Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “If you do I’ll blow a police-whistle!” she said. “We have one — it won’t take an instant. You shan’t come out the front way, and you’ll be stopped if you climb the wall!”

  “But why? Do you take me for a lunatic, or what?” he gasped out bitterly.

  “Never mind what I take you for!”

  “You’re treating me as though I were one!”

  “You’ve got to stay and see my uncle.”

  “I shan’t! Let me go, I tell you! You shall you shall! I hate your uncle, and you too!” But that was only half true, even then while he was struggling almost as passionately as though the girl had been another boy. He could not strike her; but that was the only line he drew, for she would grapple with him, and release himself he must. Over went walnut whatnots, and out came mutterings that made him hotter than ever for very shame. But he did not hate her even for what she made him say; all his hatred and all his fear were of the dreadful doctor whose will she was obeying; and both were at their highest pitch when the door burst open, and in he sprang to part them with a look. But it was a look that hurt more than word or blow; never had poor Pocket endured or imagined such a steady, silent downpour of indignation and contempt. It turned his hatred almost in a moment to hatred of himself; his fear it only increased.

  “Leave us, Phillida,” said Baumgartner at last. Phillida was in tears, and Pocket had been hanging his head; but now he sprang towards her.

  “Forgive me!” he choked, and held the door open for her, and shut it after her with all the gallantry the poor lad had left.

  ON PAROLE

  “So,” said Dr. Baumgartner, “you not only try to play me false, but you seize the first opportunity when my back is turned! Not only do you break your promise, but you break it with brutal violence to a young lady who has shown you nothing but kindness!”

  Pocket might have replied with justice that the young lady had brought the violence upon herself; but that would have made him out a greater cad than ever, in his own eyes at any rate. He preferred to defend his honour as best he could, which was chiefly by claiming the right to change his mind about what was after all his own affair. But that was precisely what Baumgartner would not allow for a moment; it was just as much his affair as accessory after the fact, and in accordance with their mutual and final agreement overnight. Pocket could only rejoin that he had never meant to give the doctor away at all.

  “I daresay not!” said Baumgartner sardonically. “It would have been dragged out of you all the same. I told you so yesterday, and you agreed with me. I put it most plainly to you as a case of then or never so far as owning up was concerned. You made your own bed with your eyes open, and I left you last night under the impression that you were going to lie on it like a man.”

  “Then why did you lock me in?” cried Pocket, pouncing on the one point on which he did not already feel grievously in the wrong. The doctor flattered him with a slight delay before replying.

  “There were so many reasons,” he said, with a sigh; “you mustn’t forget that you walk in your sleep, for one of them. We might have had you falling downstairs in the middle of the night; but I own that I was more prepared for the kind of relapse which appears to have overtaken you. I was afraid you had more on your soul than you could keep to yourself without my assistance, and that you would get brooding over what has happened until it drove you to make a clean breast of the whole thing. I tell you it’s no good brooding or looking back; take one more look ahead, and what do you see if you have your way? Humiliating notoriety for yourself, calamitous consequences in your own family, certain punishment for me!”

  “The consequences at home,” groaned Pocket, “will be bad enough whatever we do. I can’t bear to think of them! If only they had taken Bompas’s advice, and sent me round the world in the Seringapatam! I should have been at sea by this time, and out of harm’s way for the next three months.”

  “The Seringapatam?” repeated the doctor. “I never heard of her.”

  “You wouldn’t; she’s only a sailing vessel, but she carries passengers and a doctor, a friend of Dr. Bompas’s, who wanted to send me with him for a voyage round the world. But my people wouldn’t let me go. She sails this very day, and touches nowhere till she gets to Melbourne. If I could only raise the passage-money, or even stow away on board, I could go out in her still, and that would be the last of me for years and years!”

  It was not the last of him in his own mind; suddenly as the thought had come, and mad as it was, it flashed into the far future in the boy’s brain; and he saw himself making his fortune in a far land, turning it up in a single nugget, and coming home to tell of his adventures, bearded like the pard, another “dead man come to life,” after about as many years as the dream took seconds to fashion. And Baumgartner looked on as though following the same wild train of thought, as though it did not seem so wild to him, but extremely interesting; so that Pocket was quite disappointed when he shook his head.

  “A stowaway with an attack of asthma! I think I see my poor young fellow! 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 circumstances 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 do
ctor’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 hell! 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 noble 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 pagoda-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 Saturday 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 amusement; “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 asserted (by the omniscient butt 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 circumstances 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