A Hero of Romance Part 28

He began walking through the rain across the gra.s.s. How cold he was, and oh! how hungry. He must have something to eat, and something warm to drink. He thought of his money; he felt for his fourpence; it was gone!

The discovery stunned him. He could not realize the fact at once, but searched in each of his pockets laboriously, one after the other. He turned them inside out; felt for holes through which it might have fallen. He remembered that he had put it in the right hand pocket of his trousers; he examined it again and again, in a sort of stupor. In vain; it was gone!

He retraced his steps. It might have fallen out of his pockets in the night; he fell upon his knees and searched. There was no sign of it about. He was without a sou, and he was so hungry and so cold, and it was raining, and he was wet to the skin.

He could not realize his loss. He wandered stupidly on, stopping at times, feeling in his pockets again and again. It could not be gone.

But there was no money there. This was his Land of Golden Dreams; this was the object of his journey; this was the result of his dash into the world; he was cold, and he was hungry, and he saw no signs of anything to eat.

At last he left the park behind. He went out by the Piccadilly gate, as miserable a figure as any to be seen, stained with mud, soaked with wet, hungry and forlorn. It was early. The early omnibuses were bringing crowds of business men to town. The drivers were m.u.f.fled in their mackintoshes, the outside pa.s.sengers crouched beneath their umbrellas. Everything and every one looked cold, and miserable, and wet; Bertie looked worst of all, for he looked hungry too.

How hungry! There had been moments at Mecklemburg House when hunger had made itself felt, but never hunger such as this. The very worst meal Mr. Fletcher had ever set before his pupils--and his system of dietary was not his strongest point--Bertie would have welcomed as a feast. Even a dry crust of stale bread would have been welcome; a cup of the wishy-washiest tea would have been nectar of the G.o.ds.

He was footsore too. As he wandered by the Piccadilly mansions and approached the shops, he became conscious that his feet were blistered. It was a discomfort to be obliged to put them to the ground. His right foot, in particular, had a blister on the heel, and another on the ball of the foot. It seemed to him that every moment these were getting larger. He would have liked to have taken his boot and sock off and examine his injuries. He was aware, too, that he was dirty; more than two days had pa.s.sed since he had come in contact with soap and water. Once upon a time he had had a vague idea that it was a glorious sport of the heroic character to be dirty; now he would have liked to have had a wash. But he could neither wash nor examine his feet in the middle of Piccadilly.

The presence of the shops caused him an additional pang. The display of costly goods in their windows seemed to add to his misery. Even the possession of his fourpence, as compared to the value of such treasures, would have placed him at a disadvantage.

But without it he was poor indeed. He was fascinated by the fruit shops; all the fruits of the earth, those in season and those out, seemed gathered there. He glued his nose to the window and looked and longed.

"Now then, what are you doing there? move on out of that!"

A policeman, in a shiny cape, from which the wet was dripping, roughly shouldered him on. He was not even allowed to look. This was not at all the sort of thing he had expected. His idea of his entry into the great city had been altogether different. He was to come as the king of boys, if not of men; as something remarkable, as a heaven-born conqueror; something to be talked of; the centre of all eyes directly he was seen. To sleep upon the sodden gra.s.s, to be penniless, cold, wet, and hungry, to be shouldered by policemen, to be bidden to move on, these things had not entered into his calculations when that night at Mecklemburg House he had dreamed those golden dreams.

He struggled on; his feet became more painful; he was limping; rest he must. He turned down a bye-street, and then down a friendly entry, and leaned against the wall. Was this what he had come for, to lean in the rain against a wall, and to be thankful for the chance of leaning? He had not read in lives of Robin Hood, and Turpin, and Crusoe, and Jack the Giant-Killer, of episodes like this. But then, perhaps, his acquaintance with the histories of those gentlemen was not so perfect as it might have been.

Suddenly he heard the sound of rapidly approaching footsteps. Some one was coming along the side-street as though racing for his life. A lad about his own age came darting round the corner in such terrific haste that he almost ran into Bertie's arms.

"Catch hold! here's a present for you."

The runner gasped out the words, without pausing in his flight. Like an arrow from a bow he darted on, leaving Bertie standing there. To his amazement Bailey found that he had thrust something in his hand; his surprise was intensified when he discovered what it was,--it was a purse. The runner had turned another corner and was already out of sight.

Bertie, in his bewilderment, could do nothing else but gaze. Such unexpected generosity, coming at such a moment, was so astonishing that it was almost as though the gift had fallen from the skies. A good fat purse! It was like the stories after all. He could feel that it was heavy; he almost thought that he could feel that it was full.

Suppose it were full of gold! Had it fallen from the skies?

All this occupied an instant. The next he was conscious that some one else was coming up the street; apparently some one else in equal haste; apparently more than one. Cries rang in his ears; he could not quite distinguish the words which were shouted, but at their sound, for some reason, a cold chill went down his back.

Some one came round the corner; some one who seized him as though he were some wild thing.

"Got you, have I! thought you'd double, did you, and slip out when I'd run past? Artful, but it didn't quite do,--not this time, at any rate."

His captor shook him as a terrier shakes a rat. It was a policeman, a huge, bearded fellow, six feet high. Bertie was like a plaything in his hands. On hearing some one coming, the boy, without any thought of what he was doing, had slipped the hand which held the purse behind his back. The policeman was down on it at once.

"What's that you've got there?"

He twisted the boy round, revealing the hand which held the purse. He took it away.

"Oh, that's it, is it? You hadn't got time to throw it away, I suppose, or perhaps you thought it was too good to lose--worth running a little risk for, eh? Well, you've run the risk just once too often."

By this time others had come into the entry, and now Bertie recognised the words which he had heard. What they had been shouting was, "Stop thief!"

The new comers showed a lively interest in the captive. A man, who looked like a respectable mechanic, reckoned him up.

"That's not the boy," he said.

"Oh, isn't it? It doesn't look like it, not when he was hiding here, and holding the purse in his hand!"

The policeman held up the purse with an air of smiling scorn.

"Had he got the purse? Well, whether he had or whether he hadn't, all I can say is he isn't the boy who took it; I'm willing to take my oath to that. He was a different-looking sort of boy altogether, and I was standing as close to him as I am to you."

"I never took the purse," said Bertie, with dogged lips and dogged eyes. He realized that great trouble had come upon him, as he writhed and twisted in the policeman's hand. "It was given to me."

"Yes, I daresay, and by a particular friend, no doubt. You come along with me, my lad, and tell that tale elsewhere."

The policeman began to drag the lad along the entry.

"The boy will go quietly, I daresay, if you give him a chance,"

observed the man who had previously spoken. "However it may be about the purse being found upon him, I'm prepared to prove that that's not the boy who took it."

"Well, you can come and give your evidence, can't you? It's no good standing arguing here; the lad had got the purse, and I've got the lad, and that's quite enough for me."

"Where are you going to take him to?"

"Marlborough Street Police Court."

"All right, I'll come round and say what I've got to say. My name's William Standing,--I'm a picture framer; I'll go and tell my governor where I'm off to, and I'll be there as soon as you are."

The man walked away. The policeman proceeded to haul Bertie off with him again. The boy was speechless. He was tired, his feet were sore; the policeman's pace was almost more than he could manage. In consequence, every now and then he received a jerk, which all but pitched him forward on his nose.

"Why don't you leave the boy alone?" inquired a man in the little crowd, which walked alongside in a sort of procession, whose ideas of a policeman's duty were apparently vague. "He ain't done no 'arm to you."

"Why, bless yer, if it wasn't for them little 'uns them policemen would have no one to collar; they daren't lay a finger on a man of your build, old pal."

This remark, from another member of the crowd, produced a laugh. The original speaker was a diminutive specimen of his kind, whom the policeman could have carried in his arms with the greatest of ease.

When they regained Piccadilly they came upon the victim of the robbery. This was a portly, middle-aged female, who was a pleasant combination of mackintoshes and agitation. She was the centre of an interested circle, into whose sympathetic ears she was pouring her tale of woe. The arrival of the policeman with his captive created a diversion.

"Is this the boy?" inquired the constable.

"Have you got my purse?" replied the lady. "It contained thirty-seven pounds, fifteen shillings, and threepence, in two ten pound notes, two fives,--I've got the numbers in my purse,--seven pounds in gold, four of them half-sovereigns, fifteen shillings in silver, and a threepenny bit; and whatever I shall do without it I don't know. I'm the landlady of the 'Rising Sun,' and I was going to pay my wine-merchant's bill, and I said to my daughter only this morning, 'Take all that money loose I didn't ought to do. No, Mary Ann, a cheque it ought to be.'

But Mary Ann's that flighty, though she's in her thirties, though twenty-two she tries to pa.s.s herself to be----"

The policeman endeavoured to stop the lady's flood of eloquence.

"You can tell us all that when we get to the station. You'll have to come with me to identify the purse and charge the boy."

"I don't want to charge the boy, all I want is to identify the purse.

As for the young limb of a boy, I'd like to give him a good banging with my unbrella, that I would!"