Screened by that darkness, and close sheltered by the matted gorse
which fringed and dotted the expanse of the nearby heath, he had been
an interested witness to the entire proceeding.
"Played, my lad, played!" he commented, putting his thoughts into
mumbled words of laughing approval, as Lennard, taking the taxicab
under guard, escorted it and its occupants out of the immediate
neighbourhood; then, excessive caution prompting him to quell even
this little ebullition, he shut up like an oyster and neither
spoke, nor moved, nor made any sound until the two vehicles were
represented by nothing but a purring noise dwindling away into
the distance.
When that time came, however, he rose, and facing the heath, forged
out across its mist-wrapped breadth with that long, swinging,
soldierly stride peculiar unto him, his forehead puckered with
troubled thought, his jaw clamped, and his lips compressed until
his 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 their
own spell, and the troubled look dropped away; the dull eyes lighted,
the grim features softened, and the curious crooked smile that was
Nature's birth-gift to him broke down the rigid lines of the "bleak
slit" and looped up one corner of his mouth.
It was magic ground, this heath--a place thick set as the Caves of
Manheur with the Sapphires of Memory--and to a nature such as his
these 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 human
wreckage that another ten minutes would have seen stranded forever
upon 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 mist
and darkness--he had first laid aside the mask of respectability and
told Ailsa Lorne the truth about himself! Of his Apache times--of
his Vanishing Cracksman's days--and, in the telling, had watched
the 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 had
lessened the shock, when she came to know him better, when the
threads of their two lives had become more closely woven, and the
hope had grown to be something more than a mere possibility....
He laughed aloud, remembering, and with a sudden rush of animal
spirits 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 were
possible 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 be
over in another month. _She_ would be back in England then--her
long visit to the Hawksleys ended and nothing before her now but
the pleasant excitement of trousseau days. For the coming autumn
would see the final act of restitution made, the last Vanishing
Cracksman debt paid, to the uttermost farthing; and when that time
came.... He flung up his hat again and shouted from sheer excess of
joy, 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 the
Hampstead Heath Station of the Tube Railway, and he covered the
distance to such good effect that half-past eleven found him
"down under," swaying to the rhythmic movement of an electric
train 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 the
musty smell of a damp tunnel before the drop of the land and the
rise of the roadbed carried the train out into the open and the air
came fresh and sweet and pure, as God made it, over field and flood
and dewy garden spaces; and away to the west a prickle of lights
on a quiet river told where the stars mirrored themselves in the
glass of Father Thames.
At a toy station in the hush and loneliness of the pleasant country
ways his long ride came to an end at last, and he swung off into
the balm and fragrance of the night to face a two-mile walk along
quiet, shadow-filled lanes and over wet wastes of young bracken to
a wee little house in the heart of a green wilderness, with a
high-walled, old-world garden surrounding it, and, in the far
background, a gloom of woodland smeared in darker purple against the
purple darkness of the sky.
No light shone out from the house to greet him--no light could
come from behind that screening wall, unless it were one set in an
upper window--yet he was certain the place was not deserted; for,
as he came up out of the darkness, catlike of tread and catlike
of ear, he was willing to swear that he could catch the sound of
some one moving about restlessly in the shadow of that high, brick
wall--and the experiences of the night made him cautious of things
that moved in darkness.
He stopped short, and remained absolutely still for half a minute,
then, stooping, swished his hand through the bracken in excellent
imitation of a small animal running, and shrilled out a note that
was 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 the
wall's foot; then a latch clicked and, as Cleek rose to his feet, a
garden 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 went
forward and joined the boy.
"Don't I know it, says you? Don't I _just_!" he gave back. "There
aren'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 you
did----Well, let that pass, as the Suffragette said when she heaved
'arf a brick through the shop window. Gawd's truth, guv'ner, do
you realise that you've been gone since yesterday afternoon and
I 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've
done the same thing. Why should it worry you at this late day? Look
here, 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, you
are 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 to
smile and be his old happy-go-lucky, whimsical self, albeit he wasn't
carrying it off quite successfully, for there was a droop to his
smile and a sort of whimper underlying his voice, and Cleek's keen
eyes saw that his hand groped about blindly in its effort to find
the 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 buck
you up,' as the bull said when he tossed the tinker; so of course----"
"Here! You let those fastenings alone. I'll attend to them!" rapped
in Cleek's voice with a curious note of alarm in it, as he moved
briskly forward and barred and locked the wall door. "If I didn't
know that eating, not drinking, was your particular failing----"
Here he stopped, his half-uttered comment cut into by a bleating
cry, and he screwed round to face a startling situation. For there
was Dollops, leaning heavily against a flowering almond tree, his
face like a dead face for colour, and his fingers clawing frantically
at the lower part of his waistcoat, doubling and twisting in the
throes of an internal convulsion.
The gravelled pathway gave forth two sharp scrunches, and Cleek was
just in time to catch him as he lurched forward and sprawled heavily
against him. The man's arms closed instinctively about the twisting,
sweat-drenched, helpless shape, and with great haste and infinite
tenderness gathered it up and carried it into the house; but he
had scarcely more than laid the boy upon a sofa and lit the lamp
of the small apartment which served them as a general living-room,
when all the agony of uncertainty which beset his mind regarding
the genesis of this terrifying attack vanished in a sudden rush of
enlightenment.
All that was left of a bounteous and strikingly diversified afternoon
tea still littered the small round dining table, and there, on one
plate, lay the shells of two crabs, on another, the remains of a
large rhubarb tart, on a third, the skins of five bananas leaning
coquettishly up against the lid of an open pickle jar, and hard by
there was a pint tumbler with the white blur of milk dimming it.
"Good Lord! The young anaconda!" blurted out Cleek, as he stood
and stared at this appalling array. "No wonder, no wonder!" Then he
turned round on his heel, looked at the writhing and moaning boy,
and in a sudden fever of doing, peeled off his coat, rolled up his
sleeves, and made a bolt for the kitchen stove, the hot-water kettle,
and the medicine chest.
The result of Master Dollops' little gastronomic experiment scarcely
needs to be recorded. It is sufficient to say that he had the time
of his life that night; that he kept Cleek busy every minute for
the next twenty-four hours wringing out flannels in hot water and
dosing him with homely remedies, and that when he finally came
through the siege was as limp as a wet newspaper and as feeble as a
good many dry ones.
"What you need to pull yourself together is a change, you reckless
young ostrich--a week's roughing it in the open country by field and
stream, and as many miles as possible from so much as the odour of
a pastry cook's shop," said Cleek, patting him gently upon the
shoulder. "A nice sort of assistant you are--keeping a man out
of his bed for twenty-four hours, with his heart in his mouth and
his hair on end, you young beggar. Now, now, now! None of your
blubbing! 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 tell
Mr. Narkom to have somebody look up a caravan that can be hired, and
we'll be off for a week's 'gypsying' in Yorkshire, old chap."
He did--coming back later with a piece of surprising news. For
it just so happened that the idea of a week's holiday-making, a
week's rambling about the green lanes, the broad moors, and through
the wild gorges of the West Riding, and living the simple life
in a caravan, appealed to Mr. Maverick Narkom as being the most
desirable thing in the world at that moment, and he made haste to
ask Cleek's permission to share the holiday with him. As nothing
could have been more to his great ally's liking, the matter was
settled forthwith. A caravan was hired by telegram to Sheffield, and
at ten the next morning the little party turned its back upon
London and fared forth to the pleasant country lands, the charm of
laughing waters, and the magic that hides in trees.
For five days they led an absolutely idyllic life; loafing in green
wildernesses and sleeping in the shadow of whispering woods; and
this getting back to nature proved as much of a tonic to the two men
as to the boy himself--refreshing both mind and body, putting red
blood into their veins, and breathing the breath of God into their
nostrils.
Having amply provisioned the caravan before starting, they went no
nearer to any human habitation than they were obliged to do in
passing from one district to another; and one day was so exact a
pattern 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-shaded
river; then gathering fuel and making a fire and cooking breakfast;
then washing the utensils, harnessing the horses, and moving on
again--sometimes Cleek driving, sometimes Narkom, sometimes the
boy--stopping when they were hungry to prepare lunch just as they
had prepared breakfast, then forging on again until they found
some tree-hedged dell or bosky wood where they might spend the
night, crooned to sleep by the wind in the leaves, and watched
over by the sentinel stars.
So they had spent the major part of the week, and so they might
have spent it all, but that chance chose to thrust them suddenly
out of idleness into activity, and to bring them--here, in this
Arcadia--face to face again with the evils of mankind and the harsh
duty of the law.
It had gone nine o'clock on that fifth night when a curious thing
happened: they had halted for the night by the banks of a shallow,
chattering stream which flowed through a wayside spinney, beyond
whose clustering treetops they had seen, before the light failed,
the castellated top of a distant tower and, farther afield, the
weathercock on an uplifting church spire; they had supped and
were enjoying their ease--the two men sprawling at full length on
the ground enjoying a comfortable smoke, while Dollops, with a
mouth harmonica, was doing "Knocked 'Em in the Old Kent Road," his
back against a tree, his eyes upturned in ecstasy, his long legs
stretched out upon the turf, and his feet crossed one over the
other--and all about them was peace; all the sordid, money-grubbing,
crime-stained world seemed millions of miles away, when, of a
sudden, there came a swift rush of bodies--trampling on dead
leaves and brushing against live ones--then a voice cried out
commandingly, "Surrender yourselves in the name of the king!" and
scrambling to a sitting position, they looked up to find themselves
confronted by a constable, a gamekeeper, and two farm labourers--the
one with drawn truncheon and the other three with cocked guns.