A THIRD CASE
In days to come, when the boy had schooled himself not to speak of
these days, nor to let his mind dwell on their mystery and terror, it
was as a day of dark hours and vivid moments that he remembered the one
which Phillida and he began alone together in her uncle’s house. Those
endless hours were either mercifully forgotten or else contracted to an
endurable minimum; but the unforgettable moments would light themselves
up in his memory without a detail missing.
There was their first encounter at the dark-room door, and Phillida
standing all but barefoot in the ruby light, with her glorious hair
about her shoulders, a picture that could never fade. Then there was
the moment of the incriminating print, which the sun wiped out even as
Phillida stood with it in her hands. That moment merged itself in the
greater one of his discovery that the revolver was fully loaded, his
inspiration that neither it nor he had done the fatal mischief in the
Park. Then she was begging him to go (she who would keep him the time
before!) and he entreating her to come with him, and neither giving way
an inch, so that they quarrelled just when they should have stuck
together, and she ran away in tears, and he stayed below in a glow of
anger which dissolved his fears like snow in May.
That was the beginning of a black hour and more. Phillida was never to
be forgiven, then; he was staying there at his peril, staying
absolutely on her account, and so far from giving him the slightest
credit for it, or a single word of encouragement, she said all sorts of
things and was off before he could answer one of them. It was not for
Pocket to see the many ironies of that moment, and not for him to
recognise the tonic property of his heroic grievance. He could only see
himself at the foot of those stairs, first gnashing his teeth and not
sorry he had made her cry, then sitting down with his eye on the front
door, revolver in hand, to await the click of the doctor’s key. Another
click was to answer it; and at the point of the cocked revolver
Baumgartner was to have made a clean breast of his crimes, not only to
the giant-killer at the foot of the stairs but to the girl he meant to
call to witness with her own ears.
Pocket saw himself a desperate character just then, and one not
incapable of desperate action had the climax only come at once. But he
had more than an hour of it alone at his post; he had a whole hot
forenoon of unmitigated suspense, of sickening alarms from tradesmen’s
carts, boys whistling past the house as though they were not in a
wicked world at all, and then a piano-organ that redoubled his
watchfulness, and spoilt some tunes for him for ever. Once he did hear
shambling feet on the very steps outside. Once was quite enough, though
it was but an advertisement for cast-off clothing (and false teeth)
that came fluttering through the letter-box. Pocket was left in such a
state that he would not have backed himself to hit the door from the
stairs; and he put the chain on it, thinking to interview the doctor
over that, in the manner of old Miss Harbottle.
So it happened that the first significant sound was entirely lost upon
him, because he was listening for one so much nearer at hand, until
Phillida ran downstairs and almost over him where he sat.
He got up to make way stiffly, but a glance assured him that the
quarrel was over on her side. The great eyes were fixed appealingly
upon him, but with a distressing look which he had done nothing to
provoke. Not before then was he aware of another duet between newsboys
coming nearer and nearer, and shouting each other down as they came.
“You hear that?” she whispered, as if not to drown a note.
“I do now.”
“Do you hear what it is?”
Pocket listened, and caught a word he was not likely to miss.
“Something fresh about the murder,” said he grimly.
“No; it’s another one,” she shuddered. “Can’t you hear? ‘Another awful
murder!’ Now they’re saying something else.”
“It is something about the Park.” Pocket stuck to his idea.
“And something else about some ‘well-known’—I can’t hear what!”
“No more can I.”
“I’ll open the door.”
She opened it on the chain as he had left it. That did not help them.
The shouting had passed the end of their quiet road. It was dying away
again in the distance.
“I must go out and get one,” said Phillida. “Some well-known man!”
“You’re not thinking of the doctor, surely?”
“I don’t know! I can’t think where he is.”
“But you’re worse than I am, if you jump to that!” said Pocket, smiling
to reassure her. He did not smile when she had run out as she was; he
had shut the door after her, and he was waiting to open it in a fever
of impatience.
Dr. Baumgartner had left the house before six o’clock in the morning;
now it was after twelve. If some tragedy had overtaken him in his turn,
then there was an end to every terror, and for him a better end than he
might meet with if he lived. The boy remembered Him who desireth not
the death of a sinner, and was ashamed of his own thought; but that did
not alter it. Unless his fears and his surmises were all equally
unfounded, better for everybody, and best of all for Phillida, if this
criminal maniac came to his end without public exposure of his crimes.
Pocket may have misconceived his own attitude of mind, as his elders
and betters do daily; he may have been thinking of his own skin more
than he knew, or wanted to know. In that case he had his reward, for
the murdered man was not Dr. Baumgartner. Phillida’s first words on
returning were to that effect; and yet she trembled as though they were
not the truth.
“Who was it, then?” the schoolboy asked suspiciously.
“Sir Joseph Schelmerdine.”
“So he was the well-known man!”
He was well known even to the boy by name, but that was all. He had
seen it in newspapers, and he thought he had heard it execrated by
Baumgartner himself in one of his little digs at England. Pocket was
not sure about this, but he mentioned his impression, and Phillida
nodded with swimming eyes.
“Did the doctor know him?”
“Not personally; but he thought him a European danger.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you. It was something to do with politics and gold-mines,
and some financial paper. I never understood.”
“May I see the paper you’ve brought in?”
The girl held it tight in her hand, and tighter still as he held out
his.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” she said.
“Then there’s something you haven’t told me.”
“There is!”
“I shall know it sooner or later.”
“I know you will, and I know what you’ll think! You may think what you
like, and still be wrong!”
There was a pause between the sentences, and in the pause the boy found
the paper at his feet. There was no need to open it at the place; it
was so folded already, the news standing out in its leaded type, and
more of it in the late corner. Sir Joseph Schelmerdine, Bart., M.P.,
the well-known proprietor of the _Money-maker_, had been shot dead in
front of his house in Park Lane. The murder had been committed in the
early hours of the morning, before anybody was about except Sir Joseph
and his groom, and the person whom the groom described as the only
possible murderer. The man had just seen his master mounted for the
early morning ride, and had left him in conversation with a
photographer representing himself as concerned with the press, and
desirous of obtaining an equestrian photograph for his paper. The groom
thought it was to be taken in the Park, and was himself on his way back
to the mews when the riderless horse overtook him. Mounting the animal,
he had galloped round to find Sir Joseph dead in the road, and no trace
of the “photographer” but a false beard and spectacles which he had
evidently discarded in his flight, and which unfortunately precluded a
close description of his appearance. But a hue and cry had been
started, and it was believed that the criminal was still in hiding in
the immediate neighbourhood, which was being subjected to a thorough
search under the direction of responsible officers from Scotland Yard.
Such was the news which the young girl had shrunk from showing to her
companion. She had left him, indeed, to read it by himself. And the
next thing he remembered was finding her quite insensible in the big
chair in the back room.
The afternoon was a blank broken by no more moments such as these. It
was a period of dull misery and gnawing dread; but the pair saw each
other through it, they were not divided any more. Now they listened for
his step no longer, but for more newsboys crying his capture to the
world. And in the hours that they spent thus listening, and listening,
the girl had much to say, that it did her good to say, about this Dr.
Baumgartner as she had known and almost loved him in the past.
Lovable, however, he had never been, though more than good and kind to
her for all that. He had never taken her into his life, or entered into
hers, in the many years they had been more or less together. All she
really knew of him was from her mother, whose elder sister he had
married soon after the Franco-Prussian War, and lost soon after
marriage. He must have been settled in England many years before
Phillida’s mother, herself an Englishman’s widow, came to keep house
for him. The girl could not remember her father, but her mother had
lived to see her in her teens, and in her lifetime Dr. Baumgartner had
seemed much as other men. It was only of late years that he had
withdrawn from a world in which he was justly honoured, and buried
himself ever deeper in his books and his photographic experiments. His
niece had never known anything of these; he had told her nothing, and
she had always gone in awe of him. But he had sent her to school, he
was going to send her to college, he had only just given her six
months in Switzerland. It was during those months that all his
eccentricities had become pronounced; that he had given up servants,
and taken to doing half the work of the house himself, with the casual
aid of charwomen, and saving the other half by having the meals in from
a restaurant. Phillida had no influence with him in these or any other
matters. She only blamed herself for not having realised the change in
him and done more to save him from himself. He had done so much for
her, whatever madness might have overtaken him in the end; her own
kinsfolk so much less, for all their opulent integrity. Nothing could
make her forget what he had done. She never could or would desert him;
it was no use asking her again; but she took her callow champion’s
hand, and wrung it with her final answer, which was unaccompanied by
further prayers for his departure.
And Pocket could understand her now, though it was no consecutive tale
that he heard, but a very chaos of excuses and extenuations, regrets,
suppositions, and not always revelant recollections, of which he had to
make what he could in his own mind. What he made was a narrative so
natural that he could not believe it was the life-story of a murderer.
His own convictions became preposterous in his own eyes. What had he
been thinking about all day? Was that the way a murderer would behave?
Was this the way a murderer would live, in these surroundings, with
those books about him, with that little billiard-table in the next
room? Had those waxen murderers in the garish vault lived ordinary
lives as well? Pocket had only thought of them as committing their
dreadful deeds, yet now he could only think of Baumgartner as living
this ordinary life.
The mood passed, but it would recur as sure as Phillida thought of
something else to be said for Dr. Baumgartner; it was the creature of
her feeling for him, and of the schoolboy’s feeling for her. If he
could have convicted himself of the fatal affair in the Park, and so
cleared Baumgartner of all blood-guiltiness whatsoever, in that or any
other case, he would have done it for Phillida’s sake that afternoon.
But with every hour of the doctor’s absence suspicions multiplied.
Phillida herself was a prey to them. She was almost as ready to recall
symptoms of incipient insanity as instances of personal kindness; if
one lost one’s reason, she broke a long silence to contend, there could
be no question of regret and wrong. She was not so sure about crime and
punishment. Pocket, of course, said there could be no question of that
either; but in his heart he wondered how much method they must prove to
hang a madman.
The evening meal had been taken in, but that was all. The girl and boy
had no thought of sitting down to it; she had made tea not long before;
and strong excitement is its own meat and drink. They were sitting
silently together in the room at the back. The scented summer dusk was
deepening every minute. Suddenly there was a sound of small branches
breaking in the garden. Pocket peeped out, standing back from the
window at her entreaty.
The laburnum by the wall was shaking violently, pouring its golden rain
into both gardens, and the bush beneath it looked alive; a tall figure
rose out of it, and came creeping towards the little conservatory, bent
double, and brushing the soil from his clothes as he advanced with long
and stealthy strides. It was Dr. Baumgartner, in a cap pulled down over
his eyes, and the old alpaca jacket. He had a newspaper parcel under
his arm.
The boy and girl were in the dark angle between the window and the
door; but it was only comparative darkness, and Baumgartner might have
seen them; they were clasping hands as they shrank away from him with
one accord. But he did not seem to see them at all. He stretched
himself, as though he found it a relief to stand upright, and more
mould trickled from his garments in the act; he took off the alpaca
jacket, and shook it as one shakes a handkerchief. There could have
been nothing in the pockets, certainly no weapon, and if he had a
hip-pocket there was none in that, for his gaunt figure stood out
plainly enough in the middle of the room. There was still the newspaper
parcel; he had put it down on one of the walnut-tables. He now removed
the paper; it fell at Pocket’s feet, a newspaper and nothing more; and
nothing had come out of it but the stereoscopic camera, that either
watcher could detect.
And he passed through the room without taking the least notice of
either of them, whether he saw them or not; and they heard him go
upstairs, and shut the door, and then his footsteps overhead.
“I’ll go up and tackle him at once,” said Pocket, through his set
teeth; but Phillida would not hear of it.
“No! I must go first and see if there’s nothing I can get him; he
mayn’t have had anything all day. There’s no need for you to come at
all—I believe he’s forgotten all about us both!”
“Not he!” whispered Pocket, as the door opened overhead. “Here he
comes!”
He could not help gripping his revolver as the stairs creaked again
under Dr. Baumgartner; he had gripped it more than once already with
the hand that was not holding Phillida’s. The doctor was coming down in
a hurry, as though he had indeed forgotten something. But he passed
the open drawing-room door; they saw him pass, jingling a bunch of
keys, and never so much as glancing in on the way. It was the dark-room
door he opened. Now he would find out everything! They heard a match
struck, and saw the faint light turn into a strong deep crimson glow.
The door shut. The children stood listening in the dark.
Running water, and the chink of glass; the tapping of a stoppered
bottle; the opening of the dark slide; these stages the younger
photographer followed as though he were again looking on. Then there
was a long period without a sound.
“He’s developing now!” whispered Pocket, close to the folding-doors. He
caught the sound of laboured breathing on the other side. “There it
is—there it is—there it is!” cried the doctor’s voice in mingled
ecstasy and mad excitement. A deep sigh announced the blackening of the
plate at the conclusion of the first process. A tap ran for a moment;
interminable minutes ensued. “It’s gone! It’s gone again!” cried the
wild voice, with a sob; “it’s gone, gone, gone like all the rest!”
One listener waited for the passionate smashing of the negative as
before; but that did not happen again; and then he wondered if it was
being put straight into the rack with the others, if the damage to the
locker had been discovered at last. He never knew. The door opened. The
red glow showed for a moment in the passage, then went out. The door
shut behind Baumgartner, and again he passed the drawing-room, a bent
figure, without looking in. And the flagging step on the stairs bore no
resemblance to the one which had come hurrying down not many minutes
before.
“I must go to him!” said Phillida in broken undertones, and her grief
communicated itself to the other young sympathetic soul, for all the
base fears he had to fight alone. Personal safety, little as she might
think of it, was the essence of her position as opposed to his; and he
was of the type that thinks of everything. She left him listening
breathless in the dark. And in the dark she found him when at length
she returned to report the doctor busy writing at his desk; but a pin’s
head of blue gas glimmered where there had been none before, and a
paper which had been trodden underfoot now rustled in Pocket’s hand.
“Does he know I’m here?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. We never mentioned you. I believe he’s forgotten
your existence altogether; he began by looking at me as though he’d
forgotten mine. He says he wants nothing, except time to write. He
seems so strange—so old!”
Again the break in her voice, and again the boyish sympathy in his. “I
wonder if something would be any comfort to you?”
“I don’t think so. What is it?”
“Something I saw in the paper he brought in with him. I lit the gas
while you were upstairs.”
Phillida turned it out again without comment.
“Nothing that you saw can make any difference to me,” she sighed.
“Do you remember my saying there must be another man in
these—mysteries?”
“I think I do. What difference does it make? Besides, the man you meant
is in prison.”
“He isn’t!”
“You said he was?”
“He was let out early this morning! Let me light the gas while you read
it for yourself.”
But Phillida had no desire to read it for herself. “I doubt if there’s
anything in that,” she said; “but what if there were? Does it make it
any better if a man has an accomplice in his crimes? If he’s guilty at
all, it makes it all the worse.”