Thou shalt not enter" was to be written over the gateway of hisambition? He had been lifted only to be dropped again, redeemed only tolet him see how vain it was for the leopard, even though he achieved theimpossible and changed his spots, to be other than a leopard always; howimpossible it was for a man to override the decrees of Nature or evadethe edicts of Providence? That was what it meant, eh?

  To a nature such as his, Life was always a picture drawn out ofperspective. There was never any Middle Distance; never any propergradation. It was always either the Highest Heights or the LowestDepths; the glare of fierce light or the black of deepest darkness. Hecould not plod; he must either fly or fall; either loll at the Gates ofParadise or groan in the depths of Hell. And the failure of AilsaLorne's letters sent him to the darkest and most hopeless corner of it.

  Not that he blamed her--wholly; but that he blamed that Fate which hadso persistently dogged him from childhood on. For now that the lettershad ceased altogether, he recalled things which otherwise would havebeen forgotten; and, his sense of proportion being distorted, mademountains out of sand dunes.

  In one of those letters, he recollected, she had spoken of meetingunexpectedly an old friend whom she had not seen since the days of hisboyhood; in another, she had casually remarked, "I met Captain Morfordagain to-day and we spent a very pleasant half hour together," and in athird had written, "The Captain promised to call and take tea to-day butdidn't. I rather fancy he divines the fact that Lady Chepstow does notcare for him. Indeed, she dislikes him immensely. Why, I wonder?Personally, I think him exceedingly pleasant, and there are things inhis character for which I have the deepest respect and admiration."

  And out of these trifling circumstances--lo! the darkest corner thatdarkest Hell contained.

  So that was how it was to end, was it? That was the card which Fate hadall along kept up her sleeve while she stood off laughing at hisendeavours, his hopes, his struggles against the inevitable? In the end,another man was to appear, another man was to win her, and the dream wasto turn out nothing more than a dream after all.

  Once again the voices of the Wild called out to the Caged Wolf; onceagain, the old things beckoned and the new things lost their savour andthe Devil said, as before, "What is the use? What _is_ the use?" and theSavage cried out to be stripped and flung back into the wilderness asGod made him, and called and called and called for an end to the thingsthat stank in his nostrils and for the fierce companionship of his kind.And but that Time had staled these things a little and blunted the keenedge of them so that they could not endure for long, and there wasDollops and the lessons and Dollops' future to recollect, the Wolf andthe Savage and the Devil might not have hungered in vain.

  Followed a period of intense depression when all things seemed to losetheir savour and when Narkom, amazed, said to himself that the man hadcome to the end of his usefulness and had lost every attribute of thesuccessful criminologist. For the next three cases he brought him Cleekbotched in a manner that would have disgraced the merest tyro. Two, hefailed utterly to solve, although the solutions were eventually workedout by the ordinary forces of the Yard; and in the third he let his manget away under his very nose and convey Government secrets to a foreignPower. It was but natural that these three dismal failures should findtheir way to the newspapers and that, in the hysterical condition ofmodern journalism, they should be flung out to the world at large withall the ostentation of leaded type and panicky scare heads, and thatlearned editors should discourse knowingly of "the limitations ofmentality" and "the well-authenticated cases of the sudden warping ofabnormal intelligences resulting in the startling termination of amazingcareers," or snivel dismally over "the complete collapse of thatimaginative power which, hitherto, had been this detective's greatestasset, and which now, on the principle that however deep a well may beif a force-pump be put into it it must some time suck gravel, seemed tohave come to its end."

  These things, when Cleek heard of them, affected him not at all. Heseemed not to care whether his career was ended or not, whether theworld praised or censured. Neither his pride nor his vanity was stirredeven to the very smallest degree.

  But Narkom, loyal still, took these gloomy prophecies and editorialvapourings much to heart and strove valiantly to confound the man'sdetractors and to put the spur to the man himself. He would not believethat the end had come, that his mental powers had run suddenly against adead wall beyond which there was no possibility of proceeding. Somethingwas weighing upon his mind and damping his spirits that was all; and itmust be the business of those who were his friends to take steps todiscover what that something was and, if possible, to eliminate it. Hetherefore sought out Dollops and held secret conclave with him; andDollops dolefully epitomized the difficulty thus: "A skirt--that'swhat's at the bottom of it, sir. No letter at all these ten days past.She's chucked him, I'm afraid." And with this brief preface told allthat he was able to tell; which, after all, was not much.

  He could only explain about the letter that used to come off and on inthe other days and which brought such a flow of high spirits to the manfor whom it was intended; he could only say that it was addressed in awoman's hand and bore always the one postmark; and when Narkom heardwhat that postmark was and recollected where Lady Chepstow's countryseat lay, and who was with her, he puckered up his lips as if he wereabout to whistle and made two slim arches with his uplifted eyebrows.

  "Sir, if only you could sneak off and run down there without his knowingof it--it wouldn't do to write a letter, Mr. Narkom: he'd be on to thatbefore you could turn round, sir," the boy ventured hopefully; "but ifonly you could run down there and give her a tip what she's a doing ofand what she's a chuckin' away, what a Man she's a throwin' down, maybe,sir, maybe--"

  "Yes, 'maybe,'" agreed the superintendent, after a moment's reflection."At any rate it's worth a trial." And went, forthwith.

  Not that it was a prudent thing to do; not that it is wise for any manat any time to interfere, even with the best intentions, with the courseof another man's love affairs; and, finally, not that it was at allnecessary or had any influence whatsoever upon the events whichsucceeded the step. Indeed, he might have spared himself the trouble,for he had barely covered a fifth of the distance when the country postwas delivered in London, and Cleek, rocketing up in one sweep from thePit to the Gateway, stood laughing huskily with a letter from Ailsa inhis hand.

  He ripped off the envelope and read it greedily.

  "Dear Friend," she wrote, "I cannot imagine what you must think of mysilence; but whatsoever you do think cannot be half so terrible as theactual cause of it. I have been in close touch with misery and death,with things so appalling that heart and mind have had room to holdnothing else. Indeed, I am still so horribly nervous and upset that Iscarcely know how to think coherently much less write. I can onlyremember that you once said that if ever I needed your help I was toask; and oh, Mr. Cleek, I need it very very much indeed now. Not formyself--let me find time to add that--but for a dear, dear friend--thefriend I have so often written about: Captain Morford--who is involvedin an affair of the most distressing and mysterious character and whoseonly hope lies, I feel, in you. Will you come to the
rescue, for mysake? That is what I am asking. Let me say, however, that there is nopossibility of a reward, for the captain is in no position to offer one;but I seem to feel that that will not weigh with you. Neither can I askyou to call at the house, for, as I have already told you, Lady Chepstowdoes not care for the Captain and under those circumstances it would beembarrassing to ask him there to meet you. So then, if no other caseintervenes, and you really _can_ grant me this great favour, will you bein the neighbourhood of the lich-gate of Lyntonhurst Old Church at nineo'clock in the morning of Thursday, you will win the everlastinggratitude of, Your sincere friend--AILSA LORNE."

  Would he be there? He laughed aloud as he put the question to himself. ABradshaw was on his table. He caught it up, found that there was a trainthat could be caught in thirty-five minutes' time, and clapped on hishat and--caught it.

  That night he slept at the inn of the Three Desires--which, as you maypossibly know, lies but a gunshot beyond the boundary wall of the glebeof Lyntonhurst Old Church--slept with an alarm clock at his head andevery servant at the inn from the boots to the barmaid tipped a shillingto see that he did not oversleep himself.

  He was up before any of them, however--up and out into the pearl-dusk ofthe morning before ever the alarm-clock shrilled its first note, or thesun's sheen slid lower than the spurs of the weather-cock on the spireof Lyntonhurst Old Church--and twice he had walked past the big gatesand looked up the still avenue to the windows of the huge house whoseroof covered her before Lyntonhurst Old Church spoke up through thedawn-hush and told the parish it was half-past four o'clock.

  By five, he had found a pool cupped in the beech woods with mallows andmarsh marigolds and a screen of green things all round it and a tent ofblue sky over the sun-touched tree tops; and had stripped and splashedinto it and set all the birds to flight with the harsher song of humanthings; by seven he was back at the Three Desires; by eight he hadshaved and changed and breakfasted and was out again in the fields andthe leafy lanes, and by nine he was at the lich-gate of the church.