The Devil's Spectacles Read online

  ‘Shall we go back to London, to-morrow?’ I asked.

  ‘Are you tired of being here with me, Alfred?’

  ‘I am tired of waiting till the spring, my angel. I will live with you wherever you like, if you will only consent to hasten the transformation which makes you my wife. Will you consent?’

  ‘If your mother asks me. Don’t hurry her, Alfred.’

  But I did hurry her. After what we had heard in the shrubbery I could look into my mother’s heart (without assistance), and feel sure that the nobler part of her nature would justify my confidence in it. She was not only ready to ‘ask Cecilia,’ then and there—she was eager, poor soul, to confess how completely she had been misled by her natural interest in her brother’s child. Being firmly resolved to keep the secret of my discovery of her niece, I refused to hear her, as I had refused to hear Cecilia. Did I not know, without being told, what child’s play it would be to Zilla to dazzle and delude my innocent mother? I merely asked if ‘the needlewoman was still in the house.’ The answer was thoroughly explicit: ‘She is at the railway station by this time, and she will never enter any house of mine again.’

  We returned to London the next morning.

  I had a moment’s private talk with the station-master at Timbercombe. Sir John had left his friends at the town, on the previous day. He and Zilla had met on the platform, waiting for the London train. She had followed him into the smoking-carriage. Just as the station-master was going to start the train, Sir John opened the door, with a strong expression of disgust, and took refuge in another carriage. She had tried the baronet as a last resource, and he had slipped through her fingers too. What did it matter to Zilla? She had plenty of time before her, and she belonged to the order of persons who never fail to make the most of her advantages. The other day I saw the announcement of her marriage to a great ironmaster, a man worth millions of money, with establishments to correspond. Brava, Zilla! No need to look for your nobler motives with the naked eye.

  A few days before I became a married man I was a guest at the dinner table of a bachelor friend, and I met Sir John. It would have been ridiculous to leave the room; I merely charged my host to keep my name concealed. I sat next to the baronet, and he doesn’t know, to this day, who his ‘very agreeable neighbour’ was.

  Instead of spending our honeymoon abroad, Cecilia and I went back to Long Fallas. We found the place delightful, even in the winter time.

  Did I take the Devil’s Spectacles back with me?

  No.

  Did I throw them away or smash them into small morsels?

  Neither. I remembered what Septimus Notman had told me. The one way of getting rid of them was to give them to some other man.

  And to what other man did I give them?

  I had not forgotten what my rival had said of me in the shrubbery. I gave the Devil’s Spectacles to Sir John.

  VII BETWEEN THE READER AND THE EDITOR

  Are we to have no satisfactory explanation of the supernatural element in the story? How did it come into the Editor’s hands? Was there neither name nor address on the manuscript?

  There was an address, if you must know. But I decline to mention it.

  Suppose I guess that the address was at a lunatic asylum? What would you say to that?

  I should say I suspected you of being a critic, and I should have the honour of wishing you good morning.