“Yes, Rodie did it all. He called me a dog the other day, and maybe I
am, for I feel like biting him. Yes, I’ll bite him some day, when I’m
big enough.”
“Could you not help me, Billy?” said Kate, after a long silence. “I’m
afraid to go there without knowing something of the road. Couldn’t
you get some one to tell me how to do when I get through the hole?”
“I tell you there ain’t no such hole; and don’t you speak about it,
for I do-o-o-n’t like it,” sobbed Billy, almost in anger; “but if
there was, I’d be willing glad to go into it to find the road for
you,” he added, more lovingly, as he noted the distressed look which
gathered on her pinched face. “Maybe you need a new kind of medicine.
I’ll ask them to-day when I’m at the dispensary.”
Billy did ask, and in such a way that the doctor’s attention was
roused, and he whispered a few words to one of the students, who put
on his hat and kindly told Billy that he was going home with him. The
student was a tall man, and had difficulty in getting into the hole
where Kate lay, but when he did, and looked into her pinched face
and brilliant eyes, and listened to her quick, gasping breath, he
merely gave his head a slight shake, and knelt down by the bedside to
take her thin hand tenderly in his own. He had been very merry and
chatty with Billy on the way, but now he was grave and solemn, and
scarcely spoke a word.
“Will she be better soon?” asked Billy at last, when the silence had
almost sickened him.
The student looked down on the white features of the sick girl, and
said softly—
“Yes—very soon.”
There was another painful silence, and then Kate dropped off into
slumber, with her hand resting trustfully in that of the student.
Then the gentleman softly disengaged his hand, and motioned Billy out
of the hole.
“Where’s your father or mother?” he gravely asked, for the room was
empty.
“Not got any—mother’s dead,” said Billy. “Rodie looks after us,” and
his hands and teeth clenched, as they generally did now when Rodie
was in his thoughts, or at his tongue’s end.
“Then I should like to see Rodie for a minute,” said the student with
the same pitying look in his eyes, which Billy could not understand
at all. “Could you find him now?”
No, no, Billy could not do that; and did not know when Rodie would be
at home, or where he was likely to be found. The student looked round
the miserable hovel, and sighed and shook his head, and then left. He
had ordered no medicine, he had said nothing about Kate, except that
she was to be better very soon, yet Billy felt a vague uneasiness and
distrust. The house seemed oppressively quiet, and Kate’s slumber
unusually deep. What if she should sleep on and never wake?
Billy crept into the hole again, and sat down on the floor beside the
bed to listen intently to every breath Kate drew, holding her hand
softly the while to make sure that she did not slip away from him as
she slept.
“Oh, if Rodie had only kicked me instead!” he thought for the
hundredth time. “A boy is more able to stand kicks, and Rodie’s so
strong—he’d kick anybody right through the world, whether there was a
hole or not.”
Late in the afternoon Rodie and the comical fiend came in boisterous
and gleeful to dinner. They had been unusually successful in passing
some bad florins, and had invested some of the proceeds in drink,
part of which they had brought home with them to make a night of it,
and laughed consumedly over the manner in which they had cheated one
of their victims.
Billy served them passively, and then, unable to taste food himself,
he crept quietly back to watch Kate. The comical fiend made some
splendid jokes, having Billy for their subject, but for once Billy
was undisturbed, for he did not hear them. He sat on the floor
holding Kate’s hand, and sometimes he put his other arm softly round
her neck, lest his hold should not be strong enough to keep her by
him.
The men got very noisy and uproarious; Rodie banged the table with
tumblers and the bottle, and shouted and stamped his feet, and then
the comical fiend, at his own request, favoured the company with
several songs.
One smash rather louder than the rest caused Kate to start and open
her eyes. She looked up in Billy’s face steadily for some moments
without moving, and the expression was so strange that in alarm he
cried—
“Kate, Kate! don’t you know me?”
There was no immediate answer. There was in the slates immediately
above them a single pane of glass, which gave light to the closet,
and that pane now showed a deep red square of the crimson sky. Kate’s
eyes wandered to the pane, and became fixed for some moments.
“What’s—that?” she whispered at last, with a strange trembling
eagerness.
“It’s only the winder,” answered Billy, a little scared.
“No, it isn’t; it’s the hole you go through into the other world,”
said Kate joyfully. “Billy, dear, I can’t stay any longer. I’m going
through!”
Billy threw both his arms around her slight form, and rained his
tears upon her face. At the same moment there was a chorus of gleeful
shouts and table-smashing like thunder in the adjoining room. It was
the comical fiend applauding his own song. Kate continued to gaze
steadily at the crimson pane in the roof with a smile brightening on
her face.
“I wish—oh, I wish there had been somebody to tell me what to do at
the other side,” she said at last in a whisper so low that Billy
could scarce catch it. “But maybe somebody will hold out a hand to
me. I’ll keep feeling about for it. It’s growing darker. Am I going
through? and is the light only at the door?”
“No, its almost night, and Rodie’s lit the candle,” said Billy. “Do
you hear me, Kate? You’re awful dreamy and queer—I’m saying it’s
almost night.”
“Night! night!” feebly and hazily breathed Kate. “Good-night.”
Her lips stood still, and her eyes, though fixed on the crimson pane,
were strange and big and unearthly. Billy stared at them in awe, and
then moved a hand quickly before them to break the steady stare and
draw it to himself. There was no response. Her eyes remained fixed on
the pane.
“Kate! Kate!” he cried in a scream of alarm.
A slight spasm—almost shaping into a smile—crossed the pinched
features; the eyes gazed unwinkingly at the pane—the breath came and
went in long-drawn sighs—paused—came again—then paused for ever.
Kate had slipped through to another world, where her feeble and
groping hand would surely be gently taken by a Guide who Himself knew
all suffering and temptation and weakness that can afflict frail
humanity, and who will surely be as pitiful to the benighted savages
of our land as of any other.
Billy screamed and wept, and threw himself on the still form; and
at length even the comical fiend, who had got up on the table to
execute a flourishing hornpipe, became annoyed and got down to put a
stop to the unseemly disturbance. Rodie, too, who became stupid and
sullen with drink just as his partner became lively, roused himself
sufficiently to stagger across the room towards the hole, vowing that
if he could only trust himself to the support of one foot he would
use the other in stopping Billy’s howling.
“Kate stares up, and won’t move or speak to me,” cried Billy in
gasps, as soon as he was conscious of the nails of the comical fiend
almost meeting in his ear.
“Maybe she’s croaked at last,” suggested Rodie. “See if she breathes.”
Joss hopped in, and soon answered in a gleeful negative.
“It’s a good job,” said Rodie, “for she’d never have been of any more
use.”
“Three cheers for her death!” cried the comical fiend, and as there
was nobody to laugh at his joke, Rodie being too sullen, Joss laughed
the required quantity for a dozen people himself.
Rodie tried to kick Billy, but, finding himself unable to stand
on one leg, he contented himself with some horrible threats, and
then they went back comfortably to their drinking. Billy cried and
cried—softly, so that the men should not hear him—with his arms
round the still form, till he fell asleep, and there they lay all
night, the living and the dead. Next day Rodie and Joss put all their
implements and money out of sight, and sent word to the poorhouse,
and a medical inspector came and glanced at the wasted body, and
asked a few questions, and signed a paper, which Billy took to the
undertaker, who brought a coffin the next day, and placed Kate’s form
in it, and then asked if they wished it screwed down. Rodie and Joss
were too drunk to reply, but Billy, never tired of looking at the
wide open eyes, and fancying they were looking at him, said he should
like it kept open as long as possible.
The funeral took place the day after, and there was only one mourner
to follow the coffin to the grave—Billy himself, in his ragged jacket
and bare feet. The only mournings he had to put on were the tears
which flowed down his cheeks all the way. Even when the coffin was
hid in the ground, and the earth tumbled in, and the turf spread
over the top, he could not put off his mournings, or leave the place
chatting gaily about business matters, as is the custom at funerals.
He still seemed to see Kate’s open eyes shining up at him through
earth and turf, and he had a firm idea that she could still hear him
speak, though herself unable to reply. He loitered long after the
gravediggers were gone, and stuck a little twig in the ground so that
he should know the spot again, and then, when no one was near to see,
he lay down on the grass and whispered to Kate through the openings
in the turf. He had but two thoughts to reiterate—the regret that
Rodie had not kicked him out of the world instead of Kate, and the
wish that he might live to “bite Rodie” for what he had done to Kate.
Whenever Billy was in trouble after that he came to the graveyard
to whisper his griefs to Kate through the turf. He told her of all
his adventures and the tortures of the comical fiend and the kicks
of Rodie; and though he got no reply, he felt quite certain that
he had Kate’s sympathy in every word he uttered. Billy’s was not a
large mind, or a very acute one, but when an idea did get fairly in,
it stuck there firmly. When Kate had been some months in the grave,
Rodie and Joss prepared a lot of florins—their most successful effort
in base coining—and informed Billy that they were going through to
Edinburgh to attend the Musselburgh Races, on business, and that
he was to accompany them, and have the honour of carrying their
luggage—an old leather valise containing the base florins. Joss and
Rodie, for prudential reasons, went by different trains, and Billy,
though he accompanied Rodie, had strict orders to sit at the other
end of the carriage, and take no more notice of Rodie than of any
stranger.
It chanced, however, that by the time the train drew up at the
Waverley Station platform, that particular carriage was empty of
all but Billy and Rodie, and the base coiner had no sooner glanced
along the platform than he uttered an oath and drew in his head with
surprising quickness.
“Do you see that ugly brute standing over there, near the cabman with
the white hat?” he observed to Billy.
“That ugly brute” was I, the writer of these experiences, on the look
out for any of my “bairns” who might be drawn thither by the race
meeting, and Billy quickly signified that he did see me.
“Well, keep clear of him, or we’re done for. That’s M^cGovan, and
he’s a perfect bloodhound,” and Rodie cursed the bloodhound with
great heartiness. “If he gets his teeth on us, we’ll feel the bite, I
tell ye.”
“Ah!” it was all Billy said, and it was uttered with a start, for
Rodie’s words had suggested a strange idea to him.
“Yes, if he gets us at it it’ll mean twenty years to us if it means
a day,” continued Rodie, still wasting a deal of breath on me. “Now
you get out first, and go straight to the place I told ye of, while I
jink him and get round by the other.”
Billy obeyed, and was soon lost in the crowd, while Rodie—who
mistakenly believed that his face was as familiar to me as mine was
to him—cut round by another outlet, and escaped to the appointed
rendezvous.
Meantime Billy had only gone far enough with the crowd to get behind
one of the waiting cabs, whence he watched Rodie leave the station.
Then he crept out of his hiding-place, and walked back to the spot
where I stood, and touched me lightly on the arm.
“I’m Rodie’s boy,” he said, while I stared at him in astonishment.
“I’ve come from Glasgow with him, and we’re to go ‘smashing’ at the
races to-morrow. Would it be twenty years to him if you caught us at
it?”
“What Rodie do you mean?” I asked at length. “Is his other name
M^cKendrick?”
“That’s it; and Joss Brown is with him,” said Billy with animation.
“He says you’re a bloodhound, and can bite. Twenty years would be a
good bite, wouldn’t it?”
“Ah, I see, he has injured you, and you want to pay him back,” I
said, not admiring Billy much, though his treachery was to bring
grist to my mill.
“He kicked Kate, my sister, and she died, and I’ve told her often
since then that I would bite him for it, and now I’ve got the chance
I must keep my word.”
I took Billy into one of the waiting-rooms and drew from him his
story. Billy told the story much better than I could put it down
though I were to spend months on the task. He showed me also the
piles of base florins put up in screws ready for use, and offered
them to me. But while he had been telling the story I had been
studying the position. I had perfect faith in Billy’s truthfulness.
The tears he shed over the narrative of Kate’s death would have
convinced the most sceptical. I therefore explained to him that
in order to secure Rodie the full strength of a good bite it was
necessary that I should take him and Joss in the act, and if possible
with the supply of base coin in their possession. To that end I
arranged to see the three next day at the race-course, and explained
to Billy how he was to act when he got from me the required signal.
I had the idea that Billy was densely stupid—almost idiotic—and that
therefore the scheme would be sure to be bungled, but in this I
misjudged the boy sadly. If Billy had been the most acute of trained
detectives he could not have gone through his part with more coolness
or precision. When I had my men ready and dropped my handkerchief,
Billy quickly wriggled himself out of a crowd and hastily thrust
the valise containing the reserve of base florins into the hands of
Rodie, who hid the same under his jacket and looked nervously round.
The comical fiend helped him. They had not long to look. We were on
them like bloodhounds the next moment. Joss was easily managed, but
Rodie fought hard, and struggled, and kicked, and finally threw away
the valise of base coin in the direction of Billy, with a shout to
him to pick it up and run. Billy looked at him, but never moved.
“You kicked Kate, and she died. It’s Billy’s Bite,” he calmly
answered, when Rodie worked himself black in the face, and the
comical fiend nearly choked himself with hastily concocted jokes.
The two got due reward in the shape of fifteen and twenty years
respectively, but Billy was sent to the Industrial School, and is now
an honest working man.