CHAPTER VI
Screened by that darkness, and close sheltered by the matted gorsewhich fringed and dotted the expanse of the nearby heath, he had beenan interested witness to the entire proceeding.
"Played, my lad, played!" he commented, putting his thoughts intomumbled words of laughing approval, as Lennard, taking the taxicabunder guard, escorted it and its occupants out of the immediateneighbourhood; then, excessive caution prompting him to quell eventhis little ebullition, he shut up like an oyster and neitherspoke, nor moved, nor made any sound until the two vehicles wererepresented by nothing but a purring noise dwindling away intothe distance.
When that time came, however, he rose, and facing the heath, forgedout across its mist-wrapped breadth with that long, swinging,soldierly stride peculiar unto him, his forehead puckered withtroubled thought, his jaw clamped, and his lips compressed untilhis mouth seemed nothing more than a bleak slit gashed in a gray,unpleasant-looking mask.
But after a while the night and the time and the place worked theirown spell, and the troubled look dropped away; the dull eyes lighted,the grim features softened, and the curious crooked smile that wasNature's birth-gift to him broke down the rigid lines of the "bleakslit" and looped up one corner of his mouth.
It was magic ground, this heath--a place thick set as the Caves ofManheur with the Sapphires of Memory--and to a nature such as histhese things could not but appeal.
Here Dollops had come into his life--a starveling, an outcast;derelict even in the very morning time of youth--a bit of humanwreckage that another ten minutes would have seen stranded foreverupon the reefs of crime.
Here, too--on that selfsame night, when the devil had been cheated,and the boy had gone, and they two stood alone together in the mistand darkness--he had first laid aside the mask of respectability andtold Ailsa Lorne the truth about himself! Of his Apache times--ofhis Vanishing Cracksman's days--and, in the telling, had watchedthe light die out of her dear eyes and dread of him darken them,when she knew.
But not for always, thank God! For, in later days--when Time hadlessened the shock, when she came to know him better, when thethreads of their two lives had become more closely woven, and thehope had grown to be something more than a mere possibility....
He laughed aloud, remembering, and with a sudden rush of animalspirits twitched off his hat, flung it up and caught it as it fell,after the manner of a happy boy.
God, what a world--what a glorious, glorious world! All things werepossible in it if a man but walked straight and knew how to wait.
Well, please God, a part, at least, of _his_ long waiting would beover in another month. _She_ would be back in England then--herlong visit to the Hawksleys ended and nothing before her now butthe pleasant excitement of trousseau days. For the coming autumnwould see the final act of restitution made, the last VanishingCracksman debt paid, to the uttermost farthing; and when that timecame.... He flung up his hat again and shouted from sheer excess ofjoy, and forged on through the mist and darkness whistling.
His way lay across the great common to the Vale of Health district,and thence down a slanting road and a sloping street to theHampstead Heath Station of the Tube Railway, and he covered thedistance to such good effect that half-past eleven found him"down under," swaying to the rhythmic movement of an electrictrain and arrowing through the earth at a lively clip.
Ten minutes later he changed over to yet another underground system,swung on for half an hour or so through gloom and bad air and themusty smell of a damp tunnel before the drop of the land and therise of the roadbed carried the train out into the open and the aircame fresh and sweet and pure, as God made it, over field and floodand dewy garden spaces; and away to the west a prickle of lightson a quiet river told where the stars mirrored themselves in theglass of Father Thames.
At a toy station in the hush and loneliness of the pleasant countryways his long ride came to an end at last, and he swung off intothe balm and fragrance of the night to face a two-mile walk alongquiet, shadow-filled lanes and over wet wastes of young bracken toa wee little house in the heart of a green wilderness, with ahigh-walled, old-world garden surrounding it, and, in the farbackground, a gloom of woodland smeared in darker purple against thepurple darkness of the sky.
No light shone out from the house to greet him--no light couldcome from behind that screening wall, unless it were one set in anupper window--yet he was certain the place was not deserted; for,as he came up out of the darkness, catlike of tread and catlikeof ear, he was willing to swear that he could catch the sound ofsome one moving about restlessly in the shadow of that high, brickwall--and the experiences of the night made him cautious of thingsthat moved in darkness.
He stopped short, and remained absolutely still for half a minute,then, stooping, swished his hand through the bracken in excellentimitation of a small animal running, and shrilled out a note thatwas uncannily like the death squeal of a stoat-caught rabbit.
"Gawd's truth, guv'ner, is it you at last, sir? And me never seein'nor hearin' a blessed thing!" spoke a voice in answer, from thewall's foot; then a latch clicked and, as Cleek rose to his feet, agarden door swung inward, a rectangle of light shone in the darkness,and silhouetted against it stood Dollops.
"What are you doing out here at this time of night, you young monkey?Don't you know it's almost one o'clock?" said Cleek, as he wentforward and joined the boy.
"Don't I know it, says you? Don't I _just_!" he gave back. "Therearen't a minute since the night come on that I haven't counted,sir--not a bloomin' one; and if you hadn't turned up just as youdid----Well, let that pass, as the Suffragette said when she heaved'arf a brick through the shop window. Gawd's truth, guv'ner, doyou realise that you've been gone since yesterday afternoon andI haven't heard a word from you in all that time?"
"Well, what of that? It's not the first time by dozens that I'vedone the same thing. Why should it worry you at this late day? Lookhere, my young man, you're not developing 'nerves' are you? Because,if you are----Turn round and let's have a look at you! Why, youare as pale as a ghost, you young beggar, and shaking like a leaf.Anything wrong with you, old chap?"
"Not as I knows of," returned Dollops, making a brave attempt tosmile and be his old happy-go-lucky, whimsical self, albeit he wasn'tcarrying it off quite successfully, for there was a droop to hissmile and a sort of whimper underlying his voice, and Cleek's keeneyes saw that his hand groped about blindly in its effort to findthe fastenings of the garden door.
"Leastwise, nothing as matters now that you are here, sir. And I _am_glad yer back, guv'ner--Lawd, yuss! 'Nothin' like company to buckyou up,' as the bull said when he tossed the tinker; so of course----"
"Here! You let those fastenings alone. I'll attend to them!" rappedin Cleek's voice with a curious note of alarm in it, as he movedbriskly forward and barred and locked the wall door. "If I didn'tknow that eating, not drinking, was your particular failing----"
Here he stopped, his half-uttered comment cut into by a bleatingcry, and he screwed round to face a startling situation. For therewas Dollops, leaning heavily against a flowering almond tree, hisface like a dead face for colour, and his fingers clawing franticallyat the lower part of his waistcoat, doubling and twisting in thethroes of an internal convulsion.
The gravelled pathway gave forth two sharp scrunches, and Cleek wasjust in time to catch him as he lurched forward and sprawled heavilyagainst him. The man's arms closed instinctively about the twisting,sweat-drenched, helpless shape, and with great haste and infinitetenderness gathered it up and carried it into the house; but hehad scarcely more than laid the boy upon a sofa and lit the lampof the small apartment which served them as a general living-room,when all the agony of uncertainty which beset his mind regardingthe genesis of this terrifying attack vanished in a sudden rush ofenlightenment.
All that was left of a bounteous and strikingly diversified afternoontea still littered the small round dining table, and there, on oneplate, lay the shells of two crabs, on another, the rem
ains of alarge rhubarb tart, on a third, the skins of five bananas leaningcoquettishly up against the lid of an open pickle jar, and hard bythere was a pint tumbler with the white blur of milk dimming it.
"Good Lord! The young anaconda!" blurted out Cleek, as he stoodand stared at this appalling array. "No wonder, no wonder!" Then heturned round on his heel, looked at the writhing and moaning boy,and in a sudden fever of doing, peeled off his coat, rolled up hissleeves, and made a bolt for the kitchen stove, the hot-water kettle,and the medicine chest.
The result of Master Dollops' little gastronomic experiment scarcelyneeds to be recorded. It is sufficient to say that he had the timeof his life that night; that he kept Cleek busy every minute forthe next twenty-four hours wringing out flannels in hot water anddosing him with homely remedies, and that when he finally camethrough the siege was as limp as a wet newspaper and as feeble as agood many dry ones.
"What you need to pull yourself together is a change, you recklessyoung ostrich--a week's roughing it in the open country by field andstream, and as many miles as possible from so much as the odour ofa pastry cook's shop," said Cleek, patting him gently upon theshoulder. "A nice sort of assistant you are--keeping a man outof his bed for twenty-four hours, with his heart in his mouth andhis hair on end, you young beggar. Now, now, now! None of yourblubbing! Sit tight while I run down and make some gruel for you.After that I'll nip out and 'phone through to the Yard and tellMr. Narkom to have somebody look up a caravan that can be hired, andwe'll be off for a week's 'gypsying' in Yorkshire, old chap."
He did--coming back later with a piece of surprising news. Forit just so happened that the idea of a week's holiday-making, aweek's rambling about the green lanes, the broad moors, and throughthe wild gorges of the West Riding, and living the simple lifein a caravan, appealed to Mr. Maverick Narkom as being the mostdesirable thing in the world at that moment, and he made haste toask Cleek's permission to share the holiday with him. As nothingcould have been more to his great ally's liking, the matter wassettled forthwith. A caravan was hired by telegram to Sheffield, andat ten the next morning the little party turned its back uponLondon and fared forth to the pleasant country lands, the charm oflaughing waters, and the magic that hides in trees.
For five days they led an absolutely idyllic life; loafing in greenwildernesses and sleeping in the shadow of whispering woods; andthis getting back to nature proved as much of a tonic to the two menas to the boy himself--refreshing both mind and body, putting redblood into their veins, and breathing the breath of God into theirnostrils.
Having amply provisioned the caravan before starting, they went nonearer to any human habitation than they were obliged to do inpassing from one district to another; and one day was so exact apattern of the next that its history might have stood for them all:up with the dawn and the birds and into woodland pool or tree-shadedriver; then gathering fuel and making a fire and cooking breakfast;then washing the utensils, harnessing the horses, and moving onagain--sometimes Cleek driving, sometimes Narkom, sometimes theboy--stopping when they were hungry to prepare lunch just as theyhad prepared breakfast, then forging on again until they foundsome tree-hedged dell or bosky wood where they might spend thenight, crooned to sleep by the wind in the leaves, and watchedover by the sentinel stars.
So they had spent the major part of the week, and so they mighthave spent it all, but that chance chose to thrust them suddenlyout of idleness into activity, and to bring them--here, in thisArcadia--face to face again with the evils of mankind and the harshduty of the law.
It had gone nine o'clock on that fifth night when a curious thinghappened: they had halted for the night by the banks of a shallow,chattering stream which flowed through a wayside spinney, beyondwhose clustering treetops they had seen, before the light failed,the castellated top of a distant tower and, farther afield, theweathercock on an uplifting church spire; they had supped andwere enjoying their ease--the two men sprawling at full length onthe ground enjoying a comfortable smoke, while Dollops, with amouth harmonica, was doing "Knocked 'Em in the Old Kent Road," hisback against a tree, his eyes upturned in ecstasy, his long legsstretched out upon the turf, and his feet crossed one over theother--and all about them was peace; all the sordid, money-grubbing,crime-stained world seemed millions of miles away, when, of asudden, there came a swift rush of bodies--trampling on deadleaves and brushing against live ones--then a voice cried outcommandingly, "Surrender yourselves in the name of the king!" andscrambling to a sitting position, they looked up to find themselvesconfronted by a constable, a gamekeeper, and two farm labourers--theone with drawn truncheon and the other three with cocked guns.
Cleek of Scotland Yard: Detective Stories Page 7