ON PAROLE
“So,” said Dr. Baumgartner, “you not only try to play me false, but you
seize the first opportunity when my back is turned! Not only do you
break your promise, but you break it with brutal violence to a young
lady who has shown you nothing but kindness!”
Pocket might have replied with justice that the young lady had brought
the violence upon herself; but that would have made him out a greater
cad than ever, in his own eyes at any rate. He preferred to defend his
honour as best he could, which was chiefly by claiming the right to
change his mind about what was after all his own affair. But that was
precisely what Baumgartner would not allow for a moment; it was just as
much his affair as accessory after the fact, and in accordance with
their mutual and final agreement overnight. Pocket could only rejoin
that he had never meant to give the doctor away at all.
“I daresay not!” said Baumgartner sardonically. “It would have been
dragged out of you all the same. I told you so yesterday, and you
agreed with me. I put it most plainly to you as a case of then or never
so far as owning up was concerned. You made your own bed with your
eyes open, and I left you last night under the impression that you were
going to lie on it like a man.”
“Then why did you lock me in?” cried Pocket, pouncing on the one point
on which he did not already feel grievously in the wrong. The doctor
flattered him with a slight delay before replying.
“There were so many reasons,” he said, with a sigh; “you mustn’t forget
that you walk in your sleep, for one of them. We might have had you
falling downstairs in the middle of the night; but I own that I was
more prepared for the kind of relapse which appears to have overtaken
you. I was afraid you had more on your soul than you could keep to
yourself without my assistance, and that you would get brooding over
what has happened until it drove you to make a clean breast of the
whole thing. I tell you it’s no good brooding or looking back; take one
more look ahead, and what do you see if you have your way? Humiliating
notoriety for yourself, calamitous consequences in your own family,
certain punishment for me!”
“The consequences at home,” groaned Pocket, “will be bad enough
whatever we do. I can’t bear to think of them! If only they had taken
Bompas’s advice, and sent me round the world in the _Seringapatam!_ I
should have been at sea by this time, and out of harm’s way for the
next three months.”
“The _Seringapatam?_” repeated the doctor. “I never heard of her.”
“You wouldn’t; she’s only a sailing vessel, but she carries passengers
and a doctor, a friend of Dr. Bompas’s, who wanted to send me with him
for a voyage round the world. But my people wouldn’t let me go. She
sails this very day, and touches nowhere till she gets to Melbourne. If
I could only raise the passage-money, or even stow away on board, I
could go out in her still, and that would be the last of me for years
and years!”
It was not the last of him in his own mind; suddenly as the thought had
come, and mad as it was, it flashed into the far future in the boy’s
brain; and he saw himself making his fortune in a far land, turning it
up in a single nugget, and coming home to tell of his adventures,
bearded like the pard, another “dead man come to life,” after about as
many years as the dream took seconds to fashion. And Baumgartner looked
on as though following the same wild train of thought, as though it did
not seem so wild to him, but extremely interesting; so that Pocket was
quite disappointed when he shook his head.
“A stowaway with an attack of asthma! I think I see my poor young
fellow! Why, they’d hear you wheezing in the hold, and you’d gasp out
your whole story before you were in the Bay of Biscay! No, no, my
fellow; you’ve taken your line, and you must stick to it, and stop with
me till we can think of something better than a long sea voyage. If you
say you won’t, I say I’ll make you—to save you from yourself—to save us
both.”
There was no mistaking the absolute intention in this threat; it was
fixed and final, and the boy accepted it as he accepted his oppressor’s
power to make good his words. It was true that he might have escaped
already; the nearer he had been to it, the less chance was he likely to
be given again. So reasoned Pocket from the face and voice now
dominating him more powerfully than ever; but it is an interesting fact
that his conclusion neither cowed nor depressed him as it might have
done. There was actually an element of relief in his discomfiture. He
had done his best to do his duty. It was not his fault that
responsibility had been wrested from his shoulders, and an evil hour
delayed. And yet there was a certain, an immediate, a creature comfort
in such delay, which was all the greater because unsought by him; it
was a comfort that he had both ways, as the saying is, and from all
points of view but that of his poor people wondering what had become of
him.
“If only they knew!” he cried; “then I shouldn’t care. Let me write to
one of them! My mother needn’t know; but I must write to one of the
others, and at least let them know I am alive and well. My sister would
keep my secret; she’d play the game all right, I promise you! And I’d
play any game you like if only you let me write a line to her!”
The doctor would not hear of it at first. Eventually he said he should
have to inspect the letter before it went; and this proved the thin
edge of consent. In the end it was arranged that Pocket should write
what he liked to his sister only, and that Baumgartner should read and
enclose it in a covering letter, so that everybody need not know it was
a letter from the missing boy. Baumgartner was to have it posted from
St. Martin’s-le-Grand, to destroy all trace of a locality which he now
refused point-blank to disclose even to the writer. And in return for
the whole concession the schoolboy was to give his solemn word and
sacred promise on the following points.
He was not to set foot outside the house without Baumgartner, nor to
show himself for a moment at the windows back or front.
On no account was he to confide in the doctor’s niece Phillida, to give
her the slightest inkling of his connection with the latest of London
mysteries, or even of the scene, or any of the circumstances of his
first meeting with Baumgartner.
“You are bound to see something of each other; the less you say about
yourself the better.”
“But what can she think?”
“What she likes, my young fellow! I am a medical man; medical men may
bring patients to their houses even when they have ceased to practise
in the ordinary way. It is no business of hers, and what she chooses to
think is no affair of ours. She has seen you very ill, remember, and
she had your doctor’s orders not to let you out of the house in his
absence.”
“She obeyed them like a little brick!” muttered Pocket, with a wistful
heaviness.
“She did what she was told; think no more about it,” said the doctor.
“Give me your hand on these your promises, and die on your feet rather
than break one of them! Now I trust you, my young fellow; you will play
the game, as you call it, even as the poor lads in these pictures
played it at Gravelotte, and die like them rather than go back an inch.
Look at this one here. No, not the one with the ridges, but here where
we come to bayonets and the sword. See the poor devils of the Prussian
Guard! See the sheet-lightning pouring into us from the walls of St.
Privat! Look at that fellow with his head bound up, and this one with
no head to bind. That’s meant for our colonel on the white horse. See
him hounding us on to hell! And there’s a drummer drumming as though we
could hear a single beat! Our very colours were blown to ribbons, you
see, and we ourselves to shreds; but the shreds hung together, my young
fellow, and so will you and I in our day of battle!” Baumgartner might
have known his boy for years, so sure was his touch upon the strings of
a responsive nature, to strike the chords of a generous enthusiasm, and
to wake the echoes of noble deeds. Pocket attacked his letter with the
heart of a soldier, hardened and yet uplifted for the fight; it was
only when he found himself writing down vague words, which nevertheless
brought his innocent deed home to him as nothing had done before, that
the artificial frost broke up, and real tears ran with his ink. He
begged Lettice not to think too hardly of him, still less to be anxious
about him, or to make anybody else; they must not fret for him, he
wrote more than once, without seeing the humour of the injunction. He
was better than he had been for years, and in the best of hands. But
something terrible had happened; something he could not help, but would
bitterly repent all his days, especially as it might prevent him from
ever seeing any of them again. It was this monstrous remark, and others
to which it led, that were literally blotted with the writer’s tears.
But just then he saw himself in all vivid sincerity as an outcast who
could never show himself at home or at school again. And it required
the spell of Baumgartner’s presence to make the prospect such as could
be borne with the least degree of visible manhood.
Be it remembered that he was not a man at all, but a boy in many ways
younger than most boys of sixteen and three quarters, albeit older in
some few. He was old in imagination, but young in common sense. One may
be imaginative and still have a level head, but it is least likely in
one’s teens. The particular temperament does not need a label; but none
who know it when they see it, and who see it here, will be surprised to
learn that this emotional writer for one was enormously relieved and
lightened in spirit when he had got his letter off his mind and hands.
True to his warning, Dr. Baumgartner began to glance at it with a
kindly gravity; it was with something else that he shook his head over
the second leaf.
“This is not for me to read!” said he. “I’d rather run the risk of
trusting your discretion.”
No words could have enslaved poor Pocket more completely; he clasped
the hand that proceeded to write the covering note, and then the
address, all openly before his eyes. And while the doctor was gone to
the nearest messenger office to despatch the missive to the General
Post Office, ostensibly to catch a particular post, his prisoner would
not have decamped for a hundred pounds, and the doctor knew it.
Phillida did not appear at dinner, but at supper she did, and Pocket
was only less uncomfortable in her absence, which he felt he had
caused, than when they were both at table and he unable to say another
word to express his sorrow for the unseemly scene of the forenoon. She
spoke to him once or twice as though nothing of the kind had happened,
but he could scarcely look her in the face. Otherwise both meals
interested him; they were German in their order, a light supper
following the substantial middle-day repast; but it appeared that they
both came from an Italian restaurant, and the English boy was much
taken with the pagoda-like apparatus in which the dishes arrived
smoking hot in tiers. It provided a further train of speculation when
he remembered that he had never seen a servant in the house, and that
the steps had struck him as dirty, and the doctor’s waste-paper basket
as very full. Pocket determined to make his own bed next morning. He
had meanwhile an unpleasing suspicion that the young girl was clearing
away, for the doctor took him back into the drawing-room after supper;
and later, when they returned for a game of billiards on the toy board,
which they placed between them on the dining-table, both Phillida and
the fragments had disappeared.
The little billiards were a bond and a distraction. They brought out
Baumgartner’s simple side, and they emphasised the schoolboy’s
simplicity. Both played a strenuous game, the doctor a most deliberate
one; his brows would knit, his mouth shut, his eyes calculate, and his
hand obey, as though his cue were a surgical instrument cutting deep
between life and death. It was a curious glimpse of disproportionate
concentration; even the Turk’s head was only lit to be laid aside as an
obstruction. Pocket’s one chance was to hit hard and trust to the
fortune that accrues on a small table. Both played to win, and the boy
forgot everything when he actually succeeded in the last game. They had
played very late for him, and he slept without stirring until
Baumgartner came to his room about eight o’clock next morning.
Now Pocket had not seen a newspaper all Friday, but it was the first
thing he did see on the Saturday morning, for the doctor was waving one
like a flag to wake him.
“Trust your vermin press to get hold of the wrong end of the stick!” he
cried, with fierce amusement; “it only remains to be seen whether they
succeed in putting your precious police on the wrong tack too. Really,
it’s almost worth being at the bottom of a popular mystery to watch the
smartest men in this country making fools of themselves!”
“May I see?” asked Pocket; he had winced at more than one of these
remarks.
“Certainly,” replied Baumgartner; “here’s the journalistic wonder of
the age, and there you are in its most important column. I brought it
up for you to see.”
The boy bit his lips as he read. His deed had been promoted to leaded
type and the highest rank in headlines. It appeared, in the first
place, that no arrest had yet been made; but it was confidently
asserted (by the omniscient butt of Teutonic sallies) that the police,
wisely guided by the hint in yesterday’s issue (which Pocket had not
seen), were already in possession of a most important clue. In
subsequent paragraphs of pregnant brevity the real homicide was
informed that his fatal act could only be the work of a totally
different and equally definite hand. Pocket gathered that there had
been a certain commonplace tragedy, in a street called Holland Walk, in
the previous month of March. A licensed messenger named Charlton had
been found shot under circumstances so plainly indicative of suicide
that a coroner’s jury had actually returned a verdict to that effect.
There appeared, however, to have been an element of doubt in the case.
This the scribe of the leaded type sought to remove by begging the
question from beginning to end. It had not been a case of suicide at
all, he declared, but as wilful a murder as the one in Hyde Park, to
which it bore a close and sinister resemblance. Both victims had been
shot through the heart in the early hours of the morning; both belonged
to one neighbourhood, and to the same dilapidated fringe of the
community. A pothouse acquaintanceship was alleged between them; but
the suggestion was that the link lay a good deal deeper than that, and
that the two dead men were known to the police, who were busy searching
for a third party of equal notoriety in connection with both murders.
“But we know he had nothing to do with the second one,” said the boy,
looking up at last. “It wasn’t a murder, either; neither was the first,
according to the coroner’s jury, who surely ought to know.”
“One would have thought so,” said Baumgartner, with his sardonic smile;
“but the yellow pressman knows better still, apparently.”
“Do you suppose there’s a word of truth in what he says? I don’t mean
about Charlton or—or poor Holdaway,” said Pocket, wincing over his
victim’s name, which he had just gleaned from the paper. “But do you
think the police are really after anybody?”
“I don’t know,” said Baumgartner. “What does it matter?”
“It would matter a great deal if they arrested somebody for what I
did!”
The boy was no longer looking up; and his voice trembled.
“It would alter the whole thing,” he mumbled significantly.
“I don’t see it,” returned the doctor, with grim good-nature. “The
little wonder of the English reading world has nearly unearthed another
mare’s nest, as two of its readers know full well. No real harm can
come of this typical farrago. Let it lead to an arrest! There are only
two living souls who can’t account for their time at that of this
unfortunate affair.”
Pocket realised this; but it was put in a way that gave him goose-skin
under the clothes. He was always seeing his accident in some new light,
always encountering some new possibility, or natural consequence of his
silence, which had not occurred to him before. But he was learning to
keep his feelings under control, to set his face and his teeth against
the regular reactions of his coward conscience and his fickle will. And
once again did Dr. Baumgartner atone for an unintentional minor by
striking a rousing chord on the very heart-strings of the boy.
“Eight o’clock!” cried the magician, with a glance at his watch and an
ear towards the open window. “The postman’s knock from door to door
down every street in town—house to house from one end of your British
Islands to the other! A certain letter is without doubt being delivered
at this very moment—eh, my poor young fellow?”