The Camera Fiend Part 16

Why, they'd hear you wheezing in the hold, and you'd gasp out your whole story before you were in the Bay of Biscay! No, no, my fellow; you've taken your line, and you must stick to it, and stop with me till we can think of something better than a long sea voyage. If you say you won't, I say I'll make you-to save you from yourself-to save us both."

There was no mistaking the absolute intention in this threat; it was fixed and final, and the boy accepted it as he accepted his oppressor's power to make good his words. It was true that he might have escaped already; the nearer he had been to it, the less chance was he likely to be given again.

So reasoned Pocket from the face and voice now dominating him more powerfully than ever; but it is an interesting fact that his conclusion neither cowed nor depressed him as it might have done. There was actually an element of relief in his discomfiture. He had done his best to do his duty. It was not his fault that responsibility had been wrested from his shoulders, and an evil hour delayed. And yet there was a certain, an immediate, a creature comfort in such delay, which was all the greater because unsought by him; it was a comfort that he had both ways, as the saying is, and from all points of view but that of his poor people wondering what had become of him.

"If only they knew!" he cried; "then I shouldn't care. Let me write to one of them! My mother needn't know; but I must write to one of the others, and at least let them know I am alive and well. My sister would keep my secret; she'd play the game all right, I promise you! And I'd play any game you like if only you let me write a line to her!"

The doctor would not hear of it at first. Eventually he said he should have to inspect the letter before it went; and this proved the thin edge of consent. In the end it was arranged that Pocket should write what he liked to his sister only, and that Baumgartner should read and enclose it in a covering letter, so that everybody need not know it was a letter from the missing boy. Baumgartner was to have it posted from St.

Martin's-le-Grand, to destroy all trace of a locality which he now refused point-blank to disclose even to the writer. And in return for the whole concession the schoolboy was to give his solemn word and sacred promise on the following points.

He was not to set foot outside the house without Baumgartner, nor to show himself for a moment at the windows back or front.

On no account was he to confide in the doctor's niece Phillida, to give her the slightest inkling of his connection with the latest of London mysteries, or even of the scene, or any of the circ.u.mstances of his first meeting with Baumgartner.

"You are bound to see something of each other; the less you say about yourself the better."

"But what can she think?"

"What she likes, my young fellow! I am a medical man; medical men may bring patients to their houses even when they have ceased to practise in the ordinary way. It is no business of hers, and what she chooses to think is no affair of ours. She has seen you very ill, remember, and she had your doctor's orders not to let you out of the house in his absence."

"She obeyed them like a little brick!" muttered Pocket, with a wistful heaviness.

"She did what she was told; think no more about it," said the doctor.

"Give me your hand on these your promises, and die on your feet rather than break one of them! Now I trust you, my young fellow; you will play the game, as you call it, even as the poor lads in these pictures played it at Gravelotte, and die like them rather than go back an inch. Look at this one here. No, not the one with the ridges, but here where we come to bayonets and the sword. See the poor devils of the Prussian Guard! See the sheet-lightning pouring into us from the walls of St. Privat! Look at that fellow with his head bound up, and this one with no head to bind.

That's meant for our colonel on the white horse. See him hounding us on to h.e.l.l! And there's a drummer drumming as though we could hear a single beat! Our very colours were blown to ribbons, you see, and we ourselves to shreds; but the shreds hung together, my young fellow, and so will you and I in our day of battle!" Baumgartner might have known his boy for years, so sure was his touch upon the strings of a responsive nature, to strike the chords of a generous enthusiasm, and to wake the echoes of n.o.ble deeds. Pocket attacked his letter with the heart of a soldier, hardened and yet uplifted for the fight; it was only when he found himself writing down vague words, which nevertheless brought his innocent deed home to him as nothing had done before, that the artificial frost broke up, and real tears ran with his ink. He begged Lettice not to think too hardly of him, still less to be anxious about him, or to make anybody else; they must not fret for him, he wrote more than once, without seeing the humour of the injunction. He was better than he had been for years, and in the best of hands. But something terrible had happened; something he could not help, but would bitterly repent all his days, especially as it might prevent him from ever seeing any of them again. It was this monstrous remark, and others to which it led, that were literally blotted with the writer's tears. But just then he saw himself in all vivid sincerity as an outcast who could never show himself at home or at school again. And it required the spell of Baumgartner's presence to make the prospect such as could be borne with the least degree of visible manhood.

Be it remembered that he was not a man at all, but a boy in many ways younger than most boys of sixteen and three quarters, albeit older in some few. He was old in imagination, but young in common sense. One may be imaginative and still have a level head, but it is least likely in one's teens. The particular temperament does not need a label; but none who know it when they see it, and who see it here, will be surprised to learn that this emotional writer for one was enormously relieved and lightened in spirit when he had got his letter off his mind and hands.

True to his warning, Dr. Baumgartner began to glance at it with a kindly gravity; it was with something else that he shook his head over the second leaf.

"This is not for me to read!" said he. "I'd rather run the risk of trusting your discretion."

No words could have enslaved poor Pocket more completely; he clasped the hand that proceeded to write the covering note, and then the address, all openly before his eyes. And while the doctor was gone to the nearest messenger office to despatch the missive to the General Post Office, ostensibly to catch a particular post, his prisoner would not have decamped for a hundred pounds, and the doctor knew it.

Phillida did not appear at dinner, but at supper she did, and Pocket was only less uncomfortable in her absence, which he felt he had caused, than when they were both at table and he unable to say another word to express his sorrow for the unseemly scene of the forenoon. She spoke to him once or twice as though nothing of the kind had happened, but he could scarcely look her in the face. Otherwise both meals interested him; they were German in their order, a light supper following the substantial middle-day repast; but it appeared that they both came from an Italian restaurant, and the English boy was much taken with the paG.o.da-like apparatus in which the dishes arrived smoking hot in tiers. It provided a further train of speculation when he remembered that he had never seen a servant in the house, and that the steps had struck him as dirty, and the doctor's waste-paper basket as very full. Pocket determined to make his own bed next morning. He had meanwhile an unpleasing suspicion that the young girl was clearing away, for the doctor took him back into the drawing-room after supper; and later, when they returned for a game of billiards on the toy board, which they placed between them on the dining-table, both Phillida and the fragments had disappeared.

The little billiards were a bond and a distraction. They brought out Baumgartner's simple side, and they emphasised the schoolboy's simplicity.

Both played a strenuous game, the doctor a most deliberate one; his brows would knit, his mouth shut, his eyes calculate, and his hand obey, as though his cue were a surgical instrument cutting deep between life and death. It was a curious glimpse of disproportionate concentration; even the Turk's head was only lit to be laid aside as an obstruction. Pocket's one chance was to hit hard and trust to the fortune that accrues on a small table. Both played to win, and the boy forgot everything when he actually succeeded in the last game. They had played very late for him, and he slept without stirring until Baumgartner came to his room about eight o'clock next morning.

Now Pocket had not seen a newspaper all Friday, but it was the first thing he did see on the Sat.u.r.day morning, for the doctor was waving one like a flag to wake him.

"Trust your vermin press to get hold of the wrong end of the stick!" he cried, with fierce amus.e.m.e.nt; "it only remains to be seen whether they succeed in putting your precious police on the wrong tack too. Really, it's almost worth being at the bottom of a popular mystery to watch the smartest men in this country making fools of themselves!"

"May I see?" asked Pocket; he had winced at more than one of these remarks.

"Certainly," replied Baumgartner; "here's' the journalistic wonder of the age, and there you are in its most important column. I brought it up for you to see."

The boy bit his lips as he read. His deed had been promoted to leaded type and the highest rank in headlines. It appeared, in the first place, that no arrest had yet been made; but it was confidently a.s.serted (by the omniscient b.u.t.t of Teutonic sallies) that the police, wisely guided by the hint in yesterday's issue (which Pocket had not seen), were already in possession of a most important clue. In subsequent paragraphs of pregnant brevity the real homicide was informed that his fatal act could only be the work of a totally different and equally definite hand. Pocket gathered that there had been a certain commonplace tragedy, in a street called Holland Walk, in the previous month of March. A licensed messenger named Charlton had been found shot under circ.u.mstances so plainly indicative of suicide that a coroner's jury had actually returned a verdict to that effect. There appeared, however, to have been an element of doubt in the case. This the scribe of the leaded type sought to remove by begging the question from beginning to end. It had not been a case of suicide at all, he declared, but as wilful a murder as the one in Hyde Park, to which it bore a close and sinister resemblance. Both victims had been shot through the heart in the early hours of the morning; both belonged to one neighbourhood, and to the same dilapidated fringe of the community. A pothouse acquaintanceship was alleged between them; but the suggestion was that the link lay a good deal deeper than that, and that the two dead men were known to the police, who were busy searching for a third party of equal notoriety in connection with both murders.

"But we know he had nothing to do with the second one," said the boy, looking up at last. "It wasn't a murder, either; neither was the first, according to the coroner's jury, who surely ought to know."

"One would have thought so," said Baumgartner, with his sardonic smile; "but the yellow pressman knows better still, apparently."

"Do you suppose there's a word of truth in what he says? I don't mean about Charlton or-or poor Holdaway," said Pocket, wincing over his victim's name, which he had just gleaned from the paper. "But do you think the police are really after anybody?"

"I don't know," said Baumgartner. "What does it matter?"

"It would matter a great deal if they arrested somebody for what I did!"

The boy was no longer looking up; and his voice trembled.

"It would alter the whole thing," he mumbled significantly.

"I don't see it," returned the doctor, with grim good-nature. "The little wonder of the English reading world has nearly unearthed another mare's nest, as two of its readers know full well. No real harm can come of this typical farrago. Let it lead to an arrest! There are only two living souls who can't account for their time at that of this unfortunate affair."

Pocket realised this; but it was put in a way that gave him goose-skin under the clothes. He was always seeing his accident in some new light, always encountering some new possibility, or natural consequence of his silence, which had not occurred to him before. But he was learning to keep his feelings under control, to set his face and his teeth against the regular reactions of his coward conscience and his fickle will. And once again did Dr. Baumgartner atone for an unintentional minor by striking a rousing chord on the very heart-strings of the boy.

"Eight o'clock!" cried the magician, with a glance at his watch and an ear towards the open window. "The postman's knock from door to door down every street in town-house to house from one end of your British Islands to the other! A certain letter is without doubt being delivered at this very moment-eh, my poor young fellow?"

HUNTING WITH THE HOUNDS

Eugene Thrush was a regular reader of the journal on which Dr. Baumgartner heaped heavy satire, its feats of compression, its genius for headlines, and the delicious expediency of all its views, which enabled its editorial column to face all ways and bow where it listed, in the universal joint of popularity, were points of irresistible appeal to a catholic and convivial sense of humour. He read the paper with his early cup of tea, and seldom without a fat internal chuckle between the sheets.

That Sat.u.r.day morning, however, Mr. Thrush was not only up before the paper came, but for once he took its opinion seriously on a serious matter. It said exactly what he wished to think about the Hyde Park murder: that the murderer would prove to be the author of a similar crime, committed in the previous month of March, when the Upton boy must have been safe at school. If that were so, it was manifestly absurd to connect the lad with a mystery which merely happened to synchronise with that of his own disappearance-absurd, even if he were shown to have been somewhere near the scene of the murder, somewhere about the time of its perpetration.

That much, though no more, had, however, been fairly established overnight. It was a conclusion to which Mullins, with the facile conviction of his cla.s.s, had jumped on the slender evidence of the asthma cigarette alone; but before midnight Thrush himself had been forced to admit its extreme probability. There was a medicine cork as well as an asthma cigarette; the medicine cork had been found very much nearer the body; in fact, just across the pathway, under a shrub on the other side of the fence. It was Mullins, who had made both discoveries, who also craved permission to ring up Dr. Bompas, late at night, to ask if there was any particular chemist to whom he sent his patients with their prescriptions.

Dr. Bompas was not at home, which perhaps was just as well but his man gave the name of Harben, in Oxford Street. Harbens, rung up in their turn, found that they certainly had made up one of the doctor's prescriptions on the Wednesday, for a young Mr. Upton, and, within half an hour, had positively identified the cork found by Mullins in Hyde Park. It was still sticky with the very stuff which had put poor Pocket asleep.

Yet Thrush could not or would not conceive any actual connection between a harmless schoolboy and an apparently cold-blooded crime. He resisted the idea on more grounds than he felt disposed to urge in argument with his now strangely animated factotum. It was still a wide jump to a detestable conclusion, but he confined his criticism to the width of the jump. The cork and the cigarette might be stepping-stones, but at least one more was wanted to justify the slightest suspicion against the missing boy. Let it be shown that he had carried firearms on the Wednesday night, and Thrush undertook to join his satellite on the other side; but his mental bias may be gauged from the fact that he made no mention of the boy's mother's dream.

Mullins found him not only up, shaved and booted, but already an enthusiastic convert to the startling theory of a sensation journalist, and consequently an irritable observer of the saturnine countenance which darkened to a tinge of distinct amus.e.m.e.nt over the leaded type.

"So you don't think there's much in it, Mullins?"

"I shouldn't say there was anything at all, sir."

"Yet I suppose you remember the very similar occurrence in Holland Walk?"

"Oh yes, sir, but it was a case of suicide."

"I don't agree."

"But surely, sir, the jury brought it in suicide?"

"The coroner's jury did-in spite of the coroner-but it may come before another jury yet, Mullins! I remember the case perfectly; the medical evidence was that the shot had been fired at arm's length. That isn't the range at which we usually bring ourselves down! Then there was nothing to show that the man ever possessed a pistol, or even the price of one; he was so stony it would have gone up the spout long before. The very same point crops up in the case of this poor boy. Who says he ever had a revolver in his life? His father tells me explicitly that he never had; I happened to ask the question," added Thrush, without explaining in what connection.