‘O! a better way, have you?’ he said sneeringly. ‘We’ll see about that. I know where I’m not wanted, and the value to be put on my undesirability. If you wish to hoof me out of this precious dove-cot of yours, you’ll have to pay for the privilege, you know, Uncle Greg.’
‘Shall I?’ said the old man. ‘Why, how you go on, Charlie. There are Christian ways of retaliating, ain’t there? Suppose in my old age, I have come to that.’
‘Come to that!’ The Wanderer drew in his breath as if to a sudden pang. Was it conceivable that out of such ineffable slyness and hypocrisy as he remembered of old had blossomed this aftermath of Christian charity and forgiveness? He tried to read the change in the familiar face, but the swaying candlelight distorted it absurdly.
‘I can’t make out if you’re getting at me or not,’ he said. ‘Anyhow my misery is plain enough. May I come in, Uncle Greg?’
‘Why not?’ said the old man. ‘It’s the very thing I want.’
He turned and went silently along the hall. The Wanderer, following half dazed, observed stupidly how the candle-light seemed to have awakened a very phantasmagoria of shadows on the walls and ceiling. They jerked and frolic’d above and around; they tumbled over the stair-rails as if in some fantastic scramble for place and precedence. The effect was so bewildering, that it came as a quick shock to him to notice suddenly, through the thick of their gambolling, the echoing emptiness of the passage he trod. It was without carpet or furniture – bare to its limits.
And so it was with the room into which Uncle Gregory preceded him. From door to shuttered window it was void as death; only a faint, sickly odour pervaded it; only a very little litter of damp straw was scattered about its boards. The Wanderer stopped, petrified, staring before him – staring hither and thither, and then at Uncle Gregory. The old man stood, swaying the candle high, swaying it to and fro so that his own shadow, obeying its motions, danced and leapt and dilated on the walls and floor.
‘Damn it!’ cried the Wanderer, finding his breath in a gasp; ‘stop that – stop it, will you! What is the meaning of this? What trick are you playing on me?’
‘Trick, Charlie!’ The old builder bent in a soundless chuckle. ‘It’s all right; it’s all right, you know. If I’d known you were coming, I’d have delayed the bankruptcy proceedings.’
‘What! Sold up?’
‘That’s the word, Charlie. Nothing left – only this.’
He held out the revolver, balancing it in his hand.
‘A heavy bullet,’ he said – ‘fit to splash a man’s brains all over the shop. What a curse you intended to make of my life, didn’t you? A mean, squalid ruffian – you were always that, you know. I hated you, Charlie, my dear; I always hated you, you poisonous prodigal. Now I’m going to have my turn with you at last. You’d come here, would you, to bleed the old man? You shall bleed for him, hang for him, you hound! They’ll think you did it, and you shall answer with the red witness on your hands.’
The Wanderer’s face was white as drained veal; he had thought for an instant that the other meant to murder him; and then he saw in a flash his more terrific purpose. He gave a scream like a run-over woman, and leapt forward – but it was too late. The pistol crashed, and Uncle Gregory’s brains flew all about the room.
Or so they appeared to as, on the moment, darkness rang down. He staggered back, with a sob that was wrenched from him like a hook from a fish’s throat. He put his hand to his forehead, and it seemed to adhere there with a little treacly suggestion, and a more overpowering sense of that odour which had already nauseated him. And then he turned and fled. The hall door was still open, revealing a livid oblong of watery moonshine. Into that he fell, rather than plunged, as a man leaps from the side of a burning ship. He had no thought or care for his direction, so long as it bore him from that horror. Once, as he tore along, he stumbled and fell, his hands in a pool of water. That suggesting something to him, frantically, hurriedly, he rinsed his palms and bathed his forehead before he rose again and sped on. He had only one purpose in his mind – to reach the city lights and find shelter from himself in their glare.
Little by little he had come to recognise that the doom imposed upon him was unavoidable and irrevocable. What insidious pressure, intimate and satanic, had persuaded him to that necessity, gradually enveloping his mind until escape from its torture seemed possible in only one direction, he knew well enough, while he was helpless to resist it. There was a limit to the endurance of reason; better the condemned cell and the rope and the pinioned arms than this long drawn-out agony of apprehension. After all, if he were to die, a self-accused though innocent man, perhaps the sacrifice might be accepted by the Unknown in some sort as an atonement, and he might be spared in the hereafter that company which alone he unspeakably dreaded. But a man could not continue for ever with that shadow at his shoulder, which no word of his – he believed it truly – could conceivably dissipate. He might have washed his flesh and his clothes: the stains of blood were indelible. So surely as he confessed his visit to the house on that night of terror, so surely, viewing his antecedents and the purpose for which he had come, would he place the noose about his own neck. He could not resist his impulse the less for that; the diabolical thing which inspired it was more powerful than himself. He was so weary, so nerve-worn in the end, that even the thought of temporising with the truth seemed an intolerable ordeal. Better to confess at once that he was guilty of murder, and get it over. Only that way lay peace from it all.
During all these three days, so haunted, so marked as he was, his immunity from arrest had not ceased to astonish him. It was inconceivable that he had not been observed on his way either to or from the fatal house; it was incredible that that persistent knocking of his had failed to find its echo in some panic heart. He had dared no attempt to leave the place; he had possessed no means to lie hidden in it. On the contrary, some little dawn of luck, which had found him out since that night, had brought him more prominently than usual into the open. Was not that the common irony of Fortune – to bestow her grudging favours at the moment when for all moral purposes they had become valueless? So now, though she was represented by no more than a job to distribute circulars, that respite from starvation was gained at the expense of bitter bread to eat.
On each of the three days he had bought and feverishly perused a halfpenny paper; but never one had contained any mention of the tragedy. No shouting headlines rushed into his ken; no report of discovery or inquest appeared to confirm him in his sickest apprehensions. Was it possible that the police, for their own purposes, were lying low? That were an unusual course, at least in these days of sensational publicity. And then there flashed into his mind another explanation of this silence, and the most hideously plausible of them all. The bankruptcy; the emptied house; its unsuspected inmate. Of course the body was lying there yet, undiscovered; and the crisis, in the prolonged expectation of which he had been lingering out the exquisite torment of these days, were merely postponed.
To the madness of that thought his reason succumbed, and finally. He could endure no more. One morning he walked into the local police station and addressed the inspector on duty.
‘I have come to give myself up for the murder at The Laurels.’
The inspector, immovable, grizzle-bearded, with overhanging eyebrows, betrayed no least hint of emotion; but he just signed to a subordinate to keep the door.
‘Yes,’ he said evenly. ‘What is your name?’
The Wanderer confessed it; as also his relationship to the dead man, the purpose for which he had called upon him and, more excitedly, the measure of his own worthlessness and iniquity.
The inspector stopped him, with official aplomb, in mid-career.
‘This occurred three nights ago, you say? I want you to give an account of your movements up to that time.’
‘That is easily done,’ said the Wanderer, with a little panting laugh, now that the horror was off his mind. ‘I had been discharged only a week befor
e from B— Hospital, where I had been an in-patient for two months and more. You won’t expect me to tell you for what.’
‘No,’ said the Inspector; and ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Well, I shall have to detain you for inquiries.’
The magistrate, a precise, benevolent man, with a certain soldierly compactness about his attire, ended some remarks he had been making on the advisability of contriving some punishment for those who increasingly took up the time of the Court with unfounded self-accusations, the result commonly of drink.
‘Your statement about the hospital,’ he said, addressing the prisoner, ‘has been confirmed. It is possible that some mental distemper, induced by your recent condition, was responsible for this wild appropriation of a crime which, amounting as it did to an unquestionable case of self-destruction, occurred quite a month ago, when you were lying ill. Not less could excuse you for this wanton imperilling of your own life. What is that you say?’
His words had to be interpreted to the magistrate, so thickly inarticulate they came from his lips.
‘I knocked, and knocked, and he opened to me at last. He had a pistol in his hand, and I saw him do it.’
‘Come,’ said the magistrate kindly; ‘you must forget all that. Leave closed doors alone for the future, is my advice. Remember what is said – that the devil lays snares for the importunate; only not being omniscient, he sometimes over-reaches himself on the question of an alibi. Nevertheless, it is not safe to count upon his anachronisms. He has succeeded once or twice, I am afraid, in getting innocent men hanged. The best thing for all of us is to avoid knocking him up when we find him asleep.
‘I think, for your own sake, I shall remand you for a week into the hands of the prison doctor.’
THE DARK COMPARTMENT
I remember once, when hunting for a seat in a crowded train, finding unexpectedly an empty compartment, the door of which, when I came to try it, was locked. Holding on to the handle, I looked about for the guard. At that moment another hurrying passenger halted beside me, peered over my shoulder into the carriage, and went quickly away. Something in the man’s manner striking me, I also investigated, and saw that the floor of the compartment was sprinkled thick with sawdust. Incontinently I let go the handle, and hastened to find a seat elsewhere.
There cannot be many engines, after all, which do not trail the ghosts of past tragedies in their wake. That was an experience unforeseen enough to give one a sharp little qualm; but I would not willingly exchange it for Manby’s. In his case – but let him tell his own story:
‘I had been visiting the old Hampshire Abbey town, and a run thence of thirty minutes by rail would take me to the next stopping-place on my itinerary, where there were barracks, and a cathedral, and a public school, and a gaol – not to speak of cosy hotels. It was a dark November evening, and soppingly wet, so that, dawdling over my tea-board comforts at the inn, I came near in the end to missing my train altogether. It was actually starting when I gained the platform, and I had to make a dash for it, and scramble into the first compartment that offered.
‘The light in the roof burned so dim that, what with that and the momentary flurry of my entrance, I did not recognise at once whether I were alone or had broken into company. As my eyes, however, accustomed themselves to the obscurity, I saw that there were two men sitting together opposite me at the further end of the compartment.
‘The lamp, I say, was so down – a mere night-light in suggestion – that it was difficult to distinguish the character of my travelling companions. Moreover, as one of them seemed thickly bearded, and the other wore a dark felt hat slouched over his eyes, their faces, or the section of each of them visible to me, appeared nothing but featureless white maps, hung up, as it were, in the gloom. The two sat very quiet, close together, but without exchanging the least communication that I could see; and presently, from under cover of my own hat-brim, I took to scrutinising the silent shapes. I was the more emboldened to that inquisition by the utter indifference with which they had accepted my abrupt invasion. They seemed now, even, to be wholly unconscious of my presence.
‘The deathliness of that disregard, rigid and motionless; the huddled cohesion of the twin shadows, with those blots of white representing their faces, affected me strangely and uneasily after a while. I wanted one or the other of them to stir, to resolve himself into a detached human entity – and quite suddenly I had my wish. How it happened I don’t know; but there came a sort of local shifting of the gloom, a sense of a quick gleam in its midst, and in that moment I understood. The man with the slouched hat had handcuffs on his wrists, and he was travelling in charge of a prison warder.
‘And almost as I realised the truth the prisoner began to speak:
‘“I’m sick; I want air.”
‘I say he spoke, and I might say the other answered. A sense of those words, anyhow, throbbed in my brain, and they had their instant corollary in his rising and standing at the window unopposed. I felt the rush of wet air, and saw the wing-like filling of the dark Inverness cape he wore. And then suddenly there was a tiny snap, and he went out of the window like a flying crow. I saw the warder snatch at him, and follow the way he had gone, pulled off his feet by the wrench and jerk. And there was I alone in the dark compartment, with only the window guard, broken and bent askew, to witness to the stunning tragedy which had passed in a moment before my eyes.
‘Even as I leapt to my feet I grasped what had happened. Under cover of his cloak, and the roar of wheels and rain, the prisoner, though manacled, had managed rapidly to file through the bar to breaking point.
‘I tore at the alarm communication cord, and stood gasping and shaken. Almost against my expectation, the train slowed down within a few seconds and came to a stop. I put my head out of the window on my side, and beckoned frantically to the shape I saw beating towards me along the blown track-side. The guard came below, looking up with the staring, rather combative, expression of the official summoned against his own better faith.
‘“What is it?”
‘“For God’s sake, come here! Two men have just gone out of the window.”
‘He climbed grudgingly to the footboard, and so into the carriage. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Where were they sitting?”
‘His cool, incredulous tone maddened me.
‘“There, by that open window,” I said. “Isn’t it plain enough?”
‘He crossed the carriage, pressed his hand on the seat, turned to me again. “That won’t do. No one’s been sitting here. The cushion’s cold. Feel for yourself.”
‘“God in heaven, man!” I cried. “Do you take me to be mad or drunk? They sat there, I tell you – a warder and his charge; and the prisoner stood up on some pretext and went clean out, dragging the other after him. There’s the broken window rail to witness.”
‘“Is there?” He had had his back to it; but moved now, just glancing over his shoulder, so that I might see. And there was the window-rail whole and sound, and the window itself closed.
‘Presently, after I don’t know what brief interval, I found myself giggling hysterically.
‘“Look here,” I said, “I think I’ll change my carriage.”
‘“I would,” said the guard, “if I were you.” Both his tone and his look were odd; but he formally took my name and address, with an intimation that the minimum penalty was five pounds. It was, on the face of it, a serious offence, you will agree. Yet, curiously, I received no summons from the company, or ever heard another word on the matter.’
THE MARBLE HANDS
We left our bicycles by the little lych-gate and entered the old churchyard. Heriot had told me frankly that he did not want to come; but at the last moment, sentiment or curiosity prevailing with him, he had changed his mind. I knew indefinitely that there was something disagreeable to him in the place’s associations, though he had always referred with affection to the relative with whom he had stayed here as a boy. Perhaps she lay under one of these greening stones.
We walked round the church, with its squat, shingled spire. It was utterly peaceful, here on the brow of the little town where the flowering fields began. The bones of the hill were the bones of the dead, and its flesh was grass. Suddenly Heriot stopped me. We were standing then to the northwest of the chancel, and a gloom of motionless trees overshadowed us.
‘I wish you’d just look in there a moment,’ he said, ‘and come back and tell me what you see.’
He was pointing towards a little bay made by the low boundary wall, the green floor of which was hidden from our view by the thick branches and a couple of interposing tombs, huge, coffer-shaped, and shut within rails. His voice sounded odd; there was a ‘plunging’ look in his eyes, to use a gambler’s phrase. I stared at him a moment, followed the direction of his hand; then, without a word, stooped under the heavy, brushing boughs, passed round the great tombs, and came upon a solitary grave.
It lay there quite alone in the hidden bay – a strange thing, fantastic and gruesome. There was no headstone, but a bevelled marble curb, without name or epitaph, enclosed a gravelled space from which projected two hands. They were of white marble, very faintly touched with green, and conveyed in that still, lonely spot a most curious sense of reality, as if actually thrust up, deathly and alluring, from the grave beneath. The impression grew upon me as I looked, until I could have thought they moved stealthily, consciously, turning in the soil as if to greet me. It was absurd, but – I turned and went rather hastily back to Heriot.
‘All right. I see they are there still,’ he said; and that was all. Without another word we left the place and, remounting, continued our way.
Miles from the spot, lying on a sunny downside, with the sheep about us in hundreds cropping the hot grass, he told me the story:
‘She and her husband were living in the town at the time of my first visit there, when I was a child of seven. They were known to Aunt Caddie, who disliked the woman. I did not dislike her at all, because, when we met, she made a favourite of me. She was a little pretty thing, frivolous and shallow; but truly, I know now, with an abominable side to her. She was inordinately vain of her hands; and indeed they were the loveliest things, softer and shapelier than a child’s. She used to have them photographed, in fifty different positions; and once they were exquisitely done in marble by a sculptor, a friend of hers. Yes, those were the ones you saw. But they were cruel little hands, for all their beauty. There was something wicked and unclean about the way in which she regarded them.
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