GHOSTS
London terrified me after the long silence of the prison; I was afraid
of it. More than that, I discovered that I had forgotten my brief
experience of it; so that I should have been unable, even had it been
necessary, to find my way to the old rooms in the little street off
Holborn, wherein I had dreamed my brief dreams, and wherein the Law had
so suddenly gripped me, and swept me out of the world twenty years
before. But I had this man for guide--this man who had been my guardian,
and was now, as it seemed, my friend; I could only cling to him, with
some measure of gratitude in my heart that he should have remembered me
at all, and have come to my rescue when I was once more flung upon the
world.
I gathered that he was poor; there were no signs about him of that
prosperity that had once been his. Moreover, on reaching London he
hurried me into an omnibus, and took me a long way rattling through an
obscure part of the town to a street of mean houses abutting on the
river; it was a place of houses evidently let out in rooms. He rang a
bell at one house, and after a long time the sound of shuffling feet was
heard, and the door opened a little way, and a face looked out. I was
not sure at first whether it was the face of a child or of an old and
wizened woman. Then, as the door was opened a little wider, I saw that
it was a shabby and forlorn-looking girl of about fifteen or sixteen,
dressed in an old skirt and blouse much too big for her.
"All right, Moggs," said Fanshawe, "you needn't be afraid to let us in."
He thrust her aside as he spoke, and motioned to me with a jerk of the
head to follow him. I went in, and the girl closed the door.
"There's a letter for you upstairs, guv'nor," she said, calling after
Fanshawe, who was mounting the stairs.
He muttered something, and went on his way; I followed obediently. We
came into a forlorn-looking room, with an untidy bed in one corner, and
with some wretched scraps of furniture scattered about it; a ragged
apology for a carpet covered about half the floor. A cupboard, with a
broken hinge to its door, swung open in one corner, and disclosed a few
plates and cups and saucers, and some glasses that did not match. The
place was destitute of fire, and was bitterly cold. Jervis Fanshawe
strode out of the room again, and screamed querulously for the girl.
"Moggs! Moggs!"
She came up in a moment or two; listened calmly to his volcanic outburst
at her; and proceeded to light the fire. She was the strangest little
person I ever remember to have seen; she went on calmly with her work,
singing to herself under her breath a sort of melancholy dirge that had
no tune nor time about it, but which seemed in some vague way to comfort
her, much as a man may suck at an empty pipe, or a baby at a bottle. She
took not the faintest notice of Fanshawe, despite all that he said; she
only looked at me curiously once or twice before finally quitting the
room. By that time my guardian (as I must continue to call him, for want
of a better title) was deep in the letter he had found on the table.
Finally he thrust it into his pocket, with an exclamation of annoyance,
and turned to me.
I suppose the fact of seeing me standing there, huddled as close as I
could to the fire, reminded him of something in the past; he looked
round the room, and waved his hands, and spoke mockingly.
"Welcome, Charlie Avaline, to my rooms!" he exclaimed. "Perhaps I should
say 'room,' because there's only one of 'em. Observe the furniture, the
costly appointments, the ease and luxury of it all! To this have we
come, Charlie--you and I. Who can say that we haven't done well for
ourselves?"
He was on his knees before the fire, stirring it savagely and striving
to make it burn, and muttering about it. He looked up at me with that
old look of contempt on his face; flung the rusty poker into the grate
with a clatter, and got to his feet. He was in a strange mood, and I did
not know what to make of him. More than that, I was coming back so
slowly to life myself that I did not trouble very much about him; I had
just those animal instincts to warm myself, and to get food, and to
rest, and nothing more. Whatever old pulses he had stirred in me with
his mention of the woman I had loved were dropping back into their old
condition. The time was coming when they were to be stirred and shaken,
and brought to full and abundant life; but his was not the hand to sweep
the strings of my being, and wake any music within me. I had only a dull
curiosity concerning him, and that curiosity he presently began to
satisfy.
"You're such a bloodless thing--something that has borne a number for
years--a slave; one doesn't know how much you understand, or how much
you don't," he began, looking at me over his shoulder in that old
fashion I dimly remembered.
"I'll try to understand," I replied patiently.
"It is necessary that you should be told certain things; there's work
for you to do, and you must remember who you are, and what you have
been, before you can undertake it. I've waited a long time for you, on
the chance that you might come into my hands again; and I'm getting an
old man, and time is precious. Carry your dull mind back, and see if you
remember what _I_ was."
I suppose I looked at him in a troubled way, as one not clearly
understanding; he beat his fist upon the table, and cried out harshly at
me.
"Numbskull! Do you remember what position I occupied?"
"You had money--you lived well--you had many friends," I began slowly;
and he interrupted me impatiently.
"Yes, I had friends--money--power," he exclaimed. "The world went well
with me, and there were those who trembled at the sound of my voice.
Indirectly you brought me to this," he added, waving his hand to
indicate the poor room. "When you killed Gavin Hockley, you let loose a
cloud of things that had better have been hidden; I had forgotten the
possibility of that when I set you on to kill him."
"I killed him because he spoke ill of a woman," I said, like one
repeating a lesson.
"You killed him because I had made up my mind that you should," he
retorted. "However, that's neither here nor there. Hockley had left
behind a cloud of debts; he had paper signed by me; he had letters of
mine. Even in those first days, when you were in prison, the thing
sprang up alive to confront me; men whispered those ugly words, forgery
and fraud. You've not been the only prisoner, my fine fellow."
"You?" I stared at him in amazement.
He laughed disagreeably. "Yes, they shut me away for seven years; and I
came out what you see me now--a man ruined and broken, without a friend
in the world, and without any one to speak a good word for me. Those I
had known were dead, or would not speak to me; I was too old to make new
friends of the sort I had known before. So I've lived by my wits,
Charles Avaline, just as you'll have to live. While you've been warm and
well-cared for at the expense of your country, I've been down into the
depths, and have seen strange things. And it's not a nice world for a
man under those circumstances. One longs to get hold of another man, and
to drag that other man down, and show him that bitter life too," he
added savagely.
"I--I'm sorry," I said vaguely; I did not know what else to say. "You
see, I have not known what has been happening. In all the long time
(they tell me it was twenty years)--in all the long time that I have
been there I have not seen the face of any one I ever knew before; and I
have not heard a voice that was a voice out of the past, save in dreams.
And I never had a letter."
"No--they forget you easily when you go under," said Fanshawe. "As for
me, I thought they'd hang you; and by the time they hadn't done that I
was too full of my own troubles. I suppose you'd like to know something
about the old people and the old days--eh?" He thrust his face towards
me across the table; his eyes were hungry. I did not understand then
what was in the mind of the man; his brain was clear and strong, and his
plans already well thought out. My brain was dull and tired, and I had
no plans at all.
"You remember Hammerstone Market?" he went on, watching me, and perhaps
noting the expression of my face as I heard names I remembered. "All
changed down there, in one way, and yet not changed in another. Some
dead, and some alive. You remember Barbara?"
"Yes; I loved--loved Barbara," I whispered brokenly.
"You shall see her again; talk with her again; come into her life
again." There was a fierce eagerness about him that held me and
frightened me. "That's what I'm going to do for you; that's what I meant
when I said that I would bring you back to love and life and laughter.
Look round this room--and then see it all swept away," he went on with
growing excitement. "I've found one friend who will help us both; it may
happen that we are not poor and forlorn any more. We have both suffered;
it is right that we should have some little joy in our lives."
"What are you going to do with me?" I asked him, as I had asked before;
but he laughed, and would not answer me.
I spent the rest of the day in that place, cowering over the fire, and
striving hard to look back into the past. I found it difficult at first;
it was like a closed book to me, in which only here and there, when I
was able at last to open it, could I decipher a few words--a few broken
sentences that came like the sigh of a dead wind blowing over the dead
years back to me. I got up mechanically when I was called to eat what
simple food he put before me, going back afterwards to crouch over the
fire, and to start that burrowing process again into the lost years.
It was late in the evening when I saw him reading again that letter he
had taken from his pocket, and muttering to himself over it. At last he
seemed suddenly to make up his mind about it; he crammed it back into
his pocket, and put on his hat, and announced that he was going out.
"You can stay here," he told me curtly; "no one will interfere with
you."
I sat still for a little time after he had gone; and then an intolerable
restlessness seized upon me. I was like a lost spirit; I did not know
what to do with myself. I found myself pacing out again on the floor the
steps that for twenty years I had paced out in my cell; and finding the
room too large, so that the steps would not fit in. And at last got my
hat, and went out into the streets; and looked about me, with a new and
definite idea for the first time growing in my mind.
Hammerstone Market! At Hammerstone Market I had been happy once; and
there, waiting for me, and preserved in some strange fashion through all
the years, was the life I had laid down and left behind me. Why had I
not thought of this before? It was the simplest thing in the world; I
had but to go to that place where I had been happy to pick up again the
thread of my life, and to put together successfully the puzzle I did not
now understand. So I set out for the place, with a new and happy
confidence growing in my mind.
I was but groping yet, and I did not understand fully what I meant to
do. I was but a poor thing, striving hard to get back to some life I had
lost; and so it happened that I set about it as a child might have done,
and in what seemed to my childish mind the simplest and most direct way.
I have wondered since what I must have looked like to any one who saw me
then, wandering about in search of Hammerstone Market. I have a vision
of myself as being tall and thin, and gaunt and old-looking; with deep
eyes that must have been pathetic in the hopeless weariness that was in
their depths. My years counted as nothing; I was a shabby tired old man,
going back, pathetically enough, to pick up here and there a thread of
the life that had been snatched so suddenly from me. I knew of no way to
reach the place of my dreams, except to walk; and I only knew dimly that
it lay in a county not very far to the north of London.
By little short of a miracle I found the place, after walking through
the best part of a long winter night. When once I had got out of London
the road had proved to be a straight one; I walked on and on with dogged
persistency. By the time the morning light was beginning to break over
the country that stretched before me, I was within reasonable distance
of the place, and my heart was light with a hope it had not known for
years. For I was coming back to the place where for a little time at
least I had lived and loved and suffered--and I was to see Barbara!
Even then I had no thought that she could be anything but the bright
girl I had left. Time had stood still with me, and my life had been so
completely a thing of dreams that she was a dream creature in my mind
still; I could think of her in no other way. I came back to the place
where I had known her after that lapse of twenty years, but under what
different conditions! I had come there before a mere boy, with the world
at my feet; I crept back now, jaded and weary and old, to look on the
life I had known, and to find my lost love, who, had I but thought about
the matter clearly and sanely, I must surely have understood might well
be in her grave years before.
The place was unchanged; the mere sight of the old houses and of the
quaint High Street stirred my memory, and made me see more clearly into
that past in which I was groping. I went on eagerly; I wanted to find
again all that I had lost so long ago.
Perhaps it was characteristic of my wasted life that it should be winter
now, instead of the summer when I had first met Barbara in the woods; it
was as though the joy and beauty of it all had been stripped away. But
when I came to the wood at last, with the bare branches of the trees
standing up nakedly against the sky, a gleam of sun struck across it,
making fanciful patterns on the snow. I sat down on a fallen tree, and
looked about me, with my mind clearing more and more every minute.
Have you ever closed your eyes, and seen suddenly and vividly in a
mental picture some scene that was enacted years and years before--seen
the figures moving in it, just as they did long ago? That was what I saw
then, or began to see, when, suddenly raising my eyes, I saw standing in
the sunlight an easel with a canvas upon it. I knew then that in some
extraordinary fashion I had dropped back through the years, and had come
again as a young man into the wood. Yet not as a young man; because now
I was poor and old, and shabby and tired--and it was winter. There could
be no getting away from that; in spite of the sunlight it was winter.
I walked up to the canvas, and touched it, to be sure that it was real.
And then, knowing my way clearly, as it seemed, I walked on into the
depths of the wood, looking about me.
God of mercy!--she was there! I saw her coming straight through the
wood--Barbara, with her hands outstretched, and a smile on her face; I
knew her in a moment. And going towards her, as it seemed, was myself--a
tall straight youth, with an easy step and an eager manner, meeting her
and holding her hands, and looking into her eyes. I had slipped behind a
tree, so that they did not see me; I stood there with my hands pressed
against my throbbing temples, looking on at what seemed to be a dream
picture of something that had happened years and years before--looking
on at myself, and seeming to live again my own hopeless love story. For
now I saw that the boy held her close in his arms, and whispered to her;
and she seemed to be weeping.
My first thought was that I must have suddenly gone mad, or that this
was some dream out of which I should presently wake. But while I stood
there staring at them, I went over in my mind all that I had done the
previous night and that day: my long walk from London--and the coming
into the old town at break of day--then this further journey here. I
looked down at my shabby clothes, and stared in bewilderment at my
coarsened hands with the broken nails. Yes--I was convict No. 145--once
Charlie Avaline; and these were no dream figures, but two people living
out again, in some strange fashion, the life that I had lived in a few
short hours with Barbara Patton. Yet here was Barbara herself--with the
eyes of my Barbara, and the face of my Barbara--all unchanged, as I had
dreamed of her so often in my cell in prison! How was I to account for
that?
I remained hidden at no great distance from them; I saw them presently
part. The boy was impressing something upon her; I saw her dry her
tears, and listen, and even strive to smile at something that he said.
Then they clung together for a moment or two--and she ran away through
the woods, waving her hand to him as she went. He walked back dejectedly
to his easel, and packed up his things, and went away. And I, in a fever
of anxiety and remorse and wonder, followed him.
Perhaps the strangest thing of all was to see him go to that inn where I
had once stayed--going into it with the light step that I must have had
twenty years before. It was as though the ghost of myself had come back,
in a better shape than I, to take up the life I had dropped.
I watched him all that day; which is to say that I hung about the little
town, and waited for him, wondering what he would do. I was not
surprised when, as it was growing dark, he came out into the High
Street, and set off at a swinging pace in the direction of the house I
had known as belonging to old Patton. With the trot that had been mine
for so long in the exercise ground of the prison, I went after him.
It was obvious that he was not so lucky as I had been, in that he must
not enter the house. I crept into the grounds, and presently saw him
standing on that very terrace on which I had stood with my
Barbara--looking in at the windows and listening; I was below the
terrace, crouched among some bushes, watching him, and watching the
lighted windows. Presently a man walked to one of them, and opened it a
little way, and returned into the room; and still I lay there, watching
and thinking and wondering.
Then across the silence of the night there broke the sound of music, and
the voice of a girl singing. I dropped my head upon my arms as I lay
there; it seemed as though I could not bear it. For this was a song I
had heard twenty years before in that very room, and it seemed to me
that the voice was the same, coming hauntingly and wonderfully out of
the past. The boy stood listening too; every word and every note floated
to us clearly. It seemed as though out of the deep night of the years
Barbara's voice came to me, singing to me as she had sung before.
The song ceased, and the last notes died away. The girl came to the open
window, and looked out into the night; I saw the boy crouching there,
watching her. Then from somewhere in the room a man's voice sounded
quite clearly and distinctly.
"Barbara, you have your mother's voice."
She turned her head, and looked back into the room. "Thank you, father,"
she said; "I like to hear you say that."
I lay still, with a full understanding coming to me for the first time.
This was not my Barbara; this was her child. I had come back, to find
the mother gone, and the child in her place--in her very likeness.
And I had come back, as it seemed, to touch again a love story as
hopeless and as broken as my own had been. While the girl stood at
the window, and the boy crouched in the shadows watching her, I lay
there--thinking--thinking!
Presently the window was fastened, and the shutters drawn; lights began
to appear in the upper windows. The boy lingered for a long time, but
presently stole away; I crept after him. I did not know what to do, or
what to think; I was like a lost soul wandering the earth, forlorn and
hopeless and helpless. But he, going on through the night back to his
lodging, was so much a part of myself, sprung up suddenly out of the
past, that I could not bear to lose sight of him; I was close behind him
when we came to the outskirts of the little town. There he turned
suddenly, and faced about, looking at me.
"Why do you follow me?" he asked suspiciously.
"I meant no harm," I replied. "I beg you won't take any notice of me;
I'm only a poor wanderer."
I saw his hand go to his pocket, as though he would have given me money;
I drew back hastily. "Not that," I said; "I don't need that. But I was
once like you--God knows how many years ago!--and so I liked to feel
that I was near you. I'm sorry ... good-night!"
I went away quickly, leaving him staring after me. Presently, when he
had gone on again, I followed him, at a greater distance; came to the
inn where he was stopping, and stood outside for a long time, wondering
passionately and despairingly if I could help him; and then laughing at
that thought, ruefully enough, when I remembered my own forlorn
condition.
The hopelessness of doing anything there, where I was merely a penniless
waif, was borne in upon me more forcefully the next day. I had found
shelter in a barn, and I begged my breakfast from a charitable woman at
a cottage. Then I set out again to walk to London. It was only when I
was many miles on my journey that I stood still in the road, with a hand
pressed to my forehead, and with a new light breaking in upon me.
Jervis Fanshawe had tried to tell me of this new Barbara! Why had I
forgotten that; why hadn't I understood what he meant? Jervis Fanshawe
had told me that I should see my Barbara again, as I had seen her in the
past; that I should come back to love and life and laughter. Jervis
Fanshawe understood; surely he would be able to show me what was best to
be done. I set off at a greater rate than ever for London, determined
that I must see him at the earliest opportunity, and tell him the
wonderful thing that I had discovered.
I could think only of that discovery; I forgot completely what the man
was whose services I desired to enlist--forgot all he had done, and all
I had suffered indirectly through him. I had no one in the world to whom
I could turn, save this man; and I only remembered with gratitude then
that he had come to me at the moment of my release from prison, and had
given me food and lodging.
It was very late when I reached the shabby little street in the
neighbourhood of the river; I must have found it by a sort of instinct,
for I did not even know its name. I came to the house, and rang the
bell; the child my guardian had called Moggs opened the door. She
grinned when she saw me, and jerked her head towards the staircase.
"Lucky you've come," she said, in a sort of hoarse whisper. "'E's bin
carryin' on like mad, blamin' me for it, of all fings. I made sure you'd
cut yer lucky."
I guessed dimly that my guardian had wondered at my absence; I went
quickly up the stairs. I opened the door, and went eagerly into the
room, with my tale at my very lips; but I stopped short when I saw that
another man was seated at the table from which Fanshawe had risen.
"So you've come back, have you?" sneered my guardian, looking me over
with no very favourable eye. "And by the look of you, I should think
you've been out of doors a little."
I became suddenly aware how deplorably muddy and dirty I was. Like a
scolded child, I pulled off my hat, and stood there with bowed head,
unable to say a word. I raised my head when I heard the other man speak
to Fanshawe.
"Is this the fellow?"
It was a curiously hard voice, a cold metallic voice. I looked at the
speaker, and saw a man a little over thirty years of age, with a strong,
rather heavy face; I noticed that his dark hair grew low on his
forehead, and rather forward at the temples. He was very
well-dressed--so well-dressed, in fact, that his being in that place at
all on friendly terms with the shabby Jervis Fanshawe seemed incongruous
in itself.
"Yes, this is the fellow," said Fanshawe, taking me by the sleeve and
drawing me forward. "You can speak to him yourself."
The man lounging at the table looked up at me contemptuously
enough--studied me as he might have studied a dog he meant to buy if he
approved of it.
"You've been in prison?" he said at last.
I bowed my head, and dropped my eyes. "A long time," I replied.
"And now are thrown on the world, with a living to get if possible, and
with no trade at your fingers' ends--eh? Well, I may be able to help
you. We are friends here, and so I can speak freely. You killed a man?"
"A long time ago," I said, without raising my eyes.
"There's nothing to be ashamed of," he retorted, with a disagreeable
laugh--"in fact, you're a man to know. I've been talking to Fanshawe
here about you, and I think you may serve my purpose."
"In a word, Charlie," broke in Fanshawe excitedly, "there's a chance for
you to get back a little payment for what you have suffered--to pay off
old scores--to get a little cheap revenge. Don't stare at me like that;
pull your wits together, and listen."
"To pay off old scores? Revenge?" I stared at him, wondering if he knew
what I had seen in that old place of my dreams--wondering what he would
say next.
"You have served a long term of imprisonment--your life has been broken
and spoilt and ruined," went on the man at the table, setting my
guardian aside. "Naturally you hate those who have drawn you into that;
naturally your mind is filled with the desire to get even with them--to
settle that old account."
"I don't understand," I murmured, looking from one to the other.
Jervis Fanshawe seized my arm, and shook me fiercely. "Years ago you
suffered, like a fool, for the sake of a woman; she cared nothing for
you, and married another man. Do you remember that?"
"Yes. Her name was Barbara," I replied slowly.
Fanshawe turned to the stranger. "You see he remembers something," he
said. Then he turned again impatiently to me. "I have already told you
that a new Barbara has sprung up in her place--a child--a girl."
Glancing at the face of the stranger at the table, I decided to hide my
knowledge of what I had seen; I said nothing. Perhaps here I was to be
shown the way to do what was in my mind; perhaps I was to be helped, as
I had never expected to be helped at all.
"You understand, Avaline," went on the stranger, in his deadly voice,
"that I take an interest in this new Barbara, who is like the Barbara
you so mistakenly loved twenty years ago. In other words, for her own
sake it is necessary that I should see much of her--communicate with her
often. That is difficult without a third person, because the lady
herself is a little obdurate. Do you follow me?"
"Yes," I replied, looking at him for a moment, and then turning to my
guardian. "I begin to understand."
"So that if I can introduce to her some one she does not know--some one
who is bound, by reasons of policy, to do what he is told, without
thought of the consequences--I am a gainer," went on the man at the
table. "You have reason to hate a girl, so unfortunately formed in the
image of the woman who deceived you, and brought disaster upon you; you
have reason to be loyal to me, because I can keep you from starving, and
can give you clothes and shelter. You're a poor broken worn-out thing,
and I take pity on you. Now do you understand the situation?"
I understood it so well that my mind, for the first time since I had
stepped out from the prison gates, was clear, and I was fully alive. I
looked eagerly from one to the other; I told the man brokenly that I
would do all he asked; I think I suggested that I would be his slave. He
might tell me to do anything; I was eager to take up that old story that
I had been compelled to lay down.
"For your revenge?" he asked, with a grin.
"For my revenge!" I said; and burst into a shout of laughter.
"Don't take any notice of him," I heard my guardian whisper. "The poor
fool is only half-witted; his years of prison life have told upon him.
But he's the man you want!"