The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris (20 page)

THE RAIN WAS
beginning to let up. A stout sea wind was bundling the clouds toward London and a distant glitter of sunlight had appeared on the gray sea's horizon. Mrs. Harris, her daughters, and Morgan the nurse, unable to bear the suspense of waiting indoors, had been scouring the nearby streets for some sign of the triumphant inquiry agent with Adelaide in his arms. Caped and hooded, they leaned and turned into every gust of wind with their garments whipping like broken wings. Mrs. Bostock, looking out from her window, saw them and begged them to come inside, at least until the worst of the wind had dropped. At first Mrs. Harris wouldn't hear of it, but when Mrs. Bostock declared that a physician's wife should know better than to court a
severe chill, she saw the sense of it, and with her soaking family, accepted Mrs. Bostock's kind invitation.

It was while she was waiting there, sitting in Mrs. Bostock's parlor and drinking hot soup, that Bostock and Harris returned Adelaide to her proper place. The emptiness of the house—which had been left in the care of the kitchen maid who would never come out of the kitchen since Morgan had warned her about goblins—and the consequent ease with which the friends accomplished their task, prompted Bostock to declare once again that Harris was a genius.

“I suppose I must be,” said Harris dreamily. “But Bosty, old friend, it don't make me feel any different from you.”

Bostock stared at him disbelievingly. Was it possible that Harris really felt as vague and puzzled by the world as he did?

“I get the bellyache just like you do, Bosty, and the rain makes me just as wet.”

Bostock smiled and shook his head. Harris was having him on. “It's the way you think, Harris. High, like an eagle.”

“It seems quite ordinary to me, Bosty. Honestly it does.”

Suddenly there came a knocking on the front door that put a period to all meditation. “It's the wet nurse! Quick—the window! Help me down, Bosty!”

At five minutes after eight o'clock, Harris, strolling into his home from nowhere in particular, was
greeted with the most astonishing news. Adelaide had been restored! She was back. His little sister had come home!

He was overjoyed. His real warmth of affection and great delight surprised even his sisters, who were glad enough to answer his many eager questions as to how the miracle had come about. The wet nurse had been admitted by the kitchen maid, he was told, and taken up to the nursery. She had come out almost directly saying the baby had been changed and looked amazingly like a poorhouse brat of her acquaintance. At first the maid had pooh-pooh'd her, thinking her to be in gin and not able to tell one baby from another as she saw so many. Then the wet nurse had lost her temper and flounced off, so the maid had conquered her fear of goblins and gone in to see for herself. “Adelaide!” she'd shrieked, and then tumbled straight out into the street shouting, “She's back! Miss Adelaide's come back!”

Actually it turned out that Mrs. Harris, drinking soup at the Bostocks, had heard the cry some moments before anyone else, but had not dared to say so for fear she should be imagining it. But then Morgan heard it, and then everyone did. They all rushed out in a terrific commotion—the Bostocks included—and sure enough, Adelaide was back!

All this was told to the open-mouthed Harris at such a rate and with so many interruptions—for the sisters disagreed on details—that the poor boy was quite bewildered and kept staring around the room in helpless amazement.

“But who—” he managed at length, “but who did it?”

“Why that inquiry agent, of course. Mister Raven. It was all his doing.”

Harris nodded. Mr. Raven, of course . . .

“And Ma says you're to go down to the Old Ship and ask him to lunch. Go on, hurry up now. Adelaide'll still be here when you come back!”

But the inquiry agent was not at the Old Ship. Nor was he still outside the house of the Hemps. Eight o'clock had been and gone and no pistol shot had broken the morning air. The murder had been forestalled, as he'd hoped it would, so Mr. Raven had clumped off to Dr. Bunnion's school to pick up the traces of his archenemy Brett. But when he got there he found the school in an end-of-term confusion with no one willing or able to help him. Not a soul seemed to know where the devil Brett had gone. Mrs. Bunnion, who had at last woken up, had gone flying out in a hopeless attempt to prevent the unnecessary duel, and the headmaster himself was doing what he could to conceal his agonized fear that Ralph, now two hours gone, was bleeding to death from Major Alexander's merciless bullet.

“Of course you know,” said Mr. Raven, irritated by his casual reception, “that Brett was at the bottom of everything?”

Distractedly Dr. Bunnion nodded. “That is exactly what I keep telling my wife, sir.”

“You villain, James Brett! You terrible, crafty, shocking villain! If Ma had only known, she'd never have let me fall in love with you!”

The time was shortly after nine o'clock. The place was the warmly dancing interior of the Southampton coach, now well on its way. The speaker was Tizzy Alexander, and
her
place was in the arms of her Mr. Brett. The cause of her censure was that Mr. Brett had just confessed to her his unusual part in the duel, and just what he'd done about it.

She was looking at him with great severity, and frowning with all her might. But the corners of her mouth, do what she would, kept tugging and twitching, and her shoulders were beginning to heave and shake. “James Brett,” she began, but could say no more. Laughter engulfed her, helpless laughter that came bubbling up and exploding in her eyes. She rocked with it, and the coach rocked with her, and then Mr. Brett joined in and the tears ran from their eyes in shining streams while an outside passenger nearly overturned himself in an effort to see what was going on.

“But what else could I do?” gasped Mr. Brett. “What else
could
I do?”

Tizzy only shook her head, and when she was able to speak, all she could say was, “Do you think they're still there?” and then she was off again.

At a quarter to ten o'clock, Major Alexander and his son Adam, cold, wet and ankles awash—for the tide was coming in—retreated from the seashore.
“As I suspected,” said the Major with grim satisfaction. “The fellow's a coward and won't face me!”

High on the Downs, near where Adelaide had been found, Ralph Bunnion and his party waited perhaps five minutes longer on account of not wanting to disappoint Sir Walter and to outface a small number of spectators who were beginning to jeer.

“I knew the swine was craven when I first clapped eyes on him,” grunted the baronet. “All those damned military fellows are the same. Shoot your eyes out with a cannon, but not with a pistol. You have to get too close for that!”

Then they too left the dueling ground, with Frederick half glad his pistols had not been put to the test.

“And what the devil happened to that fellow Brett?” said Sir Walter as they walked along.

“And where was Mister Brett?” said Adam Alexander to his father as they neared the school.

But it was not until the thwarted duelists met that they discovered Mr. Brett's duplicity.

“I told him that it was to be on the beach by the Old Ship,” said Major Alexander furiously.

“He told me it was to be on the Downs,” said Ralph Bunnion, equally annoyed.

“The man's a damned scoundrel!” said Major Alexander. “He has insulted an affair of honor!”

Mr. Brett had taken the only advantage possible in being second to both parties. He had arranged for them to meet some three miles apart.

“I warned you!” snarled the Major, glaring at Dr.
Bunnion's knees. “I told you the man was furtive, underhanded and sly!” Then he went off with Ralph and Sir Walter to Ralph's room where, heedless of gathering parents, the three men of blood and honor drowned their furious disappointment and humiliation in bottomless tankards of claret as red as their unshed blood.

Mrs. Alexander shrugged her ample shoulders and muttered something in her native tongue. Then her eye fell upon her firebrand son, Adam. She smiled sadly at him, and he, touched, laid his arm about her shoulders. Who knows, she wondered to herself in German, perhaps, in time, I might make something of him?

Mrs. Bunnion alone still had a good word to say for Mr. Brett, and whenever her husband recalled his treachery, she always defended him warmly and declared she couldn't believe it of him. Then Dr. Bunnion would smile and say, “What a heart you have, my love. Generous to a fault.”

And as for the headmaster himself, now that all his fears had proved groundless and nothing disagreeable had happened, he was more convinced than ever that nothing was to be gained by facing an unpleasantness but a nasty shock.

Mr. Raven did not have lunch with the Harrises on that memorable Saturday, even though they pressed him to stay. He had sworn that he'd not break bread with them even if they begged him on bended knees. He did not want their lunch and he
scorned their hospitality. He suspected he'd have been asked to eat in the kitchen. Besides, his work there was done. The return of Adelaide he took as a matter of course. He was pleased but not surprised. According to his plan, it had been bound to happen, and happen it had. The greater triumph was what had not happened. There had been no murder. This was indeed a feather in his cap, but alas, not the one he really wanted. Brett had escaped him. At the last minute he must have decided that the inquiry agent had come too close. So Mr. Raven was on his way to Southampton to track his adversary down. He and his boot would be the eternal pursuers, and Mr. Brett and his paramour would be the eternal pursued. To the ends of the earth he'd follow them, with his terrible tap-thump . . . tap-thump . . .

Had Tizzy and James been aware of this, they might indeed have been chilled. But the ship that took them to the crisp New World was too full of dreaming to let so lame a nightmare in, and the raven had no wings.

But back to that tremendous Saturday once more. One small mishap marred the general rejoicing in the homes of the Bostocks and the Harrises. Mrs. Bostock, returning unexpectedly from the Harrises, came upon her son attempting to dry out her quilt that had vanished mysteriously on the previous day and now appeared even more mysteriously. Despite Bostock's protests, she snatched it from him, and then she recoiled. It stank of fish, gin, babies, and a
very powerful odor that seemed to be compounded of brandy and burnt cake. And so, Mrs. Bostock remembered, did the infant Adelaide.

She communicated this interesting fact to her husband, who at once passed it on to Dr. Harris. The two fathers stared at each other. They grew very pale. Then, basely acting on suspicion alone, Captain Bostock thrashed Bostock with an old belaying pin he kept as a souvenir. But Dr. Harris, who was a more cultured man altogether, smote Harris with a volume of Harvey's Circulation of the Blood.

“Violence,” said Harris the younger, bitterly. “Personal violence. And only on suspicion, too.”

“My pa said it was natural justice,” mumbled Bostock, whose thicker feelings had not been so outraged.

“Justice? What's that? There ain't no such thing as justice, Bosty. It—it's just the calling card of brute force. Mark my words, Bosty—beware of the man who says he's just. He's the one who's out to get you if he can!”

Deeply impressed, Bostock nodded, and the two friends thereupon made a solemn pact to steer clear of justice in all its forms.

At the school, Adam Alexander filled the vacancy created by the elopement of Mr. Brett, so Major Alexander's schemes at last bore a somewhat mottled fruit. Whether there was any justice in this or not is neither here nor there. It happened in accordance with the way of the world which is chiefly concerned with convenience.

Ralph Bunnion, in the fullness of time, married Maud Sorley, so Sir Walter was able to extend his pleasures by being overbearing in yet another household to a son-in-law of inferior birth. But all in all they got on very well together and often dined at the expense of Frederick, to whom Ralph had given one of his waistcoats on the occasion of his wedding.

Last of all there was the Gypsy baby with hair as black as sin. His miraculous appearance among the foundlings in the place of the flowery Adelaide, though remarked on by the wet nurse who thought she was going mad, was resolutely ignored by Mrs. Bonney, who had been present all the time. No exchange could possibly have taken place under the vigilant eye of the matron, and anyone who dared to suggest that it had—here she glared at the trembling wet nurse—was either malicious, unchristian or drunk.

So the infant grew and grew in all his darkly passionate mystery. He grew until he was between five and six years old when, early one summer, he ran away from Mrs. Bonney's care. By degrees he made his way northward, until one day he was found in the streets of Liverpool by a kindly old gentleman by the name of Earnshaw. This old gentleman took him home and brought him up, and after an early disappointment in love, he ended his days in prosperous circumstances in a remote part of Yorkshire. Considering his unfavorable beginnings, he ended up rather well.

But back once more to Dr. Bunnion's Academy for
the sons of merchants and gentlefolk. In the front parlor, words drone, but no one seems to heed them. Most of the boys are asleep and Adam Alexander lowers his voice as he does not want to wake them up. His fiery nature has been quite quenched and he gazes with fear and hatred at the pupils who have done this to him. He gazes particularly hard at Bostock and Harris and his voice falls to a whisper.

He is reading from The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus. He does not much care for it, but there is something about children in it that attracts him powerfully. “Why, there they are both,” he murmurs dreamily, “baked in that pie.”

Harris leans forward and cups a hand to his ear. “Could I have that last item again, sir?” he asks, and Adam Alexander shudders to observe an unwholesome light in his eyes. He hopes that it is a fever, as he does not care to think of its being an idea.