The Camera Fiend Part 25

"He lied to you, and he's been lying to me!"

"He may have been justified."

"You wait till you hear all he's done! I don't mean taking my revolver from me; he was justified in that, if you like, after what I'd done with it. He may even have been justified in taking away my clothes, if he couldn't trust me to keep my word and stay in this awful house. But that isn't the worst. He encouraged me to write a letter home, to my own poor people who may think me dead--"

"Well?"

There was more sympathy in her voice, more anxiety; but his was breaking with his great grief and grievance.

"He took it out himself, to send it to the General Post Office to catch the country post. So he said; and I was so grateful to him! On Sat.u.r.day morning he said they must have got it; he kept on saying so, and you don't know how thankful I was every time! But yesterday afternoon I found sc.r.a.ps of my letter in the waste-paper basket in his room; he'd never posted it at all!"

Phillida looked shocked and distressed enough at this; her liquid eyes filled with sympathy as they gazed upon the wretched youth.

"I'm a fool to blub about it-but-but that was the Limit!" he croaked, and worked the poor word till it came distinctly.

"It was cruel," she allowed. "It must seem so, at any rate; it does to me; but then I understand so little. I can't think why he's hiding you, or why you let yourself be hidden."

"But you must know what I've done; you must guess?"

The revolver was still in his hand; he gave it a guilty glance, and she looked from it to him without recoiling.

"Of course I guessed on Sat.u.r.day." There was a studious absence of horror in her tone. "Yet I couldn't believe it, unless it was an accident. And if it was an accident--"

"It was one!" he choked. "It was the most absolute accident that ever happened; he saw it; he can tell you; but he never told me till hours afterwards. I was nearly dead with asthma; he brought me here, he was frightfully good to me, I'm grateful enough for all that. But he should have told me before the accident became a crime! When he did tell me I lost my head, and begged him to keep me here, and afterwards when I came to my senses he wouldn't let me go. I needn't remind you of that morning!

After that I promised to stay on, and I'd have kept all my promises if only my letter had gone to my poor people!"

He told her what a guarded letter it had been, only written to let them know he was alive, and that with the doctor's expressed approval. But now he had learnt his lesson, and he was going to play the game. It was more than ever the game with that poor fellow lying in prison for what he had never done. And so the whole story would be in to-morrow's papers, with the single exception of Dr. Baumgartner's name.

"Nothing shall make me give that," said Pocket valiantly; "on your account, if not on his!"

Phillida encouraged his new resolution without comment on this last a.s.surance. She had stooped, and was picking up the unbroken negatives and putting them back in the rack; he followed her example, and collected the broken bits, while she put the rack back in its place, and certain splinters in theirs, until the locker shut without showing much damage.

Pocket was left with the fragmentary negatives on his hands.

"I should throw those away," said Phillida. "And now, by the time you're ready to go, I'll have a cup of tea ready for you."

They faced each other in the rosy light, now doubly diluted by the open door, and Pocket did not move. He wanted to say something first, and he was too shy to say it. Shyness had come upon him all at once; hitherto they had both been like young castaways, finely regardless of appearances, he of his bare feet and throat, she of her dressing-gown and her bedroom slippers. She was unconscious or careless still, as with a brother; but he had become the very embodiment of mauvaise honte, an awful example of the awkward age; and it was all the fault of what he suddenly felt he simply must say.

"But-but I don't want to leave you!" he blurted out at last.

"But I want you to," she returned promptly and firmly, though not without a faint smile.

It was leaving her with a villain that he minded; but he could not get that out, except thus bluntly, nor could he denounce the doctor now as he had done when his blood was up. Besides, the man was a different man to his niece; all that redeemed him went out to her. Pocket did not think he was peculiar there; in fact, he thought romantically enough about the girl, with her dark hair all over her pink dressing-gown, and ivory insteps peeping out of those soft slippers especially when the vision was lost for ever, and he upstairs making himself as presentable as he could in a few minutes. But it seemed she was busy in the same way, and she took longer over it. He found the breakfast things on the table, the kettle on the gas-stove, but no Phillida to make the tea. He could not help wishing she would be quick; if he was going, the sooner he went the better, but he was terribly divided in his desires. He hated the thought of deserting a comrade, who was also a girl, and such a girl! He could only face it with the fixed intention of coming back to the rescue of his heroine, he the hero of their joint romance. But for his own immediate freedom he was already unheroically eager. And yet he could deliberately fit the broken negatives together, on the white tablecloth, partly to pa.s.s the time, partly out of a boyish bravado which involved little real risk; for the doctor had not yet been gone an hour; and a loaded revolver is a loaded revolver, be it brandished by man or boy.

The piecing of the plates was like a children's puzzle, only easier, because the pieces were not many. One of the reconstructed negatives was of painful interest; it reminded Pocket of the fatal one smashed to atoms by Baumgartner in the pink porcelain trough. There were trees again, only leafless, and larger, and there was a larger figure sprawling on a bench.

Pocket felt he must have a print of this; he remembered having seen printing-frames and tubes of sensitised paper in the other room; and hardly had he filled his frame and placed it in position, than Phillida ran down stairs, and he told her what he had done.

"I wish you hadn't," she said nervously, as she made mechanical preparations with pot and kettle. "It would only make matters worse if my uncle came in now."

"But he wasn't back on Friday before ten or eleven."

"You never know!"

Pocket spoke out with a truculence which his brothers had inherited, but not he, valiantly as he might try to follow a family example.

"I don't care! I can't help it if he does come. I'll tell him exactly what I've done, and why, and exactly what I'm going to do next. I give him leave to stop me if he can."

"I'm afraid he won't wait for that. But I wish you had waited for his leave before printing his negative."

Pocket jumped up from table, and ran to the printing-frame in the sunny room at the back. He had been reminded of it only just in time. It was a rather dark print that he first examined, one half at a time, and then extracted from the frame. It was meshed with white veils, showing the joins of the broken plate. But it had been an excellent negative originally. And it was still good enough to hold Pocket rooted to the carpet in the sunny room, until Phillida came in after him, and stood looking over his shoulder.

"I know that place!" said she at once. "It's Holland Walk, in Kensington."

He turned to her quickly.

"The place where there was a suicide or something not long ago?"

"The very place!" exclaimed the girl, looking up from the darkening print.

"I remember my uncle would take me to see it next day. He's always so interested in mysteries. I'm sure that's the very spot he showed me as the one where it must have happened."

"Did he take the photograph then?"

"No; he hadn't his camera with him."

"Then this is the suicide, or whatever it was!" cried Pocket, in uncontrollable excitement. "It's not only the place; it's the thing itself. Look at that man on the bench!"

The girl took a long look nearer the window.

"How horrible!" she shuddered. "His head looks as though it were falling off! He might be dying."

"Dying or dead," said Pocket, "at the very second the plate was exposed!"

She looked at him in blank horror. His own horror was no less apparent, but it was more understanding. He had Baumgartner's own confession of his attempts to secure admission to hospital death-beds, even to executions; he expounded Baumgartner on the whole subject, briefly, clumsily, inaccurately enough, and yet with a certain graphic power which brought those incredible theories home to his companion as forcibly as Baumgartner himself had brought them home to Pocket. It was the first she had ever heard of them. But then he had never discussed his photography with her, never showed her plate or print. That it was not merely a hobby, that he was an inventor, a pioneer, she had always felt, without dreaming in what direction or to what extent. Even now she seemed unable to grasp the full significance of the print from the broken negative; and when she would have examined it afresh, there was nothing to see; the June sunshine had done its work, and blotted out the repulsive picture even as she held it in her hands.

"Then what do you think?" she asked at last; her voice was thin and strained with formless terrors.

"I think that Dr. Baumgartner has the strangest power of any human being I ever heard of; he can make you do anything he likes, whether you like it yourself or not. The newspapers have been raking up this case in connection with-mine-and I see that one theory was that the man in this broken negative committed suicide. Well, if he did, I firmly believe that Dr. Baumgartner was there and willed him to do it!"

"He must have been there if he took the photograph."

"Is there another man alive who tries these things? I've told you all he told me about it, but I haven't told you all he said about the value of human life."

"Nor need you! He makes no secret of his opinion about that!"

"Then put the two things together, and where do they lead you? To these murders committed with the mad idea of taking the spirit in its flight from the flesh; that's his own way of putting it, not mine."

"But I thought your case was an accident pure and simple?"