BLACK SHEEP!

By THE AUTHOR OF "LAND AT LAST," " KISSING THE ROD,'
&c. &c.

BOOK III.
CHAPTER V. RECOGNITION.

WITH the unexpected return of George
Dallas to London from Amsterdam, an
occurrence against which so much precaution had
been taken, and which had appeared to be so
very improbable, a sense of discouragement and
alarm had stolen over Stewart Routh. In the
coarse, bold sense of the term, he was a self-
reliant man. He had no faith in anything
higher or holier than luck and pluck; but, in
those mundane gods, his faith was steadfast,
and had been hitherto justified. On the whole,
for an outcast (as he had been for some time,
that time, too, so important in a man's life),
he had not done badly; he had schemed
successfully, and cunning and crime had availed him.
He was a callous man by nature, of a base
disposition; and, under any circumstances, would
have been cool-headed and dogged. In the
circumstances in which he found himself, his dogged
cool-headedness was peculiarly useful and
valuable. He had relied upon them without any doubt
or misgiving until the day on which he was
convinced by George Dallas's appearance on
the stage, which he believed him to have
abandoned for an indefinite time, that he had made
a miscalculation. Then a slow, cold fear began
to creep over him. Had his luck — what marvellous
luck it had been — turned ? Believers in
such a creed as his are mostly superstitious
fanatics. He had felt some such dread; then,
from the moment when Harriet — Harriet, who
should have seen that he had blundered :
confound the woman, was she losing her head? — had
told him, in her smooth encouraging way, that
this new difficulty should be surmounted as the
others had been. Not the smallest touch of
repentance, not the, lightest shadow of remorse,
fell upon him with the stirring of this fact — only
a hard, contemptuous anger against himself and
Harriet, and a bitter, scornful hatred for the
young man who had been his tool for so long,
and might now, in a moment, be turned into the
agent of his punishment. When George Dallas
left Harriet after the discussion which had
terminated in his promise not to move in the
matter of the identification of Deane, Stewart
Routh, though he bore himself with calmness
in his talk with his wife, had invariably writhed
and raged under the galling sense of the first
check he had received. If he could have done
it safely, if the deed would not have been more
fatal than the conjuncture he feared, he would
have murdered Dallas readily ; and he told
himself so. He had none of the poetry, none of
the drama of crime about him. He was not a
man to kill one human being because it suited
his purpose to do so, and then to hesitate about
killing another, if a still more powerful preventive
presented itself ; he was incapable of the
mixture of base and cruel motives, with the kind
of sentimental heroics, with which the popular
imagination endows criminals of the educated
classes. He had all the cynicism of such
individuals, cynicism which is their strongest
characteristic ; but he had nothing even mock
heroic in his composition. His hatred of
George was mixed with the bitterest contempt.
When he found the young man amenable beyond
his expectations ; when he found him unshaken
in the convictions with which Harriet had con-
trived to inspire him and hardly requiring to be
supported by his own arguments, his
reassurance was inferior to his scorn

"The fool, the wretched, contemptible idiot!"
Routh said, as he looked round his dressing-
room that night, and noted one by one the signs
which would have betokened to a practised eye
preparations for an abrupt departure, "it is
hardly worth while to deceive him, and to rule
such a creature. He was full of suspicion of
me before he went away, and the first fruits of
that pretty and affecting conversion of his, under
the influence of his mother and the territorial
decencies of Poynings, was what he flattered
himself was a resolution to pay me off, and be
free of me. He yields to my letter without the
slightest difficulty, and comes here the moment
he returns. He believes in Harriet as implicitly
as ever; and if he is not as fond of me as he
was, he is quite as obedient." The cynical
nature of the man showed itself in the impatient
weariness with which he thought of his success,
and in the levity with which he dismissed, or at
least tried to dismiss, the subject from his mind.
There was, however, one insuperable obstacle to
his getting rid of it — his wife.

Harriet had miscalculated her strength; not
the strength of her intellect, but that of her