Thorne Guy
The Soul Stealer

CHAPTER IX
GRATITUDE OF MISS MARJORIE POOLE

As the man to whom she had been engaged came into the room, Marjorie rose to meet him. She was not embarrassed, the hour and occasion were too serious for that, and she herself was too broken down for any emotions save those that were intensely real and came from an anguished heart. She went up to him, all pale and drooping, and took him by the hand.

"Thank you, William," she said in a low voice, and that was all.

But in her words Gouldesbrough realized all that she was powerless to say. He heard, with an inward thrill and leap of the pulses, an immense respect for him, which, even in the days of their engagement, he had never heard.

Always, Marjorie had reverenced his attainments, never had she seemed to be so near to him as a man as now.

He looked straight into her eyes, nor did his own flinch from her direct and agonized gaze. The frightful power of his dominating will, the horrible strength of his desire, the intensity of his purpose, enabled him to face her look without a sign of tremor.

He, this man with a marvellous intellect and a soul unutterably stained by the most merciless perfidy, was yet able to look back at her with a kind, sorrowful, and touching glance.

Gouldesbrough wore no metal helmet which should make the horror of his thoughts and knowledge plain for Marjorie to see. The man who had committed a crime as foul and sinister as ever crime was yet, the man who was responsible for the pale face of the girl he loved, the drooping form, the tearful eyes, yet smiled back at her with a mask of patient resignation, deference, and chivalry.

"I am so glad you've come, William," Lady Poole said; "and I'm sure, distressing as all these circumstances are, we cannot thank you enough for what you have done and are doing. No one else in your position would have done so much. And on Marjorie's behalf and on my own I thank you with a full heart."

Sir William bowed.

Then Lady Poole, voluble as she usually was, and unabashed in almost every circumstance hesitated a little. The situation was certainly very delicate, almost unparalleled, indeed, and it was certainly quite outside even her wide experience. But her voice had a genuine ring of thankfulness and gratitude, and the real woman emerged from the veneer of worldliness and baffled ambition.

There was a pause for a moment, no one of the three spoke a single word. Then Lady Poole, by an intuition, said and did exactly the right thing – perhaps old Sir Frederick's "hobby of tact" had not been without its use after all! She sank into a chair.

"There's no need for any explanation, I can see that," she said with a sigh of relief. "With any other man it would have been so different, but it's all right, William, I can see it in your manner and in your presence here. Then let me say once and for all, that both Marjorie and I feel at last we have got some one with us who will help us. We have been terribly alone. We have both felt it most poignantly. After all, women do want a man in a crisis! You, dear William, are the last man we should have thought of asking to help us, and yet you are the first man who has come to do so."

"Dear Lady Poole," Gouldesbrough answered in a quiet voice, "I think perhaps I see a little of what you mean. I am not sure, but I think I do. And I regard it as the greatest privilege and honour to come to you with an offer of help and assistance in your trouble."

He turned to the younger lady.

"Marjorie," he said, "you must treat me just like a brother now. You must forget all that has passed between us, and just lean on me, rely on me, use me. Nothing could make me more happy than just that."

Lady Poole rose again. Who shall say in the volatile brain of the good dame that already in the exhilaration of Sir William's presence and kindness, new hopes and ambitions were not reviving? Lady Poole was a woman, and she was an opportunist too. Woman-like, her mind moved fast into an imaginary future; it had always done so. And it is possible that upon the clouded horizon of her hopes a faint star began to twinkle once more.

Who shall blame Lady Poole?

"Now, my dears," she said in a more matter of fact voice, "I think perhaps you might be happier in discussing this matter if I were to go away. Under the circumstances, I am perfectly aware that it's not the correct thing to do, but that is speaking only from a conventional standpoint, and none of us here can be conventional at a moment like this. If you would rather have me stay, just say so. But it is with pride and pleasure that I know that I can leave you with Marjorie, William, even under these miserable circumstances and in this unhappy business."

Gouldesbrough smiled sadly.

"It is as Marjorie wishes," he said. "But I know that Marjorie knows she can trust me."

The great man saw that once more the girl lifted her eyes and looked at him with something which was almost like reverence. Never before had he seen her look at him like this. Once more the evil joy in the possibility of victory after all leapt through his blood.

No thought nor realization of the terrible thing he had done, of the horrors that he and the pink-faced man in Regent's Park were even now perfecting, came to trouble that moment of evil pride. Everybody had always said, everybody who had been brought into contact with him, always knew that Sir William Gouldesbrough was a strong man!

Lady Poole waited a moment to see if her daughter made any sign of wishing her to remain, and finding that there was none, for Marjorie was standing with drooping head and made no movement, the dowager swept out of the room with rustling skirts, and gently closed the door.

Sir William and Marjorie were left alone.

The man of action asserted himself.

"Sit down, Marjorie," he said in a commonplace tone, "and just let me talk to you on pure matters of fact. Now, my dear, we haven't seen each other since you wrote me the letter telling me that our engagement was a mistake. You know what my reply to that was, and I believe and trust you know that I shall remain perfectly true to both the spirit and actual words of that communication. That's all we need say now, except just this: I loved you dearly and I love you dearly now. I had hoped that we might have been very happy together and that I might have spent my life in your service. But that was not to be in the way that I had hoped. At the same time, I am not a man easily moved or changed, and if I cannot be yours in one way, dear girl, I will be yours in another. However, that's all about that. Now, then, let me tell you how hard I have been trying to discover the truth of this astounding disappearance of poor Mr. Guy Rathbone."

A low sob came from the girl in the chair. It was a sob not only of regret for her lost lover, but it had the same note of reverence, of utter appreciation, of her first words.

"You are too good," she said. "William, I have treated you horribly badly. You are too good. Oh, you are too good!"

"Hush!" he said in a sharp staccato voice. "We agreed that aspect of the question wasn't to be spoken of any more. The past is the past, and, my dear little girl, I beg you to realize it. You loved poor Guy Rathbone, and he seems to have been wiped out of ordinary life. My business is to find him again for you, so that you may be happy. I have been trying to do the utmost in my power for days. I have done everything that my mind could suggest, and as yet nothing has occurred. Now, Marjorie, let's just be business-like. Tell me what you think about the matter, and I will tell you what I think. See if our two brains cannot hit on something which will help us."

"William," she said with a full note, a chord rather, of deep pain in her voice – "William, I don't know what to think. I can't understand it. I am lost in utter darkness. There seems no possible reason why he should have gone away. I can only think that the worst has happened, and that some terrible people must have killed him."

"But why?"

"Oh," she answered almost hysterically, "he was so beautiful and so strong. They must have killed him because he was so different to other men." She did not see the tall man who sat before her wince and quiver. She did not see his face change and contort itself into malignancy. She did not realize that these innocent words, wrung from a simple distressed and loving heart, meant awful things for the man she longed for.

"But, Marjorie," the voice came steady and strong, "you know that is just a little fantastic, if you will forgive me for saying so. People don't go about injuring other people because they are better-looking or have finer natures than themselves. They only say unkind things about them, they don't kill them, you know."

"Oh, of course, you are right, William," she answered, "and I hardly know what I'm saying, the pain of it all is so great. But then, there is nothing to say. I can't understand, I can hardly realize what has happened."

"For my part," Sir William answered, "I have left no stone unturned to discover the truth. I have been in communication with every force or agency which might be able to explain the thing. And no one has given me the slightest hint, except perhaps – "

She leapt up from her chair, her pale face changed.

"Yes?" she cried, "What is it? What is that?"

Her breath came thick and fast. Sir William remained sitting in his chair and his head was bowed.

"Sit down, Marjorie," he answered; "I didn't mean to say that."

"But you said it," she replied. "Ah! my ears are very keen, and there was something in your voice which had meaning. William, what is it? What is it?"

"Nothing," he answered in a deep, decisive voice.

But the voice brought no conviction to her ears. She had detected, or thought she had detected, the note of an inner knowledge when he had first spoken. She crossed the room with rapid strides and laid her white hand upon his shoulder.

"You've got to tell me," she said imperiously. And her touch thrilled him through and through with an exquisite agony and an exquisite joy.

"It's nothing," he repeated.

Now there was less conviction than ever in his voice. She laughed hysterically. "William," she said, "I know you so well, you can't hide anything from me. There's something you can tell me. Whatever it may be, good or bad, you've just got to tell me."

At that he looked up at her, and his face, she saw, was drawn and frightened.

"Marjorie," he said, "don't let any words of mine persuade you into any belief. Since you ask me I must say what I have got to say. But mind you, I am in no way convinced myself that what I am going to tell you is more than mere idle supposition."

"Tell me," she whispered, and her voice hissed like escaping steam.

"Well, it's just this," he said, "and it's awfully hard for me even to hint such a thing to you. But, you know, Rathbone had recently made rather a friend of poor Eustace Charliewood. I like Charliewood; you never did. A man's point of view and a girl's point of view are quite different about a man. But of course I can't pretend that Charliewood is exactly, well – er – what you might call – I don't know quite how to put it, Marjorie."

"I know," she said with a shudder of disgust "I know. Go on."

"Well, just before Rathbone disappeared those two seemed to have been about together a good deal, and of course Charliewood is a man who has some rather strange acquaintances, especially in the theatrical world. That is to say, in the sub-theatrical world. Marjorie, I hardly know how to put it to you, and I think I had better stop."

"Go on!" she cried once more.

"Well," he said wearily, "Rathbone was a good fellow, no doubt, but he is a young man, and no girl really knows what the life of a young man really is or may be. I know that Charliewood introduced Rathbone to a certain girl. Oh, Marjorie, I can't go on, these suspicions are unworthy."

"Terribly unworthy," she cried, standing up to her full height, and then in a moment she drooped to him, and once more she asked him to go on.

He told her of certain meetings, saying that there could have been, of course, no harm in them, skilfully hinting at this or that, and then testifying to his utter disbelief in the suspicions that he himself had provoked. She listened to him, growing whiter and whiter. At last his hesitating speech died away into silence, and she stood looking at him.

"It might be," she whispered, half to herself, "it might be, but I do not think it could be. No man could be so unutterably cruel, so unutterably base. I have made you tell me this, William, and I know that you yourself do not believe it. He could not be so wicked as to sacrifice everything for one of those people."

And then Sir William rose.

"No," he said, "he couldn't. I feel it, though I don't know him. Marjorie, no living man could leave you for one of the vulgar syrens of the half world."

She looked at him for a moment as he put the thing in plain language, and then burst into a passion of weeping.

"I can't bear any more, William," she said between her sobs. "Go now, but find him. Oh, find him!"

CHAPTER X
A MAN ABOUT TOWN PAYS A DEBT

The people in the luxurious smoking-room of the great Palace Hotel saw a pale, ascetic-looking and very distinguished man come in to the comfortable place and sit down upon a lounge.

"Do you know who that is?" one man whispered to another, flicking the ash off a cigar.

"No; who is he?" his companion answered.

"That's Sir William Gouldesbrough."

"Oh, the great scientific Johnny, you mean."

"Yes, they say that he is going to turn the world topsy-turvy before he's done."

"The world's good enough for me," was the reply, "and if I'd my way, these people who invent things should all be taken out and shot. I'm tired of inventions, they make life move too quickly. The good old times were best, when it took eight hours to get from Brighton to London, and one could not have telegrams from one's office to worry one."

"Perhaps you're right," said the first man. "But still, people look at things differently now-a-days. At any rate, Gouldesbrough is said to be one of the leading men in England to-day."

"He doesn't look happy over it," replied his companion. "He looks like a death's-head."

"Well, you know, he's mixed up in the Rathbone mystery in a sort of way."

"Oh yes, of course; he was engaged to the girl who chucked him over for the Johnny who has disappeared, wasn't he?"

"That's it. Just watch him, poor wretch; doesn't he look pipped?"

"Upon my word, the perspiration's standing out on his forehead in beads. He seems as if – "

"As if he had been overworking and overeating. He wants a Turkish bath, I expect. Now then, Jones, what do you really think about the fall in South Africans? Will they recover in the next two months? That's what I want to know; that's what I want to be certain of."

Sir William had just left the up-stairs apartments of the Pooles. He had rung for the lift and entered, without a word to the attendant, who had glanced fearfully at the tall, pale man with the flashing eyes and the wet face. Once or twice the lift-man noticed that the visitor raised his hand to his neck above the collar and seemed to press upon it, and it may have been fancy on the lift-man's part – though he was not an imaginative person – but he seemed to hear a sound like a drum beating under a blanket, and he wondered if the gentleman was troubled with heart-disease.

Gouldesbrough pressed the little electric bell upon the oak table in front of him, and in a moment a waiter appeared.

"Bring me a large brandy and soda," he said in a quiet voice.

The waiter bowed and hurried away.

The waiter did not know, being a foreigner, and unacquainted with the tittle-tattle of the day, that Sir William Gouldesbrough, the famous scientist, was generally known to be a practical teetotaller, and one who abhorred the general use of alcoholic beverages.

When the brandy came, amber in the electric lights of the smoking-room, and with a piece of ice floating in the liquid, Sir William took a small white tabloid from a bottle in his pocket and dropped it into the glass. It fizzed, spluttered, and disappeared.

Then he raised the tumbler to his lips, and as he did so the floating ice tinkled against the sides of the glass like a tiny alarum.

"Nerves gone," the stock-broking gentleman close by said to his friend, with a wink.

In five minutes or so, after he had lit a cigarette, Gouldesbrough rose and left the smoking-room. He put on his coat in the hall and went out of the front door.

It was not yet late, and the huge crescent of electric lights, which seemed to stretch right away beyond Hove to Worthing, gleamed like a gigantic coronet.

It was a clear night. The air was searching and keen, and it seemed to steady the scientist as he walked down the steps and came out from under the hotel portico on to the pavement.

A huge round moon hung over the sea, which was moaning quietly. The lights in front of the Alhambra Music Hall gleamed brightly, and on the promenade by the side of the shore innumerable couples paced and re-paced amid a subdued hum of talk and laughter.

The pier stretched away into the water like a jewelled snake. It was Brighton at ten o'clock, bright, gay, and animated.

Sir William was staying at the Brighton Royal, the other great hotel which towers up upon the front some quarter of a mile away from the Palace, where Marjorie and Lady Poole were.

He strode through the crowds, seeing nothing of them, hearing nothing but the beat of his own heart.

Even for a man so strong as he, the last hour had been terrible. Never before in all his life, at the moment of realization when some great scientific theory had materialized into stupendous fact, when first Marjorie had promised to marry him – at any great crisis of his life – had he undergone so furious a strain as this of the last hour.

He came out of the Palace Hotel, knowing that he had carried out his intentions with the most consummate success. He came out of it, realizing that not half-a-dozen men in England could have done what he had done, and as the keen air smote upon his face like a blow from the flat of a sword, he realized also that not six men in England, walking the pleasant, happy streets of any town, were so unutterably stained and immeasurably damned as he.

As he passed through the revolving glass doors of his own hotel, and the hall-porters touched their caps, he exerted all the powers of his will.

He would no longer remember or realize what he had done and what it meant to him. He would only rejoice in his achievement, and he banished the fear that comes even to the most evil when they know they have committed an almost unpardonable sin.

He did not use the lift to go to his sitting-room on the second floor; he ran lightly up the stairs, wanting the exercise as a means of banishing thought.

He entered his own room, switched on the electric light, took off his coat, and stood in front of the fire, stretching his arms in pure physical weariness.

Yes! That was over! Another step was taken. Once more he had progressed a step towards his desire, in spite of the most adverse happenings and the most forbidding aspects of fate.

The unaccustomed brandy at the Palace Hotel, and the bromide solution he had dropped into it, had calmed his nerves, and suddenly he laughed aloud in the rich, silent room, a laugh of pure triumph and excitement.

Even as the echoes of his voice died away, his eyes fell upon the table and saw that there was a letter lying there addressed to him. The address was written in a well-known handwriting. He took it up, tore open the envelope and read the communication.

It was this —

"I have been down here for several days, trying to escape from London and the thoughts which London gives me. But it has been quite useless. I saw to-day, quite by chance, in the hotel register, that you have arrived here. I did not think that we were ever likely to meet again, except in the most casual way. I hope not. Since I have been here, the torture of my life has increased a thousand-fold, and I have come to the conclusion that my life must stop. I am not fit to live. I don't blame you too much, because if I hadn't been a scoundrel and a wastrel all my life, I should never have put myself in your hands. As far as your lights go, you have acted well to me. You have paid me generously for the years of dirty work I have done at your bidding. For what I have done lately, you have made me financially free, and I shall die owing no man a penny, and with no man, save you only, knowing that I die without hope – lost, degraded and despairing. Don't think I blame you, William Gouldesbrough, because I don't. When I was at Eton, I was always a pleasure-loving little scug. I was the same at Oxford. I have been the same in all my life in town. I have never been any good to myself, and I have disappointed all the hopes my people had for me. It's all been my own fault. Then I became entangled with you, and I was too weak to resist the money you were prepared to pay me for the things I have done for you.

"But it's all over now. I have gone too far. I have helped you, and am equally guilty with you, to commit a frightful crime. Lax as I have always been, I can no longer feel I have any proper place among men of my own sort. All I can say is that I am glad I shall die without anybody knowing what I really am.

"I write this note after dinner, and, finding the number of your room from the hotel clerk, I leave it here for you to see. I am going to make an end of it all in an hour or two, when I have written a few notes to acquaintances and so on. I can't go on living, Gouldesbrough, because night and day, day and night, I am haunted by the thought of that poor young man you have got in your foul house in Regent's Park. What you are doing to him I don't know. The end of your revenge I can only guess at. But it is all so horrible that I am glad to be done with life. I wish you good-bye; and I wish to God – if there is really a God – that I had never crossed your path and never been your miserable tool.

"Eustace Charliewood."

As Sir William Gouldesbrough read this letter, his whole tall figure became rigid. He seemed to stiffen as a corpse stiffens.

Then, quite suddenly, he turned round and pushed the letter into the depths of the glowing fire, pressing the paper down with the poker until every vestige of it was consumed.

He strode to the door of the room, opened it, came out into the wide carpeted corridor and hurried up to the lift.

He pressed the button and heard it ring far down below.

In a minute or two there came the clash of the shutting doors, the "chunk" of the hydraulic mechanism, and he saw the shadow of the lift-roof rising up towards him.

The attendant opened the door.

"Will you take me up to the fourth floor, please," he said, "to Mr. Eustace Charliewood's room?"

"Mr. Charliewood, sir?" the man replied. "Oh, yes, I remember, number 408. Tall, clean-shaved gentleman."

"That's him," Sir William said. "I have only just learnt that he has been staying in the hotel. He is an old friend, and I had no idea he was here."

The iron doors clashed, the lift shot upward, and the attendant and Sir William arrived at the fourth floor.

"Down the corridor, sir, and the first turning on the right," the lift-man said. "But perhaps I'd better show you."

He ran the ironwork gates over their rollers and hurried down the corridor with Sir William. They turned the corner, and the man pointed to a door some fifteen yards away.

"That's it, sir," he said. "That's Mr. Charliewood's room."

Even as he spoke there was a sudden loud explosion which seemed to come from the room to which he had pointed – a horrid crash in the warm, richly-lit silence of the hotel.

The man turned to Sir William with a white face.

"Come on," he said, forgetting his politeness. "Something has happened. Come, quick!"

When they burst into the room they found the man about town lying upon the hearth-rug with a little blue circle edged with crimson in the centre of his forehead. The hands were still moving feebly, but what had been Eustace Charliewood was no longer there.