THE CYPHER.

‘I know what you are come for,’ said Margaret in a broken voice, which had yet no touch of tenderness in it. ‘You are come for this letter.’ She snatched it from the drawer and held it before him. ‘It is no use to lie to me; your face tells me the truth.’

William Henry’s face was indeed white to the lips; his eyes returned her gaze with a confused and frightened stare. He stammered out something, he knew not what, and sank into a chair.

‘What,’ continued the girl, in harsh, pitiless tones, ‘have you nothing to say for yourself? Has your ready tongue no excuse to offer for this new duplicity?’

‘Have you read the letter?’ he inquired hoarsely.

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‘No; how could I?’

The colour rushed back to his cheeks, and into his eyes there came a gleam of hope.

‘No,’ she went on, ‘it is you who shall read it to me. If you decline to do so, I shall conclude that this vile creature has written you what is not fit for anyone, save women like herself, to hear, and your refusal will be the last words that you will ever address to me with my consent, so help me Heaven.’

Mrs. Powell herself, when personating some heroine of the stage, never looked or spoke with greater earnestness of purpose than on this occasion did simple Margaret Slade out of the simplicity of her nature.

‘I will read you the letter, Margaret,’ was William Henry’s quiet reply.

His words, and still more his tone, staggered Margaret not a little. The change in his face and manner within the last few minutes had indeed been most remarkable. At first he had seemed so struck with the consciousness of guilt, and so hopeless of forgiveness, that he had not dared to throw himself upon her mercy. Then he had appeared to recover himself a little; and now he was quite calm and composed as though all apprehension had passed away from him.

His voice as he said ‘I will read you the letter, Margaret,’ had even a tender reproach in it, as though he, and not she, were the injured party.

‘Read it,’ she said; but her tone was no longer stubborn and imperious. It was plain that this woman’s letter was not a love-letter, or he would not have consented to read it; and if it was not a love-letter, what cause had she for anger? And yet, if it was not so, why had he exhibited such confusion—nay despair?

‘I will read it, since you wish it,’ he went on, ‘though it is a breach of confidence. It is better to break one’s word than to break one’s heart.’

The morality of this aphorism was somewhat questionable, but Margaret nodded assent. She took it, no doubt, in a particular sense. It was certainly better that she should know the worst than that any proviso of a designing woman, made for her own wicked convenience, should be respected.

‘It is well to begin at the beginning,’ continued William Henry. ‘Be so good as to look at the address of that letter.’

She did so with an indifferent air. She could almost have said that she had seen it before, for she recognised it at once as one of those missives of which he had received so many of late.

‘Let me draw your attention to the postmark.’

It was ‘Mallow: Ireland.’

The letter fell from her hand. Self-humiliation mastered for the moment the happiness of discovering that he had not been false to her after all. It was certainly not with Mrs. Jordan that he was secretly corresponding, and probably with no one of her sex. If Margaret had been an older woman, with a larger experience of the ways of men, she might have regretted her misplaced indignation as ‘waste;’ it might have even struck her that the present mistake might weaken her position if on some future occasion she should have better reason for her reproaches, but she had no thought except for the injustice she had done her lover. She stood before him with downcast head, stupefied and penitent.

‘Oh, Willie, I am so sorry.’

‘So am I, dear; sorry that you should have so little confidence in me; sorry that you should have thought me capable of carrying on, under the roof that shelters you, an intrigue with another woman. This letter—and I have received others like it—is from Reginald Talbot.’

‘But, Willie, what could I think?’ she pleaded humbly, ‘and why should you write to Mr. Talbot in cypher? And why when I charged you falsely—with—what—you have mentioned—did you look so—so guilty?’

‘Say rather so hurt and shocked, Margaret,’ he answered gravely. ‘It was surely only natural that I should be shocked at finding the girl I loved so distrustful of me.’

‘I was wrong, oh, very, very wrong; and yet,’ she pleaded, ‘I erred through love of you, Willie. If I had not cared for you so much—so very much—I should not have been so unreasonable.’

‘You mean so wild with jealousy,’ he replied smiling. ‘However, it’s all over now,’ and he held out his hand for the letter which she still retained.

‘Please to read it to me,’ she said; ‘a few words will do.’

His face grew pale again, as she thought with anger.

‘Why so?’ he replied. ‘Are you not satisfied even now?’

‘Yes, yes; it was foolish of me, I know, but I said “So help me Heaven.”’

‘Oh, I see. For your oath’s sake. That is what Herod said to the daughter of Herodias. It is not a good example to follow.’

He spoke stiffly, but she shook her head.

‘I only ask for a few words, Willie.’

‘But Talbot writes to me in confidence; about matters that only affect him and me. There is not a word that concerns you in it.’

Still she shook her head. The girl was truth itself, not only in the spirit but in the letter. She had sworn not to speak with him unless he did a certain thing, and though the reason for his doing so no longer existed, her oath remained. Her stubbornness evidently annoyed him. Their parts in the little drama had as it were become reversed. The wrongdoer had become the injured person, and vice versÂ.

‘The facts are these,’ he said slowly. ‘Talbot and I, as you know, have a secret in common. He is the only person save myself, who has seen my patron. What he writes of him and his concerns—that is of the manuscripts—we do not wish others to see. We have therefore hit upon a device to keep our communications secret.’

He took out of the drawer a piece of cardboard exactly the shape and size of ordinary letter-paper, full of large holes neatly cut at unequal distances. He placed it on blank paper, and through the interstices wrote these words:

‘Margaret has done you the honour to take your finnikin hand-writing for that of Mrs. Jordan.’

Then he took off the cardboard and filled in the spaces with a number of inconsequent words, so that the whole communication became meaningless.

‘Talbot has another piece of cardboard exactly similar to this,’ he continued, ‘and has only to place it over this rubbish for my meaning to become apparent.’

‘It is very ingenious,’ said Margaret. It was the highest praise she could afford. Such arts were distasteful to her. They seemed to suggest a natural turn for deception, and she secretly hoped that the invention lay at Talbot’s door.

‘Yes, I think the plan does me some credit,’ said William Henry complacently. ‘Well, I have only to lay the cardboard over this letter that so excited your indignation, to get at the writer’s meaning.’

Her eyes were turned towards him, but with no fixity of expression, she was bound to listen and to look, but her interest was gone.

‘“Why do you not send me a copy of the play?”’ he rapidly read. “One would think it was you only who had any stake in it;“ and so on, and so on. I suppose you have no wish to pry further into our little secret?’ he added, folding up the letter at the same time.

‘I did not wish to pry into it at all, Willie,’ she answered sorrowfully; ‘I again repeat I am sorry to have mistrusted you.’

‘Well, well, let us say no more about it. Let us forgive and forget.’

‘It is you who have to forgive, Willie, not I.’

‘I don’t say that,’ he answered gravely; ‘but if you think so, keep your forgiveness, Maggie, for next time. Be sure I shall have need of it.’

Here the voice of Mr. Erin was heard calling for Margaret.

‘Why do you not bring me the play?’

William Henry held up his finger in sign that she should not reveal his presence in the house to Mr. Erin, and taking the manuscript from a cupboard placed it in her hand.

‘Take it him,’ he whispered, with a tender kiss.

She kissed him again without a word; the tears stood in her eyes, as, the very image of penitence and self-reproach, she made her mute adieu.

It was certainly an occasion on which some men, not unconscious of errors, might have congratulated themselves.

The expression on William Henry’s face, however, was very far from one of triumph; it was white and worn and weary.

‘Another such a victory,’ he murmured with a haggard smile, ‘and I shall be undone.’

He locked the door and threw himself into a chair with an exhausted air, like an actor who, having played his part successfully, is conscious of having done so with great effort, and also that he owed more to good luck than to good guidance. ‘Great heaven!’ he muttered, ‘what an escape! Suppose she had found the key for herself and read the letter, or even if she had compelled me to do so. She must have heard it all. I could not have invented a syllable to save my life——. What a millstone is this fellow about my neck,’ he presently continued, as he tore the letter along and across, and threw the fragments under his feet. ‘A copy of the play! No, that he shall never see till the time is past for harm to come of it. A few days more, and all will be safe. I will be pestered no longer with his cursed importunities.’

Then he took the perforated cardboard and tore that likewise into small pieces. ‘Now I have burnt my boats with a vengeance,’ he added grimly.

Then he rose and paced up and down the room, first rapidly, then slower and slower.

‘I am afraid I have been hasty, after all,’ he murmured; ‘this Talbot is ill to deal with, and suspicious as the devil. If I tell him in what peril his communications have placed me, and that therefore I have destroyed his cypher, he will not believe me, though it is the truth. I must tell him that it has been destroyed by accident, and that therefore I dare not write him what he wishes, and that he will not believe either. If incredulity were genius, then indeed he would be a very clever fellow, but not otherwise. Great heavens! what rubbish he writes and calls it poetry. No, no, no,’ he muttered with knitted brows, ‘not that, Master Reginald, at any price. And yet how mad it will make him to find it is not so. He will do me a mischief if he can, no doubt. However, he will know nothing till it is too late. Next Saturday will put me out of the reach of harm. Would it were Saturday, and all were well. That’s Shakespeare, by the bye, save that he says supper time. A bad augury—a bad augury. The Ides of March are come, but they have not yet gone.’ Here he took another turn up and down the room. ‘I wonder whether, with all his knowledge of humanity, Shakespeare ever knew a man who suffered like me. I wonder whether he sees me now, and knows about it. A strange thought indeed, and yet it may be so. Perhaps his great soul, which understands it all, has pity on me. Will she pity me? A still more momentous question. Pity is akin to love, he says, when love comes last. If love comes first, will pity follow it? What thoughts could I set down this moment were I in the mood for it; and yet they say I am no more a poet than this Talbot. He a poet! The vain drivelling fool; curse his false heart and prying eyes! I hate him.’