i had felt myself an actor in a drama, and now i had very much the feeling an actor would have who answers to a cue and finds himself in mid-stage with the scenery and the rest of the cast suddenly vanished behind him. by that mixture of force and persuasion which avails itself of a woman's instinctive and cultivated dread of disputes and raised voices and the betrayal of contention to strangers, by the sheer tiring down of nerves and of sleepless body and by threats of an immediate divorce and a campaign of ruin against me, these three men had obliged mary to leave martens and go with them to southampton, and thence they took her in justin's yacht, the water-witch, to waterford, and thence by train to a hired house, an adapted old castle at mirk near crogham in mayo. there for all practical purposes she was a prisoner. they took away her purse, and she was four miles from a pillar-box and ten from a telegraph office. this house they had taken furnished without seeing it on the recommendation of a london agent, and in the name of justin's solicitor. thither presently went lady ladislaw, and an announcement appeared in the times that justin and lady mary had gone abroad for a time and that no letters would be forwarded.

i have never learnt the particulars of that abduction, but i imagine mary astonished, her pride outraged, humiliated, helpless, perplexed and maintaining a certain outward dignity. moreover, as i was presently to be told, she was ill. guy and philip were, i believe, the moving spirits in the affair; tarvrille was their apologetic accomplice, justin took the responsibility for what they did and bore the cost, he was bitterly ashamed to have these compulsions applied to his wife, but full now of a gusty fury against myself. he loved mary still with a love that was shamed and torn and bleeding, but his ruling passion was that infinitely stronger passion than love in our poor human hearts, jealousy. he was prepared to fight for her now as men fight for a flag, tearing it to pieces in the struggle. he meant now to keep mary. that settled, he was prepared to consider whether he still loved her or she him....

now here it may seem to you that we are on the very verge of romance. here is a beautiful lady carried off and held prisoner in a wild old place, standing out half cut off from the mainland among the wintry breakers of the west coast of ireland. here is the lover, baffled but insistent. here are the fierce brothers and the stern dragon husband, and you have but to make out that the marriage was compulsory, irregular and, on the ground of that irregularity, finally dissoluble, to furnish forth a theme for marriott watson in his most admirable and adventurous vein. you can imagine the happy chances that would have guided me to the hiding-place, the trusty friend who would have come with me and told the story, the grim siege of the place—all as it were sotto voce for fear of scandal—the fight with guy in the little cave, my attempted assassination, the secret passage. would to heaven life had those rich simplicities, and one could meet one's man at the end of a sword! my siege of mirk makes a very different story from that.

in the first place i had no trusted friend of so extravagant a friendship as such aid would demand. i had no one whom it seemed permissible to tell of our relations. i was not one man against three or four men in a romantic struggle for a woman. i was one man against something infinitely greater than that, i was one man against nearly all men, one man against laws, traditions, instincts, institutions, social order. whatever my position had been before, my continuing pursuit of mary was open social rebellion. and i was in a state of extreme uncertainty how far mary was a willing agent in this abrupt disappearance. i was disposed to think she had consented far more than she had done to this astonishing step. carrying off an unwilling woman was outside my imaginative range. it was luminously clear in my mind that so far she had never countenanced the idea of flight with me, and until she did i was absolutely bound to silence about her. i felt that until i saw her face to face again, and was sure she wanted me to release her, that prohibition held. yet how was i to get at her and hear what she had to say? clearly it was possible that she was under restraint, but i did not know; i was not certain, i could not prove it. at guildford station i gathered, after ignominious enquiries, that the justins had booked to london. i had two days of nearly frantic inactivity at home, and then pretended business that took me to london, for fear that i should break out to my father. i came up revolving a dozen impossible projects of action in my mind. i had to get into touch with mary, at that my mind hung and stopped. all through the twenty-four hours my nerves jumped at every knock upon my door; this might be the letter, this might be the telegram, this might be herself escaped and come to me. the days passed like days upon a painful sick-bed, grey or foggy london days of an appalling length and emptiness. if i sat at home my imagination tortured me; if i went out i wanted to be back and see if any communication had come. i tried repeatedly to see tarvrille. i had an idea of obtaining a complete outfit for an elopement, but i was restrained by my entire ignorance of what a woman may need. i tried to equip myself for a sudden crisis by the completest preparation of every possible aspect. i did some absurd and ill-advised things. i astonished a respectable solicitor in a grimy little office behind a queer little court with trees near cornhill, by asking him to give advice to an anonymous client and then putting my anonymous case before him. "suppose," said i, "it was for the plot of a play." he nodded gravely.

my case as i stated it struck me as an unattractive one.

"application for a writ of habeas corpus," he considered with eyes that tried to remain severely impartial, "by a wife's lover, who wants to find out where she is.... it's unusual. you will be requiring the husband to produce her corpus.... i don't think—speaking in the same general terms as those in which you put the circumstances, it would be likely to succeed.... no."

then i overcame a profound repugnance and went to a firm of private detectives. it had occurred to me that if i could have justin, tarvrille, guy or philip traced i might get a clue to mary's hiding-place. i remember a queer little office, a blusterous, frock-coated creature with a pock-marked face, iron-grey hair, an eyeglass and a strained tenor voice, who told me twice that he was a gentleman and several times that he would prefer not to do business than to do it in an ungentlemanly manner, and who was quite obviously ready and eager to blackmail either side in any scandal into which spite or weakness admitted his gesticulating fingers. he alluded vaguely to his staff, to his woman helpers, "some personally attached to me," to his remarkable underground knowledge of social life—"the illicit side." what could he do for me? there was nothing, i said, illicit about me. his interest waned a little. i told him that i was interested in certain financial matters, no matter what they were, and that i wanted to have a report of the movements of justin and his brothers-in-law for the past few weeks and for a little time to come. "you want them watched?" said my private enquiry agent, leaning over the desk towards me and betraying a slight squint. "exactly," said i. "i want to know what sort of things they are looking at just at present."

"have you any inkling——?"

"none."

"if our agents have to travel——"

i expressed a reasonable generosity in the matter of expenses, and left him at last with a vague discomfort in my mind. how far mightn't this undesirable unearth the whole business in the course of his investigations? and then what could he do? suppose i went back forthwith and stopped his enquiries before they began! i had a disagreeable feeling of meanness that i couldn't shake off; i felt i was taking up a weapon that justin didn't deserve. yet i argued with myself that the abduction of mary justified any such course.

as i was still debating this i saw philip. he was perhaps twenty yards ahead of me, he was paying off a hansom which had just put him down outside blake's. "philip," i cried, following him up the steps and overtaking him and seizing his arm as the commissionaire opened the door for him. "philip! what have you people done with mary? where is mary?"

he turned a white face to me. "how dare you," he said with a catch of the breath, "mention my sister?"

i spoke in an undertone, and stepped a little between him and the man at the door in order that the latter might not hear what i said. "i want to see her," i expostulated. "i must see her. what you are doing is not playing the game. i've got to see her."

"let go of my arm, sir!" cried he, and suddenly i felt a whirlwind of rage answering the rage in his eyes. the pent-up exasperation of three weeks rushed to its violent release. he struck me in the face with the hand that was gripped about his umbrella. he meant to strike me in the face and then escape into his club, but before he could get away from me after his blow i had flung out at him, and had hit him under the jawbone. my blow followed his before guard or counter was possible. i hit with all my being. it was an amazing flare up of animal passion; from the moment that i perceived he was striking at me to the moment when both of us came staggering across the door-mat into the dignified and spacious hall-way of blake's, we were back at the ancestral ape, and we did exactly what the ancestral ape would have done. the arms of the commissionaire about my waist, the rush of the astonished porter from his little glass box, two incredibly startled and delighted pages, and an intervening member bawling out "sir! sir!" converged to remind us that we were a million years or so beyond those purely arboreal days....

we seemed for a time to be confronted before an audience that hesitated to interfere. "how dare you name my sister to me?" he shouted at me, and brought to my mind the amazing folly of which he was capable. i perceived mary's name flung to the four winds of heaven.

"you idiot, philip!" i cried. "i don't know your sister. i've not seen her—scarcely seen her for years. i ask you—i ask you for a match-box or something and you hit me."

"if you dare to speak to her——!"

"you fool!" i cried, going nearer to him and trying to make him understand. but he winced and recoiled defensively. "i'm sorry," i said to the commissionaire who was intervening. "lord maxton has made a mistake."

"is he a member?" said someone in the background, and somebody else suggested calling a policeman. i perceived that only a prompt retreat would save the whole story of our quarrel from the newspapers. so far as i could see nobody knew me there except philip. i had to take the risks of his behavior; manifestly i couldn't control it. i made no further attempt to explain anything to anybody. everyone was a little too perplexed for prompt action, and so the advantage in that matter lay with me. i walked through the door, and with what i imagined to be an appearance of the utmost serenity down the steps. i noted an ascending member glance at me with an expression of exceptional interest, but it was only after i had traversed the length of pall mall that i realized that my lip and the corner of my nostril were both bleeding profusely. i called a cab when i discovered my handkerchief scarlet, and retreated to my flat and cold ablutions. then i sat down to write a letter to tarvrille, with a clamorous "urgent, please forward if away" above the address, and tell him at least to suppress philip. but within the club that blockhead, thinking of nothing but the appearances of our fight and his own credit, was varying his assertion that he had thrashed me, with denunciations of me as a "blackguard," and giving half a dozen men a highly colored, improvised, and altogether improbable account of my relentless pursuit and persecution of lady mary justin, and how she had left london to avoid me. they listened, no doubt, with extreme avidity. the matrimonial relations of the justins had long been a matter for speculative minds.

and while philip was doing this, guy, away in mayo still, was writing a tender, trusting, and all too explicit letter to a well-known and extremely impatient lady in london to account for his continued absence from her house. "so that is it!" said the lady, reading, and was at least in the enviable position of one who had confirmatory facts to impart....

and so quite suddenly the masks were off our situation and we were open to an impertinent world. for some days i did not realize what had happened, and lived in hope that philip had been willing and able to cover his lapse. i went about with my preoccupation still, as i imagined, concealed, and with an increasing number of typed letters from my private enquiry agent in my pocket containing inaccurate and worthless information about the movements of justin, which appeared to have been culled for the most part from a communicative young policeman stationed at the corner nearest to the justins' house, or expanded from who's who and other kindred works of reference. the second letter, i remember, gave some particulars about the financial position of the younger men, and added that justin's credit with the west-end tradesmen was "limitless," points upon which i had no sort of curiosity whatever....

i suppose a couple of hundred people in london knew before i did that lady mary justin had been carried off to ireland and practically imprisoned there by her husband because i was her lover. the thing reached me at last through little fred riddling, who came to my rooms in the morning while i was sitting over my breakfast. "stratton!" said he, "what is all this story of your shaking justin by the collar, and threatening to kill him if he didn't give up his wife to you? and why do you want to fight a duel with maxton? what's it all about? fire-eater you must be! i stood up for you as well as i could, but i heard you abused for a solid hour last night, and there was a chap there simply squirting out facts and dates and names. got it all.... what have you been up to?"

he stood on my hearthrug with an air of having called for an explanation to which he was entitled, and he very nearly got one. but i just had some scraps of reserve left, and they saved me. "tell me first," i said, delaying myself with the lighting of a cigarette, "the particulars ... as you heard them."

riddling embarked upon a descriptive sketch, and i got a minute or so to think.

"go on," i said with a note of irony, when he paused. "go on. tell me some more. where did you say they have taken her; let us have it right."

by the time his little store had run out i knew exactly what to do with him. "riddling," said i, and stood up beside him suddenly and dropped my hand with a little added weight upon his shoulder, "riddling, do you know the only right and proper thing to do when you hear scandal about a friend?"

"come straight to him," said riddling virtuously, "as i have done."

"no. say you don't believe it. ask the scandal-monger how he knows and insist on his telling you—insist. and if he won't—be very, very rude to him. insist up to the quarrelling point. now who were those people?"

"well—that's a bit stiff.... one chap i didn't know at all."

"you should have pulled him up and insisted upon knowing who he was, and what right he had to lie about me. for it's lying, riddling. listen! it isn't true that i'm besieging lady mary justin. so far from besieging her i didn't even know where she was until you told me. justin is a neighbor of my father's and a friend of mine. i had tea with him and his wife not a month ago. i had tea with them together. i knew they were going away, but it was a matter of such slight importance to me, such slight importance"—i impressed this on his collarbone—"that i was left with the idea that they were going to the south of france. i believe they are in the south of france. and there you are. i'm sorry to spoil sport, but that's the bleak unromantic truth of the matter."

"you mean to say that there is nothing in it all?"

"nothing."

he was atrociously disappointed. "but everybody," he said, "everybody has got something."

"somebody will get a slander case if this goes on. i don't care what they've got."

"good lord!" he said, and stared at the rug. "you'll take your oath——" he glanced up and met my eye. "oh, of course it's all right what you say." he was profoundly perplexed. he reflected. "but then, i say stratton, why did you go for maxton at blake's? that i had from an eye-witness. you can't deny a scrap like that—in broad daylight. why did you do that?"

"oh that's it," said i. "i begin to have glimmerings. there's a little matter between myself and maxton...." i found it a little difficult to improvise a plausible story.

"but he said it was his sister," persisted riddling. "he said so afterwards, in the club."

"maxton," said i, losing my temper, "is a fool and a knave and a liar. his sister indeed! lady mary! if he can't leave his sister out of this business i'll break every bone of his body." ... i perceived my temper was undoing me. i invented rapidly but thinly. "as a matter of fact, riddling, it's quite another sort of lady has set us by the ears."

riddling stuck his chin out, tucked in the corners of his mouth, made round eyes at the breakfast things and, hands in pockets, rocked from heels to toes and from toes to heels. "i see stratton, yes, i see. yes, all this makes it very plain, of course. very plain.... stupid thing, scandal is.... thanks! no, i won't have a cigarette."

and he left me presently with an uncomfortable sense that he did see, and didn't for one moment intend to restrain his considerable histrionic skill in handing on his vision to others. for some moments i stood savoring this all too manifest possibility, and then my thoughts went swirling into another channel. at last the curtain was pierced. i was no longer helplessly in the dark. i got out my bradshaw, and sat with the map spread out over the breakfast things studying the routes to mayo. then i rang for williams, the man i shared with the two adjacent flat-holders, and told him to pack my kit-bag because i was suddenly called away.