ON THE TRACK OF THE TRUTH
The unseen knuckles renewed their assault upon the dark-room door; and
Pocket wavered between its Yale lock, which opened on this side with a
mere twist of the handle, and the broken red window behind the drawn
red blind. Escape that way was easy enough; and if ever one could take
the streets in pyjamas and overcoat, with the rest of one’s clothes in
a bundle under one’s arm, it was before six o’clock in the morning. But
it was not a course that vanity encouraged in an excited schoolboy with
romantic instincts and a revolver which he perceived at a glance to be
still loaded in most of its chambers. Pocket was not one of nature’s
heroes, but he had an overwhelming desire to behave like one, and time
to feel how he should despise himself all his life if he bolted by the
window instead of opening the door. So he did open it, trembling but
determined. And there stood Phillida in her dressing-gown, her dark
hair tumbling over her shoulders.
“It’s you!” she cried, taking the exclamation out of his mouth.
“Yes,” he said, with a gust of relief; “did you think it was thieves?”
“Isn’t it?” she demanded, pointing to the broken window visible through
the blind. Then she saw his revolver, and drew back an inch.
“He took this from me,” said Pocket. “I had a right to it. Take it if
you will!”
And he offered it, in the best romantic manner, by the barrel. But
Phillida was too angry to look at revolvers.
“You had no business to break in to get it,” she told him, with
considerable severity.
“I didn’t! I broke in for my clothes; he took them, too, this morning
before he went out. They’re what I broke in for, and I’d a perfect
right; you know I had! And while I’m about it I thought I might as well
have this thing too. I knew it was in here somewhere. It was in there.
And I’m glad I got it, and so should you be, because you and I are in
the house of one of the greatest villains alive!”
The words tumbled over each other with quite hereditary heat. They were
all out in a few seconds, and the boy left panting with his
indignation, the girl’s eyes flashing hers.
“I begin to think my uncle was right,” said she. “This is the act of
what he said you were, if anything could be.”
“He lied to you, and he’s been lying to me!”
“He may have been justified.”
“You wait till you hear all he’s done! I don’t mean taking my revolver
from me; he was justified in that, if you like, after what I’d done
with it. He may even have been justified in taking away my clothes, if
he couldn’t trust me to keep my word and stay in this awful house. But
that isn’t the worst. He encouraged me to write a letter home, to my
own poor people who may think me dead——”
“Well?”
There was more sympathy in her voice, more anxiety; but his was
breaking with his great grief and grievance.
“He took it out himself, to send it to the General Post Office to catch
the country post. So he said; and I was so grateful to him! On Saturday
morning he said they must have got it; he kept on saying so, and you
don’t know how thankful I was every time! But yesterday afternoon I
found scraps of my letter in the waste-paper basket in his room; he’d
never posted it at all!”
Phillida looked shocked and distressed enough at this; her liquid eyes
filled with sympathy as they gazed upon the wretched youth.
“I’m a fool to blub about it—but—but that was the Limit!” he croaked,
and worked the poor word till it came distinctly.
“It was cruel,” she allowed. “It must seem so, at any rate; it does to
me; but then I understand so little. I can’t think why he’s hiding you,
or why you let yourself be hidden.”
“But you must know what I’ve done; you must guess?”
The revolver was still in his hand; he gave it a guilty glance, and she
looked from it to him without recoiling.
“Of course I guessed on Saturday.” There was a studious absence of
horror in her tone. “Yet I couldn’t believe it, unless it was an
accident. And if it was an accident——”
“It was one!” he choked. “It was the most absolute accident that ever
happened; he saw it; he can tell you; but he never told me till hours
afterwards. I was nearly dead with asthma; he brought me here, he was
frightfully good to me, I’m grateful enough for all that. But he should
have told me before the accident became a crime! When he did tell me I
lost my head, and begged him to keep me here, and afterwards when I
came to my senses he wouldn’t let me go. I needn’t remind you of that
morning! After that I promised to stay on, and I’d have kept all my
promises if only my letter had gone to my poor people!”
He told her what a guarded letter it had been, only written to let them
know he was alive, and that with the doctor’s expressed approval. But
now he had learnt his lesson, and he was going to play the game. It was
more than ever the game with that poor fellow lying in prison for what
he had never done. And so the whole story would be in to-morrow’s
papers, with the single exception of Dr. Baumgartner’s name.
“Nothing shall make me give that,” said Pocket valiantly; “on your
account, if not on his!”
Phillida encouraged his new resolution without comment on this last
assurance. She had stooped, and was picking up the unbroken negatives
and putting them back in the rack; he followed her example, and
collected the broken bits, while she put the rack back in its place,
and certain splinters in theirs, until the locker shut without showing
much damage. Pocket was left with the fragmentary negatives on his
hands.
“I should throw those away,” said Phillida. “And now, by the time
you’re ready to go, I’ll have a cup of tea ready for you.”
They faced each other in the rosy light, now doubly diluted by the open
door, and Pocket did not move. He wanted to say something first, and he
was too shy to say it. Shyness had come upon him all at once; hitherto
they had both been like young castaways, finely regardless of
appearances, he of his bare feet and throat, she of her dressing-gown
and her bedroom slippers. She was unconscious or careless still, as
with a brother; but he had become the very embodiment of mauvaise
honte, an awful example of the awkward age; and it was all the fault of
what he suddenly felt he simply must say.
“But—but I don’t want to leave you!” he blurted out at last.
“But I want you to,” she returned promptly and firmly, though not
without a faint smile.
It was leaving her with a villain that he minded; but he could not get
that out, except thus bluntly, nor could he denounce the doctor now as
he had done when his blood was up. Besides, the man was a different man
to his niece; all that redeemed him went out to her. Pocket did not
think he was peculiar there; in fact, he thought romantically enough
about the girl, with her dark hair all over her pink dressing-gown, and
ivory insteps peeping out of those soft slippers especially when the
vision was lost for ever, and he upstairs making himself as presentable
as he could in a few minutes. But it seemed she was busy in the same
way, and she took longer over it. He found the breakfast things on the
table, the kettle on the gas-stove, but no Phillida to make the tea. He
could not help wishing she would be quick; if he was going, the sooner
he went the better, but he was terribly divided in his desires. He
hated the thought of deserting a comrade, who was also a girl, and such
a girl! He could only face it with the fixed intention of coming back
to the rescue of his heroine, he the hero of their joint romance. But
for his own immediate freedom he was already unheroically eager. And
yet he could deliberately fit the broken negatives together, on the
white tablecloth, partly to pass the time, partly out of a boyish
bravado which involved little real risk; for the doctor had not yet
been gone an hour; and a loaded revolver is a loaded revolver, be it
brandished by man or boy.
The piecing of the plates was like a children’s puzzle, only easier,
because the pieces were not many. One of the reconstructed negatives
was of painful interest; it reminded Pocket of the fatal one smashed to
atoms by Baumgartner in the pink porcelain trough. There were trees
again, only leafless, and larger, and there was a larger figure
sprawling on a bench. Pocket felt he must have a print of this; he
remembered having seen printing-frames and tubes of sensitised paper in
the other room; and hardly had he filled his frame and placed it in
position, than Phillida ran down stairs, and he told her what he had
done.
“I wish you hadn’t,” she said nervously, as she made mechanical
preparations with pot and kettle. “It would only make matters worse if
my uncle came in now.”
“But he wasn’t back on Friday before ten or eleven.”
“You never know!”
Pocket spoke out with a truculence which his brothers had inherited,
but not he, valiantly as he might try to follow a family example.
“I don’t care! I can’t help it if he does come. I’ll tell him exactly
what I’ve done, and why, and exactly what I’m going to do next. I give
him leave to stop me if he can.”
“I’m afraid he won’t wait for that. But I wish you had waited for his
leave before printing his negative.”
Pocket jumped up from table, and ran to the printing-frame in the sunny
room at the back. He had been reminded of it only just in time. It was
a rather dark print that he first examined, one half at a time, and
then extracted from the frame. It was meshed with white veils, showing
the joins of the broken plate. But it had been an excellent negative
originally. And it was still good enough to hold Pocket rooted to the
carpet in the sunny room, until Phillida came in after him, and stood
looking over his shoulder.
“I know that place!” said she at once. “It’s Holland Walk, in
Kensington.”
He turned to her quickly.
“The place where there was a suicide or something not long ago?”
“The very place!” exclaimed the girl, looking up from the darkening
print.
“I remember my uncle would take me to see it next day. He’s always so
interested in mysteries. I’m sure that’s the very spot he showed me as
the one where it must have happened.”
“Did he take the photograph then?”
“No; he hadn’t his camera with him.”
“Then this is the suicide, or whatever it was!” cried Pocket, in
uncontrollable excitement. “It’s not only the place; it’s the thing
itself. Look at that man on the bench!”
The girl took a long look nearer the window.
“How horrible!” she shuddered. “His head looks as though it were
falling off! He might be dying.”
“Dying or dead,” said Pocket, “at the very second the plate was
exposed!”
She looked at him in blank horror. His own horror was no less apparent,
but it was more understanding. He had Baumgartner’s own confession of
his attempts to secure admission to hospital death-beds, even to
executions; he expounded Baumgartner on the whole subject, briefly,
clumsily, inaccurately enough, and yet with a certain graphic power
which brought those incredible theories home to his companion as
forcibly as Baumgartner himself had brought them home to Pocket. It was
the first she had ever heard of them. But then he had never discussed
his photography with her, never showed her plate or print. That it was
not merely a hobby, that he was an inventor, a pioneer, she had always
felt, without dreaming in what direction or to what extent. Even now
she seemed unable to grasp the full significance of the print from the
broken negative; and when she would have examined it afresh, there was
nothing to see; the June sunshine had done its work, and blotted out
the repulsive picture even as she held it in her hands.
“Then what do you think?” she asked at last; her voice was thin and
strained with formless terrors.
“I think that Dr. Baumgartner has the strangest power of any human
being I ever heard of; he can make you do anything he likes, whether
you like it yourself or not. The newspapers have been raking up this
case in connection with—mine—and I see that one theory was that the man
in this broken negative committed suicide. Well, if he did, I firmly
believe that Dr. Baumgartner was there and willed him to do it!”
“He must have been there if he took the photograph.”
“Is there another man alive who tries these things? I’ve told you all
he told me about it, but I haven’t told you all he said about the value
of human life.”
“Nor need you! He makes no secret of his opinion about that!”
“Then put the two things together, and where do they lead you? To these
murders committed with the mad idea of taking the spirit in its flight
from the flesh; that’s his own way of putting it, not mine.”
“But I thought your case was an accident pure and simple?”
“On my part, certainly; but how do I know he couldn’t get more power
over me in my sleep than at any other time? He saw me walking in my
sleep with this wretched revolver. He said himself I’d given him the
chance of a lifetime. You may be sure he meant before that poor man’s
death, not after it.”
“It isn’t possible,” declared Phillida, as though she had laid hold of
one solid certainty in a sea of floating hypotheses. “And I know he
hasn’t a pistol of his own,” she added, lest he should simplify his
charge.
But there they were agreed.
“He hadn’t one on him that morning; that I can swear,” said Pocket,
impartially disposing of the idea. “Mine was the only one in that cape
of his, because I once jolly nearly had it out again when he came back
into the room. There was nothing of the sort in his other coat, or
anywhere else about him, or I couldn’t have helped seeing it.” Phillida
accepted this statement only too thankfully. She beamed on the boy, as
if in recognition of a piece of downright magnanimity towards an enemy
whom she could now understand his regarding in that light. If only he
would go before the enemy returned! If her uncle had such a power over
him as he himself seemed to feel, then that was all the more reason for
him to go quickly. But Pocket was not the man to get up and run like
that. Perhaps he enjoyed displaying his bravery on the point, and
keeping his companion on tenter-hooks on his account; at any rate he
insisted on finishing his breakfast, and gave further free expression
to the wildest surmises as he did so. And yet he was even then on the
brink of a discovery which was some excuse for the wildest of them all,
while it demanded a fresh solution of the whole affair.
He had been fingering the recovered weapon in his pocket, almost
fondling it, though with mingled feelings, as the Prodigal Son of his
small possessions; suddenly it leapt out like a live thing in his hand,
and clattered on the table between the girl and boy. It was a wonder
neither of them was shot dead in his excitement. His whole face was
altered; but so was his whole life. She could not understand his
incoherent outburst; she only knew that he was twisting the chambers
round and round under her nose, and that there appeared to be live
cartridges in all six.
“Don’t you see?” the words came pouring. “Not one of them’s been
fired—it’s as I loaded it myself the other night! It can’t have been
this revolver at all!”
“But you must have known whether you fired or not?”
“I tell you I was walking in my sleep till the row woke me. I’d only
heard it once before, in a room. It sounded loud enough for the open
air, though I do remember wondering I hadn’t felt any kick. But I was
so dazed, and there was this beastly thing in my hand; and he took it
from me in such a rage that of course I believed I’d let it off. But
now I can see I can’t have done. It wasn’t my revolver and it wasn’t
me!”
“Yet you say yourself my uncle didn’t carry one?”
“I’ll swear he didn’t; but there’s another man in all this! There was
the man they arrested on Saturday—the man I was so keen to set free!”
The boy’s laugh grated; he was beside himself with righteous joy. What
was it to him that his innocence implied another’s complicity? Only too
characteristically, he saw simply the central fact from his own point
of view; but was it such an undoubted fact as he hot-headedly supposed?
There was the broken negative to confirm a certain suspicion, but that
was not enough for Phillida.
She asked if he had no more cartridges, and he said he had a few loose
in his waistcoat pocket; he had thrown away the box. “Then my uncle
might have put in a fresh one while you were asleep.”
“Why should he?”
“I don’t know, but it sounds quite as possible as the other.”
“I’ll soon tell you if he did!” cried Pocket. “There were fourteen in
the box to start with, because I counted them, and we only shot away
one at the Knaggses’ before we were cobbed. That left thirteen—six in
the revolver and seven in my pocket. There are your six, and here’s
one, two, three, four—and three’s seven!”
He swept them over the cloth like crumbs, for her to count them for
herself, while he looked on with flaming cheeks and wagging tongue. He
was beginning to see what it all meant now, but still only what it
meant to him and his. He could look his people in the face again; that
was the burden of his loud thanksgiving. He was as sure of his
innocence as though the dead man had risen to prove it.
“Very well,” said Phillida, briskly; “then it’s all the more reason you
should go this minute, and catch the very first train home.”
And in her sudden anxiety to see him safely off, she was for helping
him on with the overcoat he had brought down again with his bag; but he
followed her out slowly, and he would not turn his back.
“I can’t leave you now,” he said; and she knew that he saw it from her
side at last.
“Why not?”
“Because the whole thing’s altered! I’m not going to leave you with a
man like that!”
So Pocket, without a moment’s thought either for her immediate feelings
or the ultimate consequences to himself; and yet with an unconscious
air of sacrifice more wounding than his actual words. She would have
flung open the door, and ordered him out, but he got his back to it
first. So her big eyes blazed at him instead.
“You’re very kind!” she cried. “But suppose I don’t believe a word you
say against my uncle behind his back?”
“I shall wait and say it to his face. That’s another reason for
waiting.”
“Do you think you’re the person to judge him—a boy like you?”
“I don’t say I am. I only say that print——”
“How do you know he took the negative?”
“I don’t, but——”
“But you jump to conclusions like a baby!” cried the girl, too quick
for him in following up a confusing advantage. “I never heard anybody
like you for flying from one wild notion to another; first you say he
must have made you fire, though you own you were walking in your sleep
with a loaded revolver, and then you’re sure you never fired at all,
simply because you find the revolver fully loaded after days and days!
Then you find a photograph that needn’t necessarily be what we thought
it, that my uncle needn’t have taken even if it was; but you jump to
another conclusion about him, and you dare to speak of him to me as
though you knew every horrid thing you chose to think! As if you knew
him and I didn’t! As if he hasn’t been kind and good to me for years
and years—and kind to you—far too kind——”
The strained voice broke, tears were running down her face, and in it
and them there was more sincerity. Grief, and not anger, was the well
of those bitter tears. And it was in simple supplication, not
imperiously any more, that she pointed to the door when speech failed
her. The boy’s answer was to go close up to her instead. “Will you
come with me?” he asked hoarsely.
She shook her head; she was past surprise as well as indignation; she
could only shake her head.
“My people would be as good to you as ever he was,” urged Pocket
extravagantly. “They’d understand, and you’d stay with us, Phillida!
You might live with us altogether!”
She smiled very faintly at that.
“Oh, Phillida, can’t you see that they’d do anything for you after all
we’ve been through together? And I, oh! there’s nothing I wouldn’t do
if only you’d come with me now this minute! I know there’s a train
about ten, and I know where we could borrow the money on the way. Come,
Phillida, get on your things and come away from all this horror!”
He had gone on, even into details, encouraged by the tolerance or
apathy which had allowed him to go on at all. He took it for
indecision; but, whatever it was, she shook it off and declared once
for all that she would never leave Dr. Baumgartner, even if everything
was true about him, and he as mad as that would make him out.
“But he is!” cried Pocket, with most eager conviction. “That’s the only
possible explanation, and you’d believe it fast enough if you’d heard
all he said to me that first night, and been with me in the dark-room
when he developed his negative of the man he said I shot! You’d see how
it all fits in, and how this other negative this morning simply shows
he was at the bottom of that other affair as well! Of course he’s mad;
but that’s the very reason why I can’t go and leave you with him.”
“He would be as he’s always been to me.”
“I believe he would,” said honest Pocket.
“Then why don’t you go away and leave us?”
“Because I can’t.”
“Because you won’t!”
“Very well, because I won’t and never will! But, mind you, it’ll be
your fault if anything happens to either of us after this!”
He only meant it as a last argument, though he did resent her fatal
obstinacy, and all the obligations which it imposed upon himself. He
stood chained in fetters of her forging, as it were to the stake, but
he was prepared to stand there like a man, and he did not deserve the
things she said to him in a fresh paroxysm of unreasonable wrath. He
might be a baby, but he was not a complete coward, or simply trying to
make her miserable, as she declared; neither, on this occasion, was he
thinking only of himself. But Phillida seemed suddenly to realise that,
for she broke off with a despairing little cry, and ran sobbing up the
stairs.