The Black House in Harley Street/Chapter 3

The Park was full at that hour of the evening, and as Goulburn walked hurriedly back, the long line of cars and carriages at his side came to a halt, necessitated by some stoppage in front. Affecting a deep interest in his fellow-pedestrians and in the occupants of the penny chairs, he passed on until he had left behind him the coupé brougham in which he had caught a momentary glimpse of the lady of his dreams. Turning swiftly and keeping close to the rails, he went back again, this time betraying an equal interest in the occupants of the carriages which were still motionless. And in another moment he was opposite the coupé brougham—and they were looking at each other.

She was alone, and she gave him a little nod and a bright smile, and for a second or two her colour rose a little. She half-inclined herself toward him; he bent over the rails. Whether or not it was the knowledge that he was now a very wealthy man he could not tell, but he was conscious that he felt a very much braver and more self-confident individual than on the previous afternoon. Under ordinary circumstances he would have felt much embarrassed in daring to address a ​young lady so publicly; now he felt quite at his ease, and utterly careless of his surroundings.

"I wish I could speak to you for a few moments," he said. "I have something to tell you—something that you will like to hear."

"Why not?" she said. "Come into the brougham, and I will tell them to go round the Park—then we can talk."

It seemed the greatest of all the mysteries which had happened during the past thirty-six hours to find himself sitting side by side with this elegant young creature and to realise that he need no longer be afraid of thinking about her. The string of equipages moved on; he began to feel the first fruits of luxury in the soft cushions and easy-going motion of the coupé brougham.

"Well?" she said, turning to him with an encouraging smile. "What is your news?"

"It is so wonderful that I can scarcely realise it," replied Goulburn. "But it's true; and when I accidentally caught sight of you driving past, I wanted you to know it at once."

"Yes—why?" she asked.

"Because you were so kind to me yesterday. And—sympathetic," he added, in a lower tone.

"Tell me the news," she said.

"Well," he said, as with some shyness, "do you know I have suddenly become a rich man? My uncle has left me five hundred thousand pounds, and he has ​left my sister half that amount. I was on my way to tell her the good news when I caught sight of you."

"Now that you have told me, hadn't you better stop the brougham and run off to her?" she suggested, with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes which Goulburn did not catch.

"Well—er," he said, "you see, Christopher Aspinall was with me, and he has gone on to tell her. He'll tell her better than I could, because they're in love with each other. But you don't seem surprised by my news?"

"No; I'm not, very. I'm never surprised by anything—or by anybody. Did I not tell you that this is a little world, and that we should soon meet again?"

Goulburn's brains were gradually getting clearer and sharper—he suddenly turned, and, looking her squarely in the face, scrutinised her narrowly.

"Ah!" he said. "I'm beginning to see things. It—it must have been you who told Mr. Conybeare of me. Was it? Was it?"

Miss Phillimore laughed gently.

"I suppose there's no need to make a mystery of it," she said. "Yes, it was I. You see, my father was engaged in business in the United States for several years, and I have heard him mention old Nat Goulburn often, and describe him as a very astute and eccentric man. When I came back to London recently, I happened to mention your uncle's name to my uncle, Dr. van Mildart, with whom I am now staying in Harley Street, and I discovered that until Nathaniel's ​death, a few weeks ago, they had been next-door neighbours. Then, last Monday, I called in to see Mr. Conybeare, who is my solicitor; and in talking of various matters we got to the difficulty of finding people, especially in London. 'Yes,' he said; 'there's a young fellow named Richard Goulburn and his sister Maisie whom I want to find. I've three-quarters of a million waiting for them.' Then, of course, I found out that Richard and Maisie were nephew and niece of Nathaniel. The next discovery was during our romantic meeting yesterday. You gave me your name; you told me your business address. Naturally, I went to see Mr. Conybeare first thing this morning. As for the rest—well!"

"And so I have you to thank for this good fortune!" he exclaimed.

"I? Not a bit of it. You would have been unearthed rather quickly, you may be sure," she said. "Of course, our chance meeting yesterday helped to expedite matters."

"But what a fortunate—a strange—chance that we should so meet!" he said.

"I agree that it was fortunate—I don't agree that it was strange," she replied. "I don't believe that there is anything strange in what people will call coincidence or chance—though I don't say that all things are arranged. Just look how things really do happen in real life! You are going along in perfect serenity or its opposite, in idleness or in too much struggle, in poverty or in wealth, and you suddenly turn a sharp corner, and, before you ​realise it, the whole current of your life has been changed."

"I know that yesterday's meeting with you has changed the whole current of my life," said Goulburn, in a low voice which was not without some show of feeling in it.

"And I know that we're going to have a real bad storm," said Miss Phillimore, bending forward and looking out of the window. "I've felt it coming for an hour or more. There's the beginning," she continued, as a blinding flash of lightning cut the dull skies above the Park. "I'll tell them to drive straight home."

"Then I had better leave you," said Goulburn regretfully.

"If you want to be wet through, you may," she said, laughing. "There will be a perfect Niagara of rain in a few minutes, and there's no shelter. Come home with me, and I'll introduce you to your future next-door neighbour, my uncle, Dr. van Mildart. He will ask you to dine with———"

"But———" began Goulburn.

"Oh, I know all that already," she laughed. "You have no clothes in your waistcoat pocket, and you did not expect to have the pleasure, and perhaps my uncle may not care—and so on. All wrong—the clothes don't matter, and Dr. van Mildart will be delighted to meet Mr. Richard Goulburn, whose story he is already acquainted with, because I told him of it myself to-day at luncheon as soon as Conybeare telephoned me that he had found you to be the real man. Besides, there is ​another reason why you should go to Harley Street."

"Yes?" said Goulburn inquiringly. "And that is———?"

"Because I asked you to," she answered. "I am accustomed to having my own way when I know it is good for me and others."

"I believe I shall be afraid of you," said Goulburn presently, as they were driving hurriedly through the rain-swept streets.

"Worse things than that might happen to you," she answered. "I am very wise, seeing that I am still so young. Did I not tell you how heavy the rain would be?"

The storm of that evening—the heaviest which London had known that summer—was at its height when they drove up to Dr. van Mildart's house in Harley Street, and they were glad to make a dash for the door. But Goulburn had time to snatch a hurried glance at the front of the house and at that of the one next to it, which he now knew to be his own. In that hurried glance he noted what seemed to him an unusual thing in the matter of house decoration, especially in the West End of London, where householders mostly affect brightness of colour. Dr. van Mildart's house was painted—and recently painted—in sombre black from cornice to basement. Its next-door neighbours' had also received their annual renovation, but each was of a gay disposition, and that in which Nathaniel Goulburn had ended his days was particularly bright in its spotless whiteness and fresh light green paint.

​The door of the black house was opened by a man whom Goulburn instinctively took to be Dr. van Mildart's butler. Once within the hall, which was well lighted and in cheerful contrast to the gloomy exterior of the house, he looked at this man carefully, having never seen a man of his exact type before. He was a tall, well-made man, apparently of close upon sixty years of age, very neatly and carefully dressed in sober black, and possessed of quiet movement and self-contained manner. So far he resembled thousands of well-trained serving-men. But it was his face, and especially his eyes, which interested Goulburn most deeply. The face, a bored, somewhat heavy one, topped by a wide, intellectual-looking forehead, surmounted by smoothly brushed hair now perfectly snow-white, was of a curious tint of colour, somewhat akin to that of well-preserved old parchment. It was very deeply seamed and lined, and on one side—the left—there was a scar which ran from near the lobe of the ear to the corner of the mouth. The eyes were more than usually deep set in the sockets; they were of a light grey colour, steady and calm, but . . . strange. They looked to Goulburn like the eyes of a dead man.

"My uncle is in his laboratory, I suppose, Pimpery?" said Miss Phillimore, as she shook the raindrops from her dainty skirts.

"Yes, madam."

The man's voice was like his eyes-cold, dull, dead. It might have been the voice of a ghost.

"Then take Mr. Goulburn into the library while I go ​to him," she commanded. "If there is anything you want, Mr. Goulburn, ask for it."

Then she ran up the stairs, and Goulburn, in obedience to a gentle bow from the man with the dead eyes and voice, followed him along the hall into a large room which terminated in a conservatory.

"Is there anything that I can get for you, sir?"

Again the same deadness of tone, the suggestion of—what?

"No, thank you," replied Goulburn, "nothing."

The man bowed and left the room as noiselessly as he had entered it, and Goulburn, choosing an easy-chair, sat down and looked about him. He had a love of books, and had indulged it as far as his hitherto limited means would permit; he resolved now that he would set to work on the formation of a library. The room in which he sat was filled with books from floor to ceiling, all arranged in open shelving of old dark oak, which was surmounted at intervals by marble or bronze busts. Over the fireplace was a fine old triptych of the Dutch school; at one end of the room a quaintly carved table was covered with magazines, reviews, and pamphlets; at the other, nearer the conservatory, was a great dark table strewn with papers, bundles of manuscripts, notebooks, and all the sort of impedimenta which accumulate around the student.

Goulburn presently rose and began to wander about the room, reading the titles of the books, of which, according to a hasty calculation, there must have been ten or twelve thousand. They were in all branches of ​literature—history, philosophy, theology, poetry. He was somewhat surprised, considering that he was in the house of a medical man, to find that there were more volumes of belles-lettres than on scientific subjects. He reflected, however, that the doctor had most likely a study of his own where he kept his scientific works; to his mind they were best left out of a fine collection like that which he was inspecting. And just then, hearing the door gently opened, he turned from gazing at a magnificent edition of the Old English dramatists to find himself confronted by the man whom he supposed to be its owner.

Goulburn knew nothing, or next to nothing, of the medical profession, but he had so far always associated it with black coats, top hats, heavy gold watch-chains, and bland manners allied to mellifluous voices. He had also an impression, gained from recollections of early childhood, that most doctors were tall, heavily built men, with bald heads and mutton-chop whiskers, and that their linen was always very glossy and their hands very white. Having this general impression in his mind, he was more than a little surprised to find himself shaking hands with a gentleman of apparently forty-five or fifty years, who was certainly not of medium height, who wore a rather sporting-looking lounge suit of a distinctly large check, and who, from his fringed hair and his Vandyke beard,—both of a brownish yellow in tint,—might have been supposed much more reasonably to be a painter than a physician. Moreover, he wore a pink and blue shirt, and brown shoes. Rather ​a smart cheery-looking little doctor this, with nothing lugubrious about him; he reminded some of his patients of a rather perky robin, always hopping hither and thither. There was one great drawback about him, however, which Goulburn noticed at once—he was evidently very short-sighted, or suffered from some affection of the eyes; and this obliged him to wear dark spectacles, which were adjusted in such a fashion that it was impossible to see his eyes in any way. It also made him hold his head as folk do who peer at you through half-shut lids; thus his pointed Vandyke beard seemed to be a torpedo directed against your heart.

"Mr. Goulburn? I am Dr. van Mildart, and very glad to see you, and pleased that my niece should have brought you to see me, especially as I suppose we shall be neighbours. Your uncle was my neighbour for some months; I used to see him now and then getting in and out of his car, but I never had the pleasure of speaking to him. But sit down, sit down, Mr. Goulburn—we will have a glass of wine together and a cigarette, and I trust you will stay and dine with us. Oh, no excuses—quite informal, quite informal. I'm not going to change my clothes for dinner to-night—too much of a fag in this beastly weather. Try one of those cigarettes, and Pimpery shall bring in some sherry."

It was a curious voice, Goulburn thought—sharp, shrill, almost a falsetto. There was nothing of the usual professional voice in it: rather, it possessed a flavour of Bohemianism; and once again Goulburn thought that he could better picture Dr. van Mildart with a ​palette and brush than in a consulting room. The little man's manners were just as free-and-easy as his speech; he threw himself into an easy-chair when the strange-looking butler had been and gone, pledged his guest in eminently British fashion, and settling down to his cigarette, looked at him with an amused smile playing about the corners of his moustached mouth.

"How does it feel to become rich all of a sudden?" he said. "No harm in asking—it's my little way. I like to find out everything I can about human emotion and feeling."

"Oh, I don't mind!" replied Goulburn. "But you see, I can't tell, because I haven't yet realised it. I feel as if—well, as if there had been an earthquake!"

"Ah, not a bad definition," said Dr. van Mildart. "I once felt something of the same sort of feeling myself—only in my case it was when I discovered that I'd suddenly lost every penny I had in the world, and literally hadn't anything but what I stood up in and the little spare cash I had in my pockets. However, these sudden chops and changes in fortune have one great merit—they're interesting. Most of the rest of life is dull—drab. What'll you do with your fortune now that you've come into it?"

Goulburn, who found the dry sherry and the Egyptian cigarettes very pleasing, laughed.

"I haven't had time to think of that," he answered. "You must remember that I have only known that it was mine since half-past one o'clock. I suppose I shall have to take advice."

​"Oh, you'll get more advice than you could stow away in the British Museum if the advice were reduced to writing!" said Dr. van Mildart. "You'll be surprised at the advice you'll get. It'll come in its thousands when your case gets noised abroad from all the heights—and the depths. Inventors, now! Shade of Solomon, they'll be on to you like beetles on to a carcass or flies on to a pot of jam. And cranks of all descriptions—church cranks, chapel cranks, missionaries, societies for this, that, or the other. Oh, it's a nice thing to come into a half-million of money, but it's got its responsibilities and its drawbacks all the same. There's my niece there, now, Moira—well, that girl's worth very nearly a million pounds, all in her own control, and, of course, that's a nice little fortune, though a small one for the States, where everything is on a big scale; but the way she was pestered out of her life when it was known that Phillimore was dead and that everything was hers, was enough to drive any sensitive human being away to the regions of barbaric loneliness. Oh, after all, I don't know whether the poor man hasn't the best time of it—he misses a lot both ways."

Goulburn made no reply to this. He was thinking of his experiences of life since he had had to earn his living for himself. True, he had never known what it was to starve, to go without decent if well-worn clothing, or to spend a night in the streets homeless. But he had known hunger more than once, and shabbiness often; and it had often been all that he could do to save, or even earn, the weekly rent for his room. Of late ​years, since his going to Pepperall & Tardrew's, things had not been so bad, but he had some recollections of earlier days, when, coming to London as a mere boy, he had had to go through the mill. And he made a face at the recollection.

"No!" he said. "It's not nice to be poor; it's nasty."

Dr. van Mildart lighted another cigarette, pushed the box across to his guest, and gave him one of his queer, quizzical smiles.

"Um!" he said. "I wonder how poor you've ever been—just how far you've ever gone down? Not so far, I guess."

"Well, I've never quite starved," Goulburn admitted, with the laugh of a man who admits that he's been near a thing but not quite up to it; "nor gone without shirt, either."

The man who swung his leg carelessly over the arm of his easy-chair and sipped his old sherry with the unmistakable air of a connoisseur of good wine laughed. There was something in that laugh which jarred on Goulburn's nerves, overwrought as they were by the exciting events of the day. It suggested all sorts of things—all unpleasant.

"Never quite starved—never gone without shirt!" repeated Dr. van Mildart. "Lucky dog! Shade of Solomon! I've done both—and gone without boots too. I've spent nights on that Embankment of yours in winter, shivering, hungry. I've spent days in New York just half-mad for want of food. I've known what it was to be stranded in a Canadian town in winter when you ​couldn't get a job anyway, and had to sleep in filthy Chinese lodging-houses of the very lowest class until you were covered with vermin——— and Yes, I guess I've gone through all that—and more. Let me tell you, Mr. Goulburn, you don't know what that expression 'to be poor' means till you find yourself, with just enough rags to hide your naked body and without a cent in the world, in some town (especially one like this!) where you don't know a soul and nobody cares for you any more than they would for a pariah dog, and where hope just snuffs out———"

"To be revived again," interrupted Goulburn.

Dr. van Mildart elevated his Vandyke beard.

"There are other things than hope which revive life and effort," he said drily. "But come, we're near dinner-time. I'll take you to my room to make your toilet."

Whatever strange vicissitudes his host might have passed through in earlier stages of his career, there was no doubt, thought Goulburn, as he followed him through the hall and up the stairs and past the open doors of various rooms, that he was now a wealthy man. The house appeared to be furnished in the most magnificent style; the staircase was ornamented with fine pictures and with cabinets of rare old china; everything betokened wealth, ease, luxury. Goulburn made some comment on one of the pictures they passed. Dr. van Mildart laughed.

"Ah, you won't think anything of my poor bits of pictures when you see your own!" he said. "Your ​lamented uncle, my late neighbour, was a bit of a fancier and more than a bit of a judge. I'll tell you a secret: I bribed the caretaker—quite a worthy fellow, by the bye—to let me have a look at what we call 'next door' one day. You will see—you will see! There are some Greuzes there—and some Corots—which made my mouth water. And there is a collection of Missals which must have cost a prince's ransom. My dear sir! my poor house is a mere peasant's hut compared to your own—which I suppose you will inspect to-morrow."

Goulburn found that Dr. van Mildart had spoken in seriousness when he promised him a dinner without ceremony. He led him straight to the dining-room when they went downstairs, and there they stood chatting for a minute or two until the ringing of a delicately modulated silver bell brought Moira Phillimore and a young lady, who appeared to be some twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age, and who was very handsome and had very lively eyes, into the room. Dr. van Mildart peered at them through his glasses.

"Ah, yes," he said. "Moira, you already know Mr. Goulburn. Miss Lamotte, this gentleman is Mr. Richard Goulburn, who is going to be our next-door neighbour. Mr. Goulburn, this lady is Miss Caroline Lamotte, my assistant. Now, Pimpery, we will dine in amity."

If the host's manner and conversation were easy and informal as ever, his dinner and his wines were exceptional. Goulburn found how easy it was to sink into the luxuries and pleasures of life. The women were ​pretty and witty; Dr. van Mildart was a brilliant talker; everything was delightful; he himself joined in with the spirit of the moment, and was as lively as his three companions. Was life going to be like that always now, he wondered? Then he thought of the cheerless, lonely meals—"grubs," as Chris called them—which he used to have in his lodgings. What a contrast!

But as he sat there, eating his good food and sipping his host's choice vintages, there was one thing that secretly worried him, got on his nerves, and was as a skeleton at the feast, and that was the butler, Pimpery. The man's face was like a mask, and the eyes were as dead as ever. Try as he would, Goulburn could not help looking at him. Whenever he did so, he was conscious of some feeling which he could not fathom.

There was another man-servant in the room—a perfect specimen of the thoroughly trained English footman. He was statue-like in his demeanour: his smooth face, with its small mouth and slightly aquiline nose, looked as if nothing could break its calm. But the man with the dead eyes put this person out of recollection.

Goulburn went home that night in a taxi-cab. Once upon a time—yes, yesterday—he would have thought this a monstrous piece of extravagance. Now, as he dismissed the cab at the corner of Guilford Street, he gave its driver five shillings.

As he felt for his latchkey, his fingers encountered a twisted scrap of paper. He drew this out, untwisted it, held it up to the light of the street lamp opposite his ​door, and read the words scrawled upon it in pencil, and in what seemed to him to be a feigned hand—

"Young gentleman—take the advice of one who knows, and for Heaven's sake be careful what you have to do with the Black House in Harley Street!"