MRS. HOLDFAST INSISTS UPON BECOMING AN ACTIVE PARTNER—(CONTINUED).

Richard Manx, as a man of gallantry, was generally ready for any adventure with the fair sex which offered itself, but on the present occasion, despite his disposition to be amiable, he shrank within himself at being thus suddenly accosted. The intrusion of an unexpected voice—which at the moment he did not recognise—upon his thoughts awoke him to a sense of danger. He therefore walked on without replying, shaking the woman’s hand from his arm; but was almost immediately brought to a standstill by the sound of the woman’s steps hurrying after him.

She wore a cloak, with a hood to it, which was thrown over her head; in her haste the hood fell back, and her fair face, no longer hidden, shone out from masses of light hair, in the disorder of which was a certain picturesqueness which heightened the effect of her beauty. As her hood fell back, Richard Manx turned and recognised her.

It was Mrs. Holdfast, the widow of the murdered man.

He uttered an exclamation of alarm, and with a frightened look around, pulled the hood over her head to hide her face.

“You mad woman!” he exclaimed; “do you want to ruin us? What brings you here?” Then a sudden thought drove all the blood from his face. “Has anything happened?” he asked, in a whisper.

She laughed at his agitation. “Nothing has happened,” she replied, “except that I am worn out with sameness.”

“Then what in the devil’s name brings you here?” he asked again.

“For shame, Pelham,” she said, lightly, “to be so rude to a lady! What brings me here? I have told you. I am worn out with sameness. Sitting down with nothing to do, without excitement, in a house as dull and quiet as a doll’s cradle, doesn’t suit me. I was not cut out for that sort of life!”

“You could have waited a little,” he grumbled, somewhat reconciled to find that they were not being observed; “you were sure of another sort of life presently.”

“I’ll have it, thought I to myself, without waiting,” she said, recklessly, “and I feel better already. Running away from my doll’s cradle without preparation, with an idea in my head I am going to carry out, has put new life into me. My blood isn’t creeping through my veins; it is dancing, and I am alive once more. Really now I feel as if I should like to waltz with you round the Square!”

“Are you quite mad?” he cried, holding her still by force, but unable to refrain from admiration of her wild flow of spirits. “We have but a few hours to wait. Can’t you content yourself for a little while? What is this insane idea of yours which you are going to carry out!”

“To spend the evening with you, my dear,” she replied gaily.

“Where?”

“In Great Porter Square. Where else?”

While this conversation was proceeding, he had led her in an opposite direction from the house in which he lodged, and they were now on the other side of the Square.

“Now I am sure you are mad,” he said. “Do you know what I have to do to-night?”

“No,” she replied, “and I am curious to know.”

“I keep it to myself; but you will hear of it, and when you do you will laugh. Shall I leave behind me a danger hanging over my head—and yours? A secret that one day may be discovered, and bring ruin and death to me—and you? No, no; they make a mistake in the mettle of Dick Pelham if they think he is going to leave a trap-door open for himself to fall into.”

“I should fall also, Pelham!” she said half-questioningly.

“Why, yes; you would come down with me. It couldn’t be helped, I fear. I have a kind of dog-in-the-manger feeling for you. If I can’t have you myself, I’ll not leave you to another man.”

“It can’t be helped, I suppose,” she said, shrugging her shoulders; “but it doesn’t matter to me so long as I am enjoying myself.”

“Very well, then,” said he, in a decided tone; “go home now, and get your trinkets and dresses in order, for by to-day week we’ll be out of this dull hole. We’ll live where the sun shines for the future. Hurry now, and off with you. I have a serious night’s work before me.”

“I will help you in it,” she said, in a tone as decided as his own. “It isn’t a bit of use bullying, Pelham. I’ve made up my mind. I haven’t seen your room in No.118, and I intend to see it. I have a right to, haven’t I? The wonder is I have kept away so long; and this is the last night I shall have the chance. I was curious before, but I’m a thousand times more curious now, and if you were to talk all night you wouldn’t put me off. You are going to do something bold—all the better; I’ll be there to see, and I dare say I can be of assistance to you. We are in partnership, and I insist upon being an active partner. How do I know but that you have been deceiving me all this while?”

“In what way?” he demanded fiercely.

“I will make sure,” she said, “that you haven’t a pretty girl hidden in that garret of yours, and that you don’t want to run away with her instead of me?”

“Jealous!” he cried, with a gratified laugh; “after telling me a dozen times lately that you hated the sight of me!”

“That’s a woman’s privilege. If you don’t understand us by this time, it is too late for you to begin to learn. Pelham, I am coming up with you.”

“You are determined?”

“As ever a woman was in this world. If you run from me now, and enter the house without me, I’ll follow you, and knock at the door, and inquire for Mr. Richard Manx; and if they ask me who I am, I’ll say I am Mrs. Richard Manx.”

“I believe you would,” he said, looking down into her face, and not knowing whether to feel angry or pleased.

“I would, as truly as I am a woman.”

“There’s no help for it, then,” he said; “but I don’t know how to get you into the house without being observed.”

“Nothing easier. All the time we’ve been talking I haven’t seen half-a-dozen people. Choose a moment when nobody’s about; open the door quickly, and I’ll slip in like an eel. Before you shut the door, I’ll be at the top of the house.”

“Let me warn you once more; there is danger.”

“All the better; there’s excitement in danger.”

“And if I don’t find what I’ve been hunting for these weeks past, I intend to carry out a desperate design, which if successful—and it must be; I’ll make it so—will place us in a position of perfect safety.”

“Bravo, Pelham; I never thought you had so much pluck. I will help you in everything you have to do. Now let us get into the house. I am drenched through. You can make a fire, I suppose.”

He cautioned and instructed her how to proceed, and they walked to No.118, he leading, and she but a step or two behind. Seeing no person near, he opened the door with one turn of the key, and she glided rapidly past him, and was on the stairs, and really nearly at the top of the house, feeling her way along the balustrades, before he was up the first flight. Safely within the miserable room he had hired, he turned the key, and lighted a candle; then, pointing to wood and coals, he motioned her to make a fire. The stove was so small she could not help laughing at it, but he whispered to her savagely to stop her merriment, and not to utter a sound that could be heard outside the room. The fire lighted, she sat before it, and dried her clothes as well as she could, while he busied himself about the room. Then he sat down by her side, and explained his plans. As long as suspicion could be averted from them, and as long as they were sure that no document written by Mr. Holdfast between the date of his taking lodgings in No.119 Great Porter Square, and the date of his death, could be produced against them—so long were they safe. Suspicion was averted from them, as they believed, and they had every reason to believe that the murder would take its place, nay, had already taken its place, upon the list of monstrous crimes, the mystery of which would never be brought to light. Their only danger, then, lay in the probable discovery of the supposed document for which Pelham, as Richard Manx, had so long been searching. From what had been made known by the press and the police of Mr. Holdfast’s movements after his taking up his residence in No. 119, and from what they themselves knew, it was almost impossible that such a document, if it had existence, could have been taken out of the house. Pelham had sought for it unsuccessfully. What then, remained to be done for safety? To set fire to the house in which it was hidden, to burn it to the ground, and thus blot out from existence all knowledge of their crime.

This was Pelham’s desperate plan, and this deed it was he intended to perpetrate to-night. For a few hours longer he would search the room in which Mr. Holdfast was murdered, and then, everything being prepared to prevent failure, he would fire the house, and in the confusion make his escape, and disappear for ever from the neighbourhood. Mrs. Holdfast’s unexpected appearance on the scene complicated matters—the chief difficulty being how to get her away, during the confusion produced by the fire, without being observed. But when, unwillingly, he had given an enforced consent to her wild whim of keeping in his company on this eventful night, he had thought of a way to overcome the difficulty. In her woman’s dress, and with her attractive face, he could scarcely hope that she would escape observation; but he had in his room a spare suit of his own clothes, in which she could disguise herself, and with her face and hands blackened, and her hair securely fastened and hidden beneath a soft felt wideawake hat which hung in his garret, he had no fear that she would be discovered.

She entered into his plans with eagerness, and the adventure in which she was engaged imparted a heightened colour to her face and a deeper brilliancy to her eyes. As she leant towards the fire, with the reflection of its ruddy glow in her features, an uninformed man, gazing at her only for a moment, would have carried away with him a picture of beauty and innocence so enduring that his thoughts would often have wandered to it.

“Here are your clothes,” said Pelham; “when we are ready I will mount to the roof, and wait till you are dressed. Then I will come and assist you up. I have two or three journeys to make to the next house before we re-commence the search. See what I have here.”

He unlocked the box in the corner which Becky had vainly tried to open, and took from it a tin can filled with pitch, two small cans of inflammable oil, and a packet of gunpowder.

“These will make the old place blaze,” he said, laughing. “It will be a good job done if all Great Porter Square is burnt down. The landlady of this house ought to pay me a per-centage upon her insurance. The fire will be the making of her.”

“When do we begin?” asked Grace.

“Sooner than usual,” he replied. “At about half-past ten. The night is so bad that the Square will be pretty well deserted; and there is no one in this house to disturb us.”

He did not neglect the precaution of going to the door occasionally and listening, but he saw and heard nothing to alarm him. Exactly at half-past ten he bade Grace dress as quickly as possible in the suit of his clothes, and to disguise herself to the best of her ability. Her own woman’s dress she was to tie up in a bundle and bring with her into the next house. He mounted to the roof, and she handed him the cans and the packet which were to ensure the destruction of No.119. Then she proceeded to disguise herself.

It was a task exactly to her taste. She took the greatest pleasure in making herself look as much as possible like a young man, and as she gazed at herself in the broken bit of looking-glass fastened to the wall, she said aloud,

“Upon my word, Gracie, you make a very pretty boy!”

She wore a great many trinkets, which she wrapped in paper, and put into her pockets, but the novelty of her disguise, and the inconvenient space in which she effected it, caused her to drop two of these, a ring and an earring, and although she searched the floor carefully, she could not find them. Her hair she twisted into a tight knot at the top of her head, and the wideawake completely covered it. Richard Manx made his appearance at the trap-door above, and asked if she was ready. She answered that she was, and he assisted her up, lifting her, indeed, almost bodily from the chairs upon which she stood.

“What a little lump of weakness you are!” he exclaimed. “You can’t weigh above a hundred pounds.”

Carefully he led her over the roof, and down the trap-door, into the next house. Standing in the dark with him in the garret of this tenement, he felt that she trembled.

“If you are going to show the white feather,” he whispered, “you had better turn back. There is time even now.”

Little did she imagine how much hung upon the opportunity offered her. She refused it, saying that she had experienced a slight chill, and that she would go on; so he led her, white-faced now and shaking in every limb, down the stairs to the room in which her husband had been murdered.

Its appearance, while it bewildered, afforded her relief. Had it been in order, as she had seen it when her husband had occupied it, she could not have controlled her agitation; but it was so torn up, the work of destruction had been so wanton, that she could scarcely recognise it as the same room.

“Have you any brandy, Pelham?” she asked, careful, as he had directed her, not to raise her voice.

He had a bottle with him, and he gave her some in a glass, upon which her courage returned, and she shook her head defiantly, as much as to say, “Who cares?”

“I haven’t been idle, you see,” said Pelham, pointing around. “Amuse yourself while I do what is necessary.”

What was “necessary” was the villainous work of scattering the gunpowder about, disposing of the pitch, and pouring the oil upon the walls and flooring of the passage. At the conclusion of this part of his scheme there was still a great deal of inflammable material left, and these he placed aside, the pitch and the oil in the tins, and the gunpowder, loose, in its paper packet, in the room in which he was at work.

“Are you sure there is no one but ourselves in the house?” asked Grace.

“Listen for yourself,” replied Pelham. “If you like you can go downstairs and look. I’ll ensure you against anything but ghosts and fire.”

She shuddered, and, to divert her thoughts, endeavoured to take a practical interest in the search for the hidden document. It was difficult, in the state of the room, to move about, and she soon grew wearied. She threw herself upon the bed, and longed impatiently for the time when the crowning touch would be given to the wicked work in which she had insisted upon becoming an active partner.