“My name is Topham Vinson,” said one of the swaddled men in a sepulchral voice. “I’m the Home Secretary, but I can’t force you to come down and speak to me because of that. I can only make it more or less worth your while.”
He was fishing for his sovereign-case as he spoke. In another minute the private door had shut behind him and Doctor Dollar, and an obsequious sack of humanity shuffled before them into a sanctum still redolent of a somewhat highly-seasoned meal.
“I remember ‘aving it in the thop,” said the unkempt head protruding from the sack. “But I can’t thay ‘ow it came here — that I can thwear in a court of juthtith, my lord! It’th a narthy, beathly thing, but I thwear it wath here when I took over the bithneth.”
“I don’t care how or when it came here,” said Topham Vinson, counting the sovereigns in the gold case attached to the watch-chain of other memories. “I want to know if you remember selling this life-preserver?”
“Yeth, I do!”
“When?”
“It would be — let me thee — thome time lartht October or November.”
“Do you remember who bought it?”
“Yeth — a young lady!”
Dollar breathed again. The man did not know her name; at first he was extremely shaky on the point of personal appearance. But the doctor assisted him by unscrupulously suggesting a number of marked characteristics which Lady Vera Moyle did not happen to possess. The man fell straight into the trap, recalled every imaginary feature, and finally earned big gold by quite convincingly connecting the sale of the life-preserver with the date of the great women’s raid. Mr. Vinson looked very stern as he led the way out into the street; and it was he who sharply woke the little chauffeur, who was snoring heartily over his wheel.
“I like that lad,” he muttered in the car. “He does nothing by halves. No more do I! Do you mind dropping me first at Portman Square?”
Dollar gave the order, and they slid through the empty streets as though man and car were fresh from the garage. There was not a soul in Portman Square, or a light in any of the houses except the Home Secretary’s. They had telephoned through from Stockersham after his departure, and the door opened as he emptied his remaining sovereigns into the chauffeur’s hand, before taking Dollar’s with no lack of warmth.
“I can’t ask you in this time,” said Topham Vinson, smiling. “Apart from the hour, I’ve got to go straight to the telephone, get through to Pentonville, and spoil the Governor’s night!”
“Reprieved?” gasped the doctor. It was the one word that would come.
The Home Secretary nodded rather grimly, but was smiling as he shut the door almost on the hand with which John Dollar would have seized his once more. There was a shooting of bolts inside.
Dollar turned slowly round, wondering if at last he could tell the little driver something about the night’s enterprise in which he had played so heroic a part. There was no need. The driver had kept eyes and ears wide open — and collapsed once more over the wheel. This time it was not in sleep, but in a dead faint; and the driving goggles were all awry, the driver’s hat had tumbled off, the driver’s hair had broken bounds.
It was a girl’s hair, and the girl was Lady Vera Moyle.
A HOPELESS CASE
Alfred Croucher had the refreshing attribute of looking almost as great a ruffian as he really was. His eyes swelled with a vulgar cunning, his mouth was coarse and pitiless; no pedestal of fine raiment could have corrected so low a cast of countenance, or enabled its possessor to pass for a moment as a gentleman or a decent liver. But he had often looked a worse imitation than on the morning of his triumphant exit from the jail, his bullet head diminished in a borrowed cap, his formidable physique tempered by a Burberry all too sober for his taste.
Nor was that all the change in Mr. Croucher at this agreeable crisis of his career. The bulging eyes were glazed with a wonder which quite eclipsed the light of triumph; and they were fixed, in unwilling fascination, upon the tall figure to which the borrowed plumes belonged, whom he had never beheld before that hour, but at whose heels he trotted from the bowels of the prison to the motor-car flashing in the sun beyond the precincts.
“‘Alf a mo’!” cried Croucher, making a belated stand instead of jumping in as he was bid. “I didn’t rightly catch your name inside, let alone wot you got to do with me an’ my affairs. If you come from my s’lic’tor, I should like to know why; if you’re on the religious lay, ‘ere’s your ‘at an’ coat, and I won’t trouble you for a lift.”
“My name is Dollar,” replied the motorist. “My business is neither legal nor religious, and it need not necessarily be medical, though I do happen to be a doctor. I came at the request of a friend of yours, in that friend’s car, to see if there’s nothing we can do to make up to you for all you’ve been through.”
“A friend of mine!” ejaculated Croucher, with engaging incredulity.
The doctor smiled, but dryly, as he had spoken. “It’s one of the many unknown friends you have gained lately, Mr. Croucher. And I should like to make one more, if only to the extent of a little spin and some breakfast at my house. There is more sympathy for you than you seem to realize, and one or two of us are ready to show it in any way you will permit. But I wouldn’t stand here, unless you want a public demonstration first.”
Mr. Croucher decided to disregard the suspicions that a kindness always excited in his mind, and took his place in the car without further argument or a second look at the handful of the curious already collecting on the pavement. In a moment he was wondering why he had been such a fool as to hesitate at all. The car slid out of the shadow of the prison into the sunlight of a bright spring morning, over a sparkling Thames, and through the early traffic without let or hitch. And the gentleman in the car knew how to hold his tongue, and to submit himself to sidelong inspection as a gentleman should. But little had Croucher made of him by Welbeck Street, except that he looked too knowing to be a crank, and not half soft enough for his notion of the good Samaritan.
Breakfast removed any lingering misgivings, but might have created them in a more sophisticated mind. It was an English breakfast fit for a foreign potentate; there were soles, kidneys, eggs and bacon, hot rolls, and lashings of such coffee as made Mr. Croucher forget a previous craving for alcohol. He thought it funny that so generous a repast should be served on a black old table without a cloth, and he did not fancy the leathern chairs with the great big nails, more fit for a museum than a private gentleman’s house. But a subsequent cigar, in which the private gentleman did not join him, was up to the visitor’s highest standard, and the subject of a more articulate appreciation than all that had gone before.
“You shall smoke the box if you care to stay with me,” said Doctor Dollar, with a warmer smile.
“Stay with you!” exclaimed Croucher, suffering a return of his worst suspicions. “Why should I stay with you?”
“Because there are worse places, Croucher, and one of them has left you a bit of a wreck.”
“A bit of one!” cried the other, in a sudden snarling whine. “They’ve just about done me in, doctor, if you want to know. Two munfs’ ‘ard, that I was never ordered, on top of one in the condemned cell for what I never done! That’s ‘ow they’ve tret me — somefink crool — wuss than wot you’d treat a dawg wot give you ‘ydrophobia. And wot ‘ad I done? ‘Elped meself when the stuff was under my nose, an’ me starvin’, an’ the jooler’s winder ready broke for a cove by them as never ‘ad his temptitions. I don’t say it was right, mind you; but that much I did do, and not what they said I ‘ad an’ couldn’t prove. They couldn’t prove it, because I never done it; they couldn’t ‘ang me, because they didn’t dare; but they made me sweat an’ shiver just the same. They took ten years off of me life; they give me such a time as I shan’t forget till my dying day. And as if that wasn’t thick enough, they give me two munfs’ ‘ard on their own — no judge or jury for that little lot — an’ turn me out wot you calls a bit of a wreck,
but I calls a creepin’ corpse!”
And the animated remains wiped a forehead wet already with the throes of deglutition, and eyes that were not wet at all, before applying a flickering light to his neglected Upmann.
“What you say is perfectly fair,” observed the doctor, in a sadly unimpassioned tone; “but it is also fair to remember that others have been saying it for you for some time past, and that you are free this morning as the result. I confess I feared they might keep you longer; but I evidently had not your grasp of the niceties of your actual offense. As to your mental and bodily sufferings, I can see some of the effects for myself, and those at least I could undo. That was the idea in meeting you, and perhaps I ought to say at once that it was not my idea. It was that of the unknown friend of whom I have already spoken; but I am prepared to carry it out. I run a kind of nursing home, here in my house, and there’s a bed ready for you if you care to occupy it.”
“A nursing ‘ome!” said Croucher, shrinking from a vision of lint and ligatures. “There’s nuffunk so much the matter with me that I want to go into an ‘ome.”
“Nothing that rest could not cure — rest and diet — I agree,” said the doctor, with an eye on the empty dishes.
“But won’t it cost a lot?” inquired Croucher, thinking of the kidneys especially. “I’m stony-broke, you see,” he explained with increased bitterness.
“Our friend insists on paying the bill,” said the doctor, grimly.
“And who is our wonderful friend, doctor, when ‘e or she’s at ‘ome?”
Doctor Dollar laughed as he pushed back his chair. “That’s the one thing you mustn’t ask me; but come up and see the room before you make up your mind against it.”
It was at the top and back of the house, less lofty than those into which the Home Secretary had peeped on a previous occasion, but similarly appointed, and more attractive in the morning light and that of a fire already crackling in the grate. By the fireside stood a white wicker chair and a glass table strewn with the newest and lightest of monthly and weekly literature; ash-trays and match-boxes were in comfortable evidence; a bed of vestal purity was turned down in readiness, and a suit of gay pajamas airing with a bathgown on a set of bright brass pipes.
“The bathroom is next door,” explained the doctor; “you would have it practically to yourself, but your room would be your castle.”
And he pointed out an efficient bolt upon the door.
“You wouldn’t lock me in on the other side?” suggested Croucher suspiciously.
“Certainly not; you may have the key; but I should expect you to keep to your own floor, and, of course, to the house. You would not be a prisoner in any sense; but if you went out, Croucher, I’m afraid you would have to stay out. Otherwise my treatment would not have a fair chance; what you require, in the first instance, is absolute rest and no more truck with the outside world than you had where you have been.”
“An’ good ‘olesome grub?” suggested Croucher with another slant of his goggle eyes.
“And plenty of square meals. Perhaps not so square as this morning’s, because you won’t have any exercise; but that sort of thing.”
“A little drop of anythin’ to drink, doctor?”
“With your meals, and in moderation, by all means; but don’t ask me for nightcaps, and don’t try to smuggle anything in.”
“I wouldn’t do such a thing!” exclaimed Croucher, with virtuous decision. “Doctor, I’m your man, and ready to turn in as soon as ever you like.”
And a shabby waistcoat hung unbuttoned at the swoop of a horned thumb.
“One moment,” said the doctor. “If you are really coming to me, and coming to stay, I am to telephone to my tailor, who will take some little time getting here.”
“Your tailor!” cried Croucher. “Where the dooce does ‘e come in?”
“You may well ask!” replied Dollar with involuntary candor. “That friend in need, who was the first to assert your innocence, and to whom you owe more than you will ever know, is anxious to give you a fresh start in life, and an entire new outfit in which to make it.”
“Well! I call that ‘andsome,” declared Alfred Croucher, for once without reserve. “I won’t arst ‘oo it is no more, but I shall live in ‘opes o’ findin’ out an’ sayin’ thanky like a man. Not but wot it’s right,” he added after all, “for them as is rich to ‘old out an ‘elpin’ ‘and to them as is pore and ‘ave been tret like I’ve been, through no fault o’ their own. But it ain’t everybody as sees it like that, an’ it makes you think better o’ the world when you strike them as does.”
“I agree,” said the doctor, in a tone entirely lost on his expansive patient.
“I’m griteful to ‘im,” that worthy went so far as to assert, “and to you too, sir, if it comes to that.”
Doctor Dollar took the opportunity of being no less explicit in his turn.
“There’s no reason why it should come to that, Croucher, I assure you. I can not too strongly impress on you that anything I do for you is by business arrangement with the friend who takes this extraordinary interest in your career.”
In this statement, but especially in its relative clause, there was a note of sheer resentment which recalled other notes and other clauses to the retentive memory of Mr. Croucher. In a flash the lot had fused in his suspicious mind, and so visibly that Dollar was relieved to find himself the object of suspicion.
“You talk as if it went against your grain,” said Croucher, with a growl and a show of growler’s teeth. “I ‘ope you don’t think I went an’ done it all the time, do yer?”
“I don’t follow you, Croucher.”
“I mean the big job — the first job — the one I very near swung for!” muttered the fellow, hoarse and hot with evident emotion.
“No; indeed I don’t,” responded the doctor, in an unexpected voice; and he sighed, as though to think that his sentiments toward his patient should have been so misunderstood.
Such at least was the patient’s final interpretation of all that was unsatisfactory in the doctor’s manner; and if a doubt still rankled in his mind, it was but the crumpled petal in what was almost literally a bed of roses. Bed and room alike were the most luxurious in which Alfred Croucher had ever lain; after prison they were as the seventh heaven after the most excruciating circle of Dante’s Inferno. He stretched his great limbs in peace ineffable, fell asleep dreaming of the fine flash suits for which they had been duly measured, and was never decently awake until the evening.
A substantial tea, when he did wake up, was the least they could provide after neglecting to rouse a man for his midday meal; but a distinct grievance on that score was forgot in the appetite that accrued for dinner, and the infinitely tactful choice of the eventful viands. Steak and onions was the strong act of a romantic drama after the very heart of this transpontine rough. If he had been shown a bill of fare, Alfred Croucher would have chosen steak and onions, with Welsh rarebit to follow; and Welsh rarebit did follow, as if by magic. There was rather less to be said for the drink; the patient could have done with a longer and a stronger draught. But it was a drop of good stuff, if Mr. Croucher was any judge; and he decided not to create a possibly prejudicial impression by complaints of quality or quantity.
“You done me top-’ole,” he murmured, rolling his bulbs of eyes when the doctor stood over him once more. “Top-’ole, you ‘ave, and no error. I never struck a nicer bit o’ fillet. Saucy glass o’ wine that, too. Not that I was ever much ‘and at the liquor, but there are times w’en it seems to do yer good.”
“You shall continue to take it, medicinally,” returned Dollar, gravely; “but don’t count on the type of fare you’ve had to-day. Three meals in future, but rather lighter ones. The first day was different, I tried to put myself in your place, and am glad I seem to have succeeded on the whole. But remember you are here to lie low, and that doesn’t do on fighting food. Sufficient for the day, Croucher! Here are some flowers from the friend who works by
stealth, and these are the weeds I promised you this morning. You might do worse than judge the givers by their gifts.”
It was perhaps as well that Alfred Croucher did not pause to puzzle out that saying, for the rare blooms were as pearls before his kindred of the sty, but the box of Upmanns as a trough of offal. One was ignited without delay; yet it was hardly a matter of hours before the chartered sluggard was blissfully asleep once more, his door locked and bolted on principle, and a red fire dying in the grate.
II
It might have been a falling coal that woke him up. Such was the innocent Croucher’s first impression. But in that case it was nothing less than a shower of coals, a gentle but continuous downpour, and they fell with a curiously crisp and metallic tinkle. Moreover, the sound was not from the fire after all, but apparently from the window on the opposite side of the room.
Croucher lay listening until his quickened senses could no longer be deceived. Somebody was at his window, the dormer window that anybody could get at over the leads, that ought to have been securely barred but wasn’t, as he suddenly remembered with aggrieved dismay. He had himself considered that unprotected window and those conducive leads, in one of his last waking moments, as a not impossible solution of the whisky problem.
But this was different; this was awful; this was a case for alarming the house without scruple or delay. It should have been a great moment for a bit of an expert, who had once served the humane equivalent of seven years for an ambitious burglary of his own; but the defect of character which had spelled failure on that occasion, when an elderly householder had held him up with an unloaded revolver, rendered Mr. Croucher incapable of appreciating the present situation as it deserved. He was far too shaken to think of the former affair, or to feel for a moment like a ‘busman on his proverbial holiday or an actor at the front of the house. He did feel bitterly indignant that a patient in a nursing home should be exposed to such terrors by night; and he had got as far as his elbow toward a display of spirit (and incipient virtue) when the catch flew back with as much noise as he might have made himself. Before more could happen, Mr. Croucher had relapsed upon his pillow with a stentorian snore.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 504