The Camera Fiend Part 20

"It's no use asking me, Mr. Upton."

"But I don't understand the question."

"Is that true?"

"No," he muttered; "it isn't."

She was leaning over to him; he felt it, without looking up.

"Mr. Upton," she said, speaking quickly in the undertone they were both instinctively adopting, "you know now what I thought about you at first.

I won't say what made me; but that was what I thought, but could hardly believe, and never will again. It makes it all the more a mystery, your being here. I can't ask my uncle-he tells me nothing-but there's something I can and must ask you."

Pocket hung his head. He knew what was coming. It came.

"My uncle brought you here, Mr. Upton, on the very morning that thing happened they were calling out about to-day. In the Park. It is to the Park he goes so often in the early morning with his camera! How can I say what I want to say? But, if you think, you will see that everything points to it; especially the way he ran out for that paper-and hid the truth when he came in!"

Pocket looked up at last.

"I know the truth."

"About the arrest?"

"Yes; it was quite obvious, and he admitted it when you'd gone."

"Why not before?"

"I couldn't tax him about it in front of you," he muttered, looking up and down quickly, unable to face her fierce excitement.

"Do tell me what it is you both know about this dreadful case!"

"I can't," the boy said hoa.r.s.ely; "don't ask me."

"Then you know who did it. I can see you do."

There was a new anguish even in her whisper; he could hear what she thought.

"It was n.o.body you care about," he mumbled, hoa.r.s.er than before, and his head lower.

"You don't mean--"

She stopped aghast.

"I can't say another word-and you won't say another to me!" he added, a bitter break in his m.u.f.fled voice. He longed to tell her it had been an accident, to tell her all; but he had given his word to Baumgartner not to confide in her, and he did not think that he had broken it yet.

"You don't know me," she whispered, and for a moment her hand lay warm in his; "trust me! I'm your friend in spite of all you've said-or done!"

Dr. Baumgartner might have been ten minutes getting rid of the intruder; before that he had been first amazed and then relieved to hear the piano in the drawing-room; and that was all his anxious ear had heard of either boy or girl during his absence. Yet the boy was not standing over the piano, as he might have been, for Phillida was trying to recall one of the concert songs he said his sister sang. Pocket, however, was staring out into the garden with a troubled face, which he turned abruptly, aggressively, and yet apprehensively to meet the doctor's.

But the doctor no longer looked suspiciously from him to Phillida, but stood beaming on them both, and rubbing his hands as though he had done something very clever indeed.

BEFORE THE STORM

Sunday in London has got itself a bad name among those who occasionally spend one at their hotel, and miss the band, their letters, and the theatre at night; but at Dr. Baumgartner's there was little to distinguish the seventh day from the other six. The pa.s.sover of the postman, that boon to residents and grievance of the traveller, was a normal condition in the dingy house of no address. More motor-horns were heard in the distance, and less heavy traffic; the sound of church bells came as well through the open windows; then the street-door shut, and there was a long period without Phillida, until it opened and shut again, and in she peeped with her parasol and Prayer-book, as though they were all quite ordinary people without a guilty secret among them!

Such was the Sunday morning. It was fine and warm. Dr. Baumgartner pottered about his untidy little garden, a sun-trap again as Pocket had seen it first; the Turk's head perspired from internal and external heat, but its rich yellow, shading into richer auburn, clashed rather with a red geranium which the doctor wore jauntily in the b.u.t.ton-hole of his black alpaca jacket.

It was Phillida who had given him the flower at breakfast. She grew what she could in the neglected garden; the plants in the miniature conservatory were also hers, though the doctor took a perfunctory interest in them, obviously on her account. It was obvious at least to Pocket Upton. He saw all these things, and what they meant. He was not without his little gifts of observation and deduction. He noticed the difference in Baumgartner's voice when he addressed his niece, the humane kindling of the inexorable eyes, and to-day he thought he saw a reciprocal softening on the part of Phillida. There had been none to see yesterday or the day before. It was her uncle whom the girl had seemed unable to forgive for the unseemly scuffle of Friday morning. But now it was as though memory and common fairness had set years of kindness against these days of unendurable mystery, and bidden her endure them with a better grace. If she felt she had been disloyal to him, she could not have made sweeter amends than she did by many an un.o.btrusive little office. And she exchanged no more confidences with poor Pocket.

Yet these two were together most of the day; all three were; and it was a strangely peaceful day, a day of natural hush, and the cessation of life's hostilities, such as is sometimes almost pointedly bestowed before or after a time of strain. It was a day on which Pocket certainly drew his spiritual breath more freely than on any other since the dire catastrophe.

There were few fresh clouds; perhaps the only one before evening was the removal of the book on hallucinations in which Pocket had become interested on the Sat.u.r.day afternoon. It was no longer lying about the room as he had left it. There was a gap in its place in the shelf. The book had been taken away from him; it made him feel as though he were back again at his very first dame's school.

And the church bells sent him back to the school he was at now! They were more mellow and sedate than the chapel bells there, that rang you down the hill at the double if you were late and not too asthmatical; and Pocket saw and heard himself puffing up the opposite hill to take his place for chapel call-over in the school quad. The fellows would be forming in squads there now, all in their Sunday tails or Eton jackets as the case might be; of course Pocket was in tails, though still rather proud of them. The masters, in their silk hoods or their rabbit-skins were prominent in his mind's eye. Then came the cool and s.p.a.cious chapel, with its marble pulpit and its brazen candelabra, and rows of chastened chapel faces, that he knew better than his own, giving a swing to chants which ran in his head at the very thought. How real it all was to him, and how unreal this Sunday morning, in the sunny room with the battle engravings over the book-cases, and the walnut chairs in front of them, and Dr.

Baumgartner in and out in his alpaca coat! After chapel he would have gone for a walk with Blundell minor, most probably, or else written his letter home and got it over. And that chapter would have ended with cold boiled beef and apple-pie with cloves in it at Spearman's.

The Italian restaurant which sent in Dr. Baumgartner's meals certainly provided richer fare than that. There was a top-floor of soup in the portable contrivance, and before the meat a risotto, which the doctor praised without a single patriotic reservation.

"Italy is a country where one can live," said he. "Not that you must understand me to be altogether down on your own fatherland, my young fellow; there is something to be said for London, especially on a Sunday.

No organs from my dear Italy, none of those so-called German bands which we in Germany would not tolerate for a moment; no postman every hour of the day, and no gaolbirds crying false news down the streets."

Pocket looked for a grim twinkle in the speaker's eye, but found it fixed on Phillida, who had not looked up. Instinct prompted Pocket to say something quickly; that he had not seen a postman there, was the actual remark.

"That is because I conduct my correspondence at my club," explained the doctor. "I give out no other address; then you only get your letters when you want them."

"Do you often go there?" the boy ventured to inquire, devoutly wishing he would go that afternoon.

"Not when I have visitors," replied Baumgartner, with a smiling bow. "And I look upon my patients in that light," he added, with benevolent but futile hypocrisy, embarra.s.sing enough to Phillida, but not more so than if she had still believed it to be the truth.

Silence ensued until they were all in the other room; then the niece took refuge at her piano, and this time Pocket hung over her for an hour or more. He went through her music, and asked for everything that Lettice played or sang. Phillida would not sing to him, but she had the makings of a pianist. The boy's enthusiasm for the things he knew made her play then as well as ever he had heard them played. Even the doctor, dozing in the big chair with eyes that were never quite shut, murmured his approval more than once; he loved his Mendelssohn and Schubert, and had nothing to say against the Sousas and others that the boy picked out as well, and mentioned with ingenuous fervour in the same breath. Pocket would have sung himself if the doctor had not been there, for he had a bit of a voice when he was free from asthma; and once or twice he stopped listening to wonder at himself. Could he be the boy who had killed a man, however innocently, three days before! Could it be he whom the police might come and carry off to prison at any moment? Was it true that he might never see his own people any more? Such questions appalled and stunned him; he could neither answer them nor realise their full import. They turned the old man in the chair, who alone could answer them, back into the goblin he had seemed at first. Yet they did give a certain shameful zest and excitement even to this quiet hour of motley music in his presence.

Besides, there was always one comfort to remember now: his letter home.

Of course Lettice would show it to their father; of course something would be done at once. Shame and sorrow for the accident would be his for ever; but as for his present situation, there were moments when Pocket felt rather like a story-book cabin-boy luxuriously marooned, and already in communication with the mainland.

He wondered what steps had been taken so far. No doubt his father had come straight up to town; it was a moving thought that he might be within a mile of that very room at that very moment. Would all the known circ.u.mstances of his disappearance be published broadcast in the papers?

Pocket felt he would have red ears all his life if that were done; and yet it had hurt him a little to gather from Baumgartner that so far there was nothing in the papers to say he had so much as disappeared. That fact must have been known since Thursday or Friday. Once it did cross his mind that to keep it from his mother they would have to keep it out of the papers. Well, as long as she did not know!

He pictured the blinds down in her room; it was the hour of her afternoon rest. If he were at home, he would be going about quietly. Lettice would be reading or writing in the morning-room, most probably. Father would be gloating over his rhododendrons with a strong cigar; in his last letter the boy had heard how beautiful they were. Horace might be with him, smoking a cigarette, if he and Fred were not playing tennis. Their pocket edition had not to look very far ahead to see himself smoking proper cigarettes with the others, to hear his own voice telling them of his own experience-of this very hour at Dr. Baumgartner's. Even Fred and Horace would have to listen to that! Pocket looked at the long lean figure in the chair, at the eyelids never quite closed, and so imparting at once a softening and a sinister effect. He noted the drooping geranium in his b.u.t.tonhole, and grey ash from the Turk's head sprinkling the black alpaca coat. It brought the very phrases of a graphic portrait almost to his lips.

Yet if anybody had told the boy he was beginning to gloat over the silver lining to the cloud that he was under, and that it was not silver at all but one of the baser metals of the human heart, how indignantly he would have denied it at first, how humbly seen it in the end!

When Phillida went off to make the tea her uncle sought his room and sponge, but did not neglect to take Pocket with him. Pocket was for going higher up to his own room; but Baumgartner said that would only make more work, in a tone precluding argument. It struck Pocket that the doctor really needed sleep, and was irritable after a continuous struggle against it. If so, it served him right for not trusting a fellow-and for putting Boismont in the waste-paper basket, by Jove!

There was no mistaking the red book there; it was one of the first things Pocket noticed, while the doctor was stooping over his basin in the opposite corner; and the schoolboy's strongest point, be it remembered, was a stubborn tenacity of his own devices. He made a dive at the waste-paper basket, meaning to ask afterwards if the doctor minded his reading that book. But the question never was asked; the book was still in the basket when the doctor had finished drying his face; and the boy was staring and swaying as though he had seen the dead.