The Man of Silence.

Waipa Post, Volume VII, Issue 339, 11 August 1914, Page 2

The Man of Silence.

ALL KIQHTB REHBTBD.)

BY TOM GALLON, Author of " My Lady of the Ruins,' " Fate's Beggar Maid," etc.

CHAPTER XlX.—(Continued.)

That was a mystery that for them had yet to be solved. Growing more calm presently, they sat down side by side again on that fallen tree, and discussed every little point of which they could think. Vincent remembered the man Stark, and described him; Madeline remembered how she had seen that man in Reuben's rooms at the time she yisited him. That, of course, led to her telling him how he had stood before Babs, and had been recognised 'and had drifted away again. "I remember," he said, with a nod and a smile. "Something took me to that place, some old memory of it; and there was Babs, looking at me as if she saw a ghost. But tell me," he added quickly, 'what were you doing in Reuben's rooms?".

"It has been arranged that I am to marry him," she answered, quietly. "What?" he asked thunderstruck. "Oh, can't you understand that that is what he has' worked for from the first," she cried bitterly. "It was for that he tried to kill you; it is for (hat he holds my father in his grip, and can force him to do anything. It is to save my father from ruin that I have promised; there was no other way. Now, of course, it will all be d'ffercnt. Everything can come right for us." , "Everything can come right for us?" he echoed sadly. Don't you understand that that is impossible. Don't you realise what a nameless thing I am, here, in the very clothes of another man, and with that other man filling the grave that was meant for me Don't you understand that Vincent Avondale, so far as the world is concerned, is something that existed—and exists no longer." "But that is absurd!" she exclaimed, half-terrified, and yet half-believing that this other miracle could be performed. "Take the matter boldly. Go to the house now and rouse it, and stand before them all, and say who you ate. I shall be by your sice—l. who know what has happened." "You, who know what seems to be a fairy tale," he replied gently. "This thing goes deeper than that, my love, deeper than you imagine. This is one of the greatest and subtlest plfcts that has ever been schemed out. At the present moment you and I are powerless in the grip of it. The thing has been too well done, too deftly carried out."

"But what will,you do?" she asked, in dismay. "I shall match cunning with cunning, subtlety with subtlety. Don't you understand, my dearest Madeline, that my power lies in the fact that no one but yourself and this man Batson knows the truth. I can play a deeper game than anyone imagines. I can be dead and forgotten, and yet alive and quick and alert. I can spy upon those who believe that I am safely done with. Above all else, that trick of memory that failed me once, shall serve me now, and shall help me as nothing else could do." "But what will you do?" she asked again. "And how can I help you?".

"By keeping my secret," he answered her', solemnly. "To go to them now, and to declare who I am, would be madness. They would talk of a strange likeness; no one would believe me. Besides, with a man like Reuben my very life might be in danger; and this time, if he contrived to kill me, I should be but a ragged, unknown thing. Yet that ragged unknown thing may yet manage to get to the bottom of this mystery, and to tear the heart out of it. But it depends on you.'" "On me?" she answered, looking at him in a puzzled way. ' "You can keep my secret. You can go through each day with the memory upon you that I am alive, and that some day all will be well with me and with you. But, for my sake, you can pretend that all is as it has been from the first —that .Vincent Avondale is dead, and is no more to be reckoned with."

"But I am to marry Reuben," she faltered. "You shall hold to that—almost fo the end," he said, sternly. "I'll have no mercy on him; he shall go on to the end, cheating himself that his crime is safely hidden, and that you are to be the reward of what he has done. Trust to me; my brain is clear now, and will not, please Heaven! be ever clouded ■gain. But keep my secret." "And what will you do?" she asked, clinging to him, with anxiety in her face. "I shall go out among men, and play a part," he answered, with a little laugh. "To those who have Seen me a thing with no mind, I Kill be that thing with no mind

still; they will talk before me as they would not talk before me if they believed I could understand. I don't know quite yet what 1 shall do, but it is getting clearer every moment. 1 shall match cunning with cunning—and in the end I shall win."

"You will be playing a difficult part," she said. "Yours must be more difficult still," he answered. "Yet it will be sweet to think that each of us is playing with the same end in view—to put this thing straight, and to bring me back to life again. Can you be "strong—for my sake? If there is no other way," she answered, brokenly, "I will be strong for your sake, and I will keep your secret."

CHAPTER XX. He watched her go down through the woods towards the house that lay dark in the grounds below. At the last moment she turned and looked back, and waved her hand to him. Then, with a grim laugh, he turned towards the place where the hut lay that sheltered Danny Batson, and made for it straight. The game had to be begun, and he might as well begin it with Danny Batson as with anyone else; besides Danny might be useful. - Danny had gone back to the hut in a puzzled state of mind. He had heard that cry in the woods, and had seen Vincent fall on his knees before the girl; but he knew no more than that. That might have meant recognition, or indeed anything—Danny waited to be enlightened. Had he but known it, the man now making for the hut had already made up his mind that Danny should not be enlightened at all. ■ Vague dreams of wealth that was to come to him had been filling the mind of the little man; so that when /Vincent opened the door of the hut and went in, Danny looked up with eager expectancy. He had been nodding in slumber, but was now suddenly wide awakeVincent, for his part, had to discover how much the man knew or how much he had guessed from what he had seen.

"So you've come back, guv'nor," said Danny. "Didn't I tell yer I was the one you ought ter stick to? Didn't I say I was yer friend?" "Indeed, I've never doubted it," said Vincent. "I saw you in the wood just now; why did you run away?'" " Lor' bless yer, guv'nor, yer didn"t want me," replied Danny, slily. "Moment ever \ see yer meet the lady I took me 'bok." Vincent passed his hand with a weary gesture across his forehead, but his eyes were, watching Danny. "Someone I thought I knew," he said; "but I was wrong—l did not know her."-

"Wot!" exclaimed Danny, in amazement. "Couldn't you remember 'er?"

Vincent shook his head- "No," he answered. "It was a face something like one I seemed once to know, but not the face I wanted. I fear that I shall never remember again what I was before you found me, Danny—it seems impossible." He watched Danny while he spoke, and could scarcely conceal a smile of amusement at the blank expression on the little man's face. Danny had hoped so much from this meeting—now he seemed further off than ever. Loyalty to his former partner no longer restrained him, he determined to tell some part of the truth at least, in the hope of awakening that apparently dormant mind. '

'"Ave yer never 'eard the name of Mr. Vincent Avondale?" he asked in a mysterious whisper.

Vincent shook his head "Never!" he said. 'Who is it?"

Danny spread out his hands and shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, I give yer up!" he exclaimed. "Seems ter me you'll go on as long as yer live an' never know 'oo yer are."'

"I expect I shall," Vincent answered. And then, with apparent carelessness, he added, "I hate this place, Danny; I think we'll go back to London to-morrow—back to that good friend of yours, Noah Stark — eh?"

Danny shook his head with considerable vigour. "Not me," he said. " 'Ed bash the life out o' me, if 'e got 'old of me, fer ever 'aving let you run away." "Well, we'll make it square with him by my running back again," said the other, with a laugh. "Besides, if he starts the bashing game, I can take a hand at that, as I did once before. London's the place, Danny. We go to-morrow." In his masterful way Vincent carried his point, and' on the morrow the two started for London, travelling very early, that they might not by any chance meet anyone likely to know Vincent Avondale. Not that that was at all probable; for the shabby man, with an old cap pulled down over his eyes, seated in a corner of a third-class railway carriage, was scarcely likely to be anyone worth recognising at all. Mr. Stark got up with a threatening growl as Danny Batson opened the door. He changed the threatening growl to what seemed almost like a murmur of welcome as Vincent walked into the room. Vincent gave no account of what •he had been doing. He merely sat down, flung his cap in the corner,

and spoke a word for Danny Batson.

"I got lost somewhere," he said, quietly, "and Danny found me ana persuaded me to come back."

"Any change in Tm?" asked Stark, behind his hand to Batson.

"Not a blessed bit," said Danny, cheerfully. "Carn't remember anythin 1 at all." So for a time the man who had so strangely come back to life it) the fullest sense of the. word settled down quietly in that slum, determined to look about him and to discover, if possible, from these two men, and perhaps, from others, exactly what happened on that night when Stark must have pulled him out of the river.

Madeline Westley, loyal to her promise to keep silence, waited through weary days for some word from Vincent that should loose her tongue and bring her at once, if necessary, to his side, to fight this matter out with him. But no word came —no message of any kind. She seized an opportunity to get to the hut; but found it, of course, deserted.

She could not understand what was happening; for time was going on, and the wedding was actually arranged. Mrs. Westley was hustling busy, and, of course, could talk of nothing but the approaching affair. Clarence, greatly excited and pleased that ail his plans were coming right, went about in a perpetual condition of rubbing his hands and beaming upon all and sundry. It was only when occasionally he came face to face with Madeline that that expression changed. Madeline's greatest difficulty lay with her sister. It had been necessary to tell Babs the real truth; and one may judge of her amazement and perplexity on having that strange secret, whispered to her, whife she was held close in Madeline's arms at dead of night. It was all mysterious and more than strange, and the injunction laid' upon her to hold that secret locked in her breast was perhaps more puzzling than anything else. She was a loyal little creature, and she told no one —not even young Arthur F'ayerman, at whom she burst out laughing when he spoke with awe of the tramp they had seen in the woods, and of his amazing resemblance to the dead Vincent Avondale. "Don't be a goose!" she exclaimed. "Something like him, I admit, but only superficially. Poor old Vincent isn't likely to come back from the Shades."

But now, of course, with the wedding approaching, Babs grew frantic. Was nothing to be done, or did Madeline seriously intend to go through the ceremony with this man to whom she was pledged, and to leave "Vincent out of the reckoning altogether? Madeline could only reply that Vincent had told her that that strange game must be played right through until almost the end. On that she was relying. Not until it came to the day itself —if such should happen —would' she depart from what she had been told to do. Vincent would not fail her; of that at least she was certain.

Yet the days crept on mercilessly, and presents were arriving and dresses were being made. Sometimes at night the girl would wake and would sit up in the darkness, trembling with fright, remembering how short the time was, and how impossible it seemed that any help could arrive to save her from whaF seemed an inevitable fate. All the complications of the strange story in which she was involved would then crowd about her, until she wondered sometimes whether she was living in actual reality, or in mere dream existence, from which presently she would awake. Mrs. Westley had made up her mind that the wedding was to take place in London. One could not possibly expect people to come down to Wood End Ferry; besides, the church was small and poky—and, in fact, there were difficulties in the way everywhere. They would go to London, and would put up at a first-class hotel; and the wedding could take place from there, and the reception afterwards be held there. Mrs. Westley being one of those curiously placid people who, having made up their minds, invariably get their own way, her point was carried, and everything arranged accordingly. Three days before the wedding, and still no word from Vincent! Portraits, side by side in the newspapers ,of Reuben Avondale and herself were appearing; paragraphs announcing the fashionable wedding were also appearing. And the man who had promised to save her, if necessary at the last moment, had not yet shown signs that he was even alive. What if it should have happened that in that underworld in which he was hidden, in the new condition of things, something should have haooened to him, and he was powerless to stir on her behalf?

(To be Continued.)—M.S. 21