Presupposing a visit from the police, he could get away. The passages and exits led very far. Escape was easy. But how long would it last? A duke is a marked man. He needed a disguise, and presently he found one. His solicitors received instructions to transfer from his account to that of T. C. Druce the sum of two hundred thousand pounds.
Here we are not merely underground; we are right in the heart of a phantasmagoria. The real is giving to the fictitious. But there is a metamorphosis in preparation. Watch a moment, and from the skin of a mole a shopkeeper will emerge. Ovid imagined nothing as surprising. Cagliostro, who made little diamonds big and old women young, was unequal to such wizardry. Even Edison could not do it.
That, though, is natural. The old duke, dead now, and damned too, no doubt, had a crime to elude. To stir the wits, there is nothing like it. Besides, he was not thinking of getting his name in the papers, but of keeping it out; not of fame, but of safety. In the haunted halls in which he groped there was none for him whatever. The echo of his own footsteps startled him. There were moments when he mistook them for those of Justice; there must have been moments when he wished they were, when even the worst that could be were better than that ceaseless fright. But though for the murder of Lord George, Justice might cry "Fratricide!" at a peer of the realm, never would it bother with a tradesman. Such is the potency of logic that, no sooner was that deduction reached than the spectre of the police was exorcised. Fright departed, and, parenthetically, the duke did too.
Were we writing fiction instead of facts, here conveniently the first part might close. Having given the gentle reader a hint, we should do our best to muddle him. But literature disdains such practices. It scorns to run a secret through its copy. Here is the plot:
The money transferred and the vision gone, the Duke of Portland vanished from Welbeck Abbey. Coincidentally, a Mr. Druce opened a furniture shop in London. Located in Baker street, it stands there still. Recent investigations have shown that beneath it subterranean passages and exits were constructed. Recent testimony has shown that the proprietor never exhibited himself to his customers. Precisely as the duke preferred to live underground, so did the furniture dealer prefer the solitude of the back office. But the duke hid from people who knew him. It is alleged that from those same people Druce hid, too. At Welbeck the duke ordered the servants and tenantry never to approach him. In Baker street, Druce's orders to his shop-folk were the same.
Here the plot thickens. A month after the duke vanished from Welbeck he turned up there again. Simultaneously from Baker street Druce disappeared. Then presently the duke vanished anew from Welbeck. Thereat in Baker street Druce reappeared.
At this juncture the furniture man acquired by purchase a villa at Hendon and proceeded to collect children and hats. Meanwhile at Welbeck the duke was constantly appearing and disappearing, and meanwhile in Baker street Druce was similarly engaged. Subsequently the latter married, became a pillar of the church, the father of a boy, and, after years of middle-class respectability, punctuated, however, by periodic absences, finally concluded to die. Coincidentally, the duke turned up for good—or for bad—at Welbeck, where, full of years and of honors, ultimately he departed this life.
Here the plot grows thicker. During the progress of these events the boy grew to manhood, married and begot a son. It is for the benefit of that son that the present action was instituted. He is claimant to the Portland title and estates. The plaintiff, his mother, is the daughter-in-law of the Baker street man.
The contention of this lady is evan-
