“Good roads for motoring about here!” he said.
Lord Wrotham looked up, — then measuring the great height, muscular build, and commanding appearance of the speaker, nodded affably.
“First-rate!” he replied. “We had a splendid run from Cleeve Abbey.”
“Magnificent!” echoed Brookfield. “Not half a second’s stop all the way. We should have been far beyond Minehead by this time, if it hadn’t been for the break-down. We were racing from London to the Land’s End, — but we took a wrong turning just before we came to Cleeve — —”
“Oh! Took a wrong turning, did you?” And Tom leaned a little forward as though to hear more accurately. His face had grown deadly pale again, and he breathed quickly.
“Yes. We found ourselves quite close to Cleeve Abbey, but we didn’t stop to see old ruins this time, you bet! We just tore down the first lane we saw running back into the highroad, — a pretty steep bit of ground too — and, by Jove! — didn’t we whizz round the corner at the bottom! That was a near shave, I can tell you!”
“Ay, ay!” said Tom slowly, listening with an air of profound interest. “You’ve got a smart chauffeur, no doubt!”
“No chauffeur at all!” declared Brookfield, emphatically. “His lordship drives his car himself.”
There followed an odd silence. All the customers in the room, drinking and eating as many of them were, seemed to be under a dumb spell. Tom o’ the Gleam’s presence was at all times more or less of a terror to the timorous, and that he, who as a rule avoided strangers, should on his own initiative enter into conversation with the two motorists, was of itself a circumstance that awakened considerable wonder and interest. David Helmsley, sitting apart in the shadow, could not take his eyes off the gypsy’s face and figure, — a kind of fascination impelled him to watch with strained attention the dark shape, moulded with such herculean symmetry, which seemed to command and subdue the very air that gave it force and sustenance.
“His lordship drives his car himself!” echoed Tom, and a curious smile parted his lips, showing an almost sinister gleam of white teeth between his full black moustache and beard, — then, bringing his sombre glance to bear slowly down on Wrotham’s insignificant form, he continued,— “Are you his lordship?”
Wrotham nodded with a careless condescension, and, lighting a cigar, began to smoke it.
“And you drive your car yourself!” proceeded Tom,— “you must have good nerve and a keen eye!”
“Oh well!” And Wrotham laughed airily— “Pretty much so! — but I won’t boast!”
“How many miles an hour?” went on Tom, pursuing his inquiries with an almost morbid eagerness.
“Forty or fifty, I suppose — sometimes more. I always run at the highest speed. Of course that kind of thing knocks the motor to pieces rather soon, but one can always buy another.”
“True!” said Tom. “Very true! One can always buy another!” He paused, and seemed to collect his thoughts with an effort, — then noticing the half-glass of brandy he had left on the counter, he took it up and drank it all off at a gulp. “Have you ever had any accidents on the road?”
“Accidents?” Lord Wrotham put up an eyeglass. “Accidents? What do you mean?”
“Why, what should I mean except what I say!” And Tom gave a sudden loud laugh, — a laugh which made the hostess at the bar start nervously, while many of the men seated round the various tables exchanged uneasy glances. “Accidents are accidents all the world over! Haven’t you ever been thrown out, upset, shaken in body, broken in bone, or otherwise involved in mischief?”
Lord Wrotham smiled, and let his eyeglass fall with a click against his top waistcoat button.
“Never!” he said, taking his cigar from his mouth, looking at it, and then replacing it with a relish— “I’m too fond of my own life to run any risk of losing it. Other people’s lives don’t matter so much, but mine is precious! Eh, Brookfield?”
Brookfield chuckled himself purple in the face over this pleasantry, and declared that his lordship’s wit grew sharper with every day of his existence. Meanwhile Tom o’ the Gleam moved a step or two nearer to Wrotham.
“You’re a lucky lord!” he said, and again he laughed discordantly. “Very lucky! But you don’t mean to tell me that while you’re pounding along at full speed, you’ve never upset anything in your way? — never knocked down an old man or woman, — never run over a dog, — or a child?”
“Oh, well, if you mean that kind of thing!” murmured Wrotham, puffing placidly at his cigar— “Of course! That’s quite common! We’re always running over something or other, aren’t we, Brookie?”
“Always!” declared that gentleman pleasantly. “Really it’s half the fun!”
“Positively it is, don’t-cher-know!” and his lordship played again with his enamelled pig— “But it’s not our fault. If things will get into our way, we can’t wait till they get out. We’re bound to ride over them. Do you remember that old hen, Brookie?”
Brookfield spluttered into a laugh, and nodded in the affirmative.
“There it was skipping over the road in front of us in as great a hurry as ever hen was,” went on Wrotham. “Going back to its family of eggs per express waddle! Whiz! Pst — and all its eggs and waddles were over! By Jove, how we screamed! Ha — ha — ha! — he — he — he!”
Lord Wrotham’s laugh resembled that laugh peculiar to “society” folk, — the laugh civil-sniggering, which is just a tone between the sheep’s bleat and the peewit’s cry. But no one laughed in response, and no one spoke. Some heavy spell was in the air like a cloud shadowing a landscape, and an imaginative onlooker would have been inclined to think that this imperceptible mystic darkness had come in with Tom o’ the Gleam and was centralising itself round him alone. Brookfield, seeing that his lordly patron was inclined to talk, and that he was evidently anxious to narrate various “car” incidents, similar to the hen episode, took up the conversation and led it on.
“It is really quite absurd,” he said, “for any one of common sense to argue that a motorist can, could, or should pull up every moment for the sake of a few stray animals, or even people, when they don’t seem to know or care where they are going. Now think of that child to-day! What an absolute little idiot! Gathering wild thyme and holding it out to the car going full speed! No wonder we knocked it over!”
The hostess of the inn looked up quickly.
“I hope it was not hurt?” she said.
“Oh dear no!” answered Lord Wrotham lightly. “It just fell back and turned a somersault in the grass, — evidently enjoying itself. It had a narrow escape though!”
Tom o’ the Gleam stared fixedly at him. Once or twice he essayed to speak, but no sound came from his twitching lips. Presently, with an effort, he found his voice.
“Did you — did you stop the car and go back to see — to see if — if it was all right?” he asked, in curiously harsh, monotonous accents.
“Stop the car? Go back? By Jove, I should think not indeed! I’d lost too much time already through taking a wrong turning. The child was all right enough.”
“Are you sure?” muttered Tom thickly. “Are you — quite — sure?”
“Sure?” And Wrotham again had recourse to his eyeglass, which he stuck in one eye, while he fixed his interlocutor with a supercilious glance. “Of course I’m sure! What the devil d’ ye take me for? It was a mere beggar’s brat anyhow — there are too many of such little wretches running loose about the roads — regular nuisances — a few might be run over with advantage — Hullo! What now? What’s the matter? Keep your distance, please!” For Tom suddenly threw up his clenched fists with an inarticulate cry of rage, and now leaped towards Wrotham in the attitude of a wild beast springing on its prey. “Hands off! Hands off, I say! Damn you, leave me alone! Brookfield! Here! Some one get a hold of this fellow! He’s mad!”
But before Brookfield or any other man could move to his assistance, Tom had pounced upon him with all the fury of
a famished tiger.
“God curse you!” he panted, between the gasps of his labouring breath— “God burn you for ever in Hell!”
Down on the ground he hurled him, clutching him round the neck, and choking every attempt at a cry. Then falling himself in all his huge height, breadth, and weight, upon Wrotham’s prone body he crushed it under and held it beneath him, while, with appalling swiftness and vehemence, he plunged a drawn claspknife deep in his victim’s throat, hacking the flesh from left to right, from right to left with reckless ferocity, till the blood spurted about him in horrid crimson jets, and gushed in a dark pool on the floor.
Piercing screams from the women, groans and cries from the men, filled the air, and the lately peaceful scene was changed to one of maddening confusion. Brookfield rushed wildly through the open door of the inn into the village street, yelling: “Help! Help! Murder! Help!” and in less than five minutes the place was filled with an excited crowd. “Tom!” “Tom o’ the Gleam!” ran in frightened whispers from mouth to mouth. David Helmsley, giddy with the sudden shock of terror, rose shuddering from his place with a vague idea of instant flight in his mind, but remained standing inert, half paralysed by sheer panic, while several men surrounded Tom, and dragged him forcibly up from the ground where he lay, still grasping his murdered man. As they wrenched the gypsy’s grappling arms away, Wrotham fell back on the floor, stone dead. Life had been thrust out of him with the first blow dealt him by Tom’s claspknife, which had been aimed at his throat as a butcher aims at the throat of a swine. His bleeding corpse presented a frightful spectacle, the head being nearly severed from the body.
Brookfield, shaking all over, turned his back upon the awful sight, and kept on running to and fro and up and down the street, clamouring like a madman for the police. Two sturdy constables presently came, their appearance restoring something like order. To them Tom o’ the Gleam advanced, extending his blood-stained hands.
“I am ready!” he said, in a quiet voice. “I am the murderer!”
They looked at him. Then, by way of precaution, one of them clasped a pair of manacles on his wrists. The other, turning his eyes to the corpse on the floor, recoiled in horror.
“Throw something over it!” he commanded.
He was obeyed, and the dreadful remains of what had once been human, were quickly shrouded from view.
“How did this happen?” was the next question put by the officer of the law who had already spoken, opening his notebook.
A chorus of eager tongues answered him, Brookfield’s excited explanation echoing above them all. His dear friend, his great, noble, good friend had been brutally murdered! His friend was Lord Wrotham, of Wrotham Hall, Blankshire! A break-down had occurred within half a mile of Blue Anchor, and Lord Wrotham had taken rooms at the present inn for the night. His lordship had condescended to enter into a friendly conversation with the ruffian now under arrest, who, without the slightest cause or provocation whatsoever, had suddenly attacked and overthrown his lordship, and plunged a knife into his lordship’s throat! He himself was James Brookfield, proprietor of the Daily Post-Bag, the Pictorial Pie, and the Illustrated Invoice, and he should make this outrageous, this awful crime a warning to motorists throughout the world —— !”
“That will do, thank you,” said the officer briefly — then he gave a sharp glance around him— “Where’s the landlady?”
She had fled in terror from the scene, and some one went in search of her, returning with the poor woman and her two daughters, all of them deathly pale and shivering with dread.
“Don’t be frightened, mother!” said one of the constables kindly— “No harm will come to you. Just tell us what you saw of this affair — that’s all.”
Whereat the poor hostess, her narrative interrupted by tears, explained that Tom o’ the Gleam was a frequent customer of hers, and that she had never thought badly of him.
“He was a bit excited to-night, but he wasn’t drunk,” she said. “He told me he was ill, and asked for a glass of brandy. He looked as if he were in great pain, and I gave him the brandy at once and asked him to step inside the bar. But he wouldn’t do that, — he just stood talking with the gentlemen about motoring, and then something was said about a child being knocked over by the motor, — and all of a sudden — —”
Here her voice broke, and she sank on a seat half swooning, while Elizabeth, her eldest girl, finished the story in low, trembling tones. Tom o’ the Gleam meanwhile stood rigidly upright and silent. To him the chief officer of the law finally turned.
“Will you come with us quietly?” he asked, “or do you mean to give us trouble?”
Tom lifted his dark eyes.
“I shall give no man any more trouble,” he answered. “I shall go nowhere save where I am taken. You need fear nothing from me now. But I must speak.”
The officer frowned warningly.
“You’d better not!” he said.
“I must!” repeated Tom. “You think, — all of you, — that I had no cause — no provocation — to kill the man who lies there” — and he turned a fierce glance upon the covered corpse, from which a dark stream of blood was trickling slowly along the floor— “I swear before God that I had cause! — and that my cause was just! I had provocation! — the bitterest and worst! That man was a murderer as surely as I am. Look yonder!” And lifting his manacled hands he extended them towards the bench where lay the bundle covered with horse-cloth, which he had carried in his arms and set down when he had first entered the inn. “Look, I say! — and then tell me I had no cause!”
With an uneasy glance one of the officers went up to the spot indicated, and hurriedly, yet fearfully, lifted the horse-cloth and looked under it. Then uttering an exclamation of horror and pity, he drew away the covering altogether, and disclosed to view the dead body of a child, — a little curly-headed lad, — lying as if it were asleep, a smile on its pretty mouth, and a bunch of wild thyme clasped in the clenched fingers of its small right hand.
“My God! It’s Kiddie!”
The exclamation was uttered almost simultaneously by every one in the room, and the girl Elizabeth sprang forward.
“Oh, not Kiddie!” she cried— “Oh, surely not Kiddie! Oh, the poor little darling! — the pretty little man!”
And she fell on her knees beside the tiny corpse and gave way to a wild fit of weeping.
There was an awful silence, broken only by her sobbing. Men turned away and covered their eyes — Brookfield edged himself stealthily through the little crowd and sneaked out into the open air — and the officers of the law stood inactive. Helmsley felt the room whirling about him in a sickening blackness, and sat down to steady himself, the stinging tears rising involuntarily in his throat and almost choking him.
“Oh, Kiddie!” wailed Elizabeth again, looking up in plaintive appeal— “Oh, mother, mother, see! Grace come here! Kiddie’s dead! The poor innocent little child!” They came at her call, and knelt with her, crying bitterly, and smoothing back with tender hands the thickly tangled dark curls of the smiling dead thing, with the fragrance of wild thyme clinging about it, as though it were a broken flower torn from the woods where it had blossomed. Tom o’ the Gleam watched them, and his broad chest heaved with a sudden gasping sigh.
“You all know now,” he said slowly, staring with strained piteous eyes at the little lifeless body— “you understand, — the motor killed my Kiddie! He was playing on the road — I was close by among the trees — I saw the cursed car coming full speed downhill — I rushed to take the boy, but was too late — he cried once — and then — silence! All the laughter gone out of him — all the life and love — —” He paused with a shudder.— “I carried him all the way, and followed the car,” he went on— “I would have followed it to the world’s end! I ran by a short cut down near the sea, — and then — I saw the thing break down. I thanked God for that! I tracked the murderers here, — I meant to kill the man who killed my child! — and I have done it!” He paused agai
n. Then he held out his hands and looked at the constable.
“May I — before I go — take him in my arms — and kiss him?” he asked.
The chief officer nodded. He could not speak, but he unfastened Tom’s manacles and threw them on the floor. Then Tom himself moved feebly and unsteadily to where the women knelt beside his dead child. They rose as he approached, but did not turn away.
“You have hearts, you women!” he said faintly. “You know what it is to love a child! And Kiddie, — Kiddie was such a happy little fellow! — so strong and hearty! — so full of life! And now — now he’s stiff and cold! Only this morning he was jumping and laughing in my arms — —” He broke off, trembling violently, then with an effort he raised his head and turned his eyes with a wild stare upon all around him. “We are only poor folk!” he went on, in a firmer voice. “Only gypsies, tinkers, road-menders, labourers, and the like! We cannot fight against the rich who ride us down! There’s no law for us, because we can’t pay for it. We can’t fee the counsel or dine the judge! The rich can pay. They can trample us down under their devilish motor-cars, and obliging juries will declare our wrongs and injuries and deaths to be mere ‘accident’ or ‘misadventure’! But if they can kill, by God! — so can we! And if the law lets them off for murdering our children, we must take the law into our own hands and murder them in turn — ay! even if we swing for it!”
No one spoke. The women still sobbed convulsively, but otherwise there was a great silence. Tom o’ the Gleam stretched forth his hands with an eloquent gesture of passion.
“Look at him lying there!” he cried— “Only a child — a little child! So pretty and playful! — all his joy was in the birds and flowers! The robins knew him and would perch on his shoulder, — he would call to the cuckoo, — he would race the swallow, — he would lie in the grass and sing with the skylark and talk to the daisies. He was happy with the simplest things — and when we put him to bed in his little hammock under the trees, he would smile up at the stars and say: ‘Mother’s up there! Good-night, mother!’ Oh, the lonely trees, and the empty hammock! Oh, my lad! — my little pretty lad! Murdered! Murdered! Gone from me for ever! For ever! God! God!”
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 22) Page 666