The Camera Fiend - E. W. Hornung (books you need to read txt) 📗
- Author: E. W. Hornung
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“There may have been an accident, Thrush, but not necessarily a fatal one!”
An accident! Thrush had never thought of that explanation of the public mystery; but evidently Mullins had, judging by his almost fiendish grins and nods behind the poor father's back. Thrush looked at both men with the troubled frown of a strenuously reasoning being—looked and frowned again—frowned and reasoned afresh. And then, all in an instant, the trouble lifted from his face; light had come to him in an almost blinding flash, such as might well obscure the quality of the light; enough for Eugene Thrush that it lit him back to his mystery every bit as brightly as it lit him onward to its solution.
He was even man enough to refrain from reflecting it automatically in his face, as he put a number of apparently irrelevant questions to Mr. Upton about the missing boy. What was his character? what its chief points? Was he a boy with the moral courage of his acts? Would he face their consequences like a man?
“I never knew him tell a lie in his life,” said Mr. Upton, “either to save his own skin or any thing else; and it was a case of their young skins when they got into trouble with me! Poor Tony was the most conscientious of them all, and I hear that's what they say of him at school.”
[pg 164]Thrush put one or two further questions, and then said he had a clue, though a very slight one, which he was rather in a hurry to follow up himself; and this time the ironmaster went off quietly of his own accord, with a dejected undertaking to be at his hotel when he was wanted.
“I don't like the look of our friend,” remarked Thrush, looking hard at Mullins when at last they were alone. “He shapes none too well for the strain he's got to bear; if he cracks up there'll be a double tragedy, if not a triple one, in that family. We must catch our hare quickly, Mullins, or we may catch him too late.”
Mullins turned on the disagreeable grin that Thrush had so resented a few minutes before; he took no notice of it now.
“You'll find your man,” said Mullins significantly, “the very moment that I find mine, Mr. Thrush.”
“Meaning they're the same person?”
“To be sure.”
“That this lad is the actual slayer of the man Holdaway?”
“Surely, sir, it's as plain as a pikestaff now?”
“Not to me, Mullins—not to me.”
Thrush was twinkling behind his great round goggles.
“Then who do you think has done it, sir?” inquired Mullins, in deferential derision.
[pg 165]“Ah! that's another matter, my man; but I can tell you whom I hope to get arrested within another hour!”
Mullins looked as though he could hardly believe his ears; his jaw, black as a crape hat-band this morning, fell in front of his grimy collar.
“You're actually thinking of arresting some one else?”
“I am—with your permission, Mullins.”
“Tell me who it is, sir, for Heaven's sake!”
And with his fattest smile Thrush whispered into an ear that recoiled from his words as though they had been so many drops of boiling oil.
Pocket Upton was able to relieve his soul of one load that morning. Dr. Baumgartner had left the schoolboy to his soap and water, taking the newspaper with him; but apparently Pocket had followed him down in quicker time than the other anticipated. At any rate the little lady of the house was all alone in the dining-room, where Pocket found her boiling eggs on the gas-fire, and had her to himself for several seconds of which he wasted none. There was neither grace nor tact in what he said, and his [pg 166] manner was naturally at its worst, but the penitential torrent came from his heart, and was only stemmed by the doctor's hasty arrival on the scene. Miss Platts had not been given time to say a word, but now she asked Mr. Upton how many minutes he liked his egg boiled, and would not let him do it himself, but smiled when he told her it was “done to a shake.” Dr. Baumgartner, on the other hand, scowled upon them both until observation or reflection had convinced him that no promises had been broken and no confidences exchanged.
The callow pair saw something more of each other during the morning; for Pocket hotly resented being distrusted, and showed it by making up to the young girl under the doctor's nose. He talked to her about books in the other room. He had the impertinence to invite her into the dining-room for a game of billiards, but the sense next moment to include her uncle in an amended form of more becoming suggestion. Baumgartner eventually countenanced a game, but spent most of the time with his back to the players and his eye on the street. The boy and girl got on very well now; they seemed frankly glad of each other, though he caught her more than once with a large and furtive eye on him. But she seemed to enjoy her baptism of schoolboy slang. And it was only when she [pg 167] began to question him about his special vocabulary, that Baumgartner looked on for a little, and put in his word.
“You see he still believes in his public school,” said he to Phillida, in a tone which reminded their visitor of his first breakfast in the house.
“I should think I did!” cried Pocket, and did a little loyal boasting about the best of schools, and the best house in that school, until memory took him by the throat and filled his eyes. It was twelve o'clock, and a summer's Saturday. School was over for the week. Only your verses to do in your own time, and get signed by Spearman before you went up to dormitory on Saturday night; but meanwhile, Saturday afternoon! A match on the Upper, where you could lie on your rug and watch the game you couldn't play; call-over at the match; ices and lemon-drinks in a tent on the field; and for Saturday supper anything you liked to buy, cooked for you in the kitchen and put piping hot at your place in hall, not even for the asking, but merely by writing your name plainly on the eggs and leaving them on the slab outside! It was not these simple luxuries that Pocket missed so sorely; it was the whole full life of ups and downs, and no yesterdays and no to-morrows, that he had lost for ever since last Saturday. The heavy midday meal came in smoking from [pg 168] the Italian restaurant, and Pocket was himself again, as a boy will be; after all, they knew about him at home by this time, their worst fears were allayed, and in the end it would all come right. In the end he would be sitting in his own old place at home, instead of with strangers in an unknown street; telling them everything, instead of holding his peace; and watching even Fred and Horace listening to every word—much as Dr. Baumgartner was listening to something now.
What was it? Phillida was listening, too, and watching her uncle as she listened. Pocket did both in his turn.
It was the voice of newspaper hawkers, shouting in couples, coming nearer with their shouts. Dr. Baumgartner jumped up from the table, and ran outside without his hat.
His promise alone prevented Pocket from following and outstripping the doctor. He knew what the shouting was about before he could have sworn to a single raucous word. But Phillida could not know, and she resumed at once where they had left off before breakfast.
“Of course I forgive you,” she whispered. “It was I began it!”
“Began what?”
“Our row yesterday.”
Phillida had a demure twinkle, after all; but it [pg 169] was lost on Pocket now. “I'd forgotten all about it,” he said with superfluous candour, his ear still on the street.
“I haven't.”
Her voice made him remember better. “I hope to goodness I didn't hurt you?”
“Of course you didn't.”
“But you must have thought me mad!”
There was a slight but most significant pause.
“Well, I never shall again.”
“Then you did!” he gasped. Their eyes had met sharply; both young faces were flooded with light, and it was much the same light. There was no nonsense about it, but there was indignant horror on his side, and indignant shame on hers.
“You really are at school?” she whispered, not increduously, but as one seeking assurance in so many words; and in a flash he saw what she had thought, what she had been deliberately made to think, that his beloved school was not a school at all, but an Ayslum!
But at that moment Dr. Baumgartner was heard bargaining at the gate with one raucous voice, while the other went on roaring huskily, “Park murder—arrest! 'Rest o' de Park murderer! Park murder—Park murder—arrest!” And Pocket sprang up from the table in a state that swept his last thoughts clean from his mind.
[pg 170]The girl said something; he did not hear what. He was white and trembling, in pitiable case even to eyes that could only see skin-deep; but the doctor's step came beating like a drum to him, and he was solidly seated when the doctor entered—without any paper at all.
“It's that murder the papers are all exploiting,” he explained benignly. “They were shouting out something about an arrest; you would hear them, I daresay. But it's the usual swindle; the police are merely hoping to effect an arrest. I threatened to send for them unless the scoundrel took his paper back!”
He was in his lightest mood of sardonic gaiety. The sins of the vendors recalled those of “your vermin press itself”; the association was wilfully unfair, the favourite phrase a studied insult; but the English boy was either dense or indifferent, and Phillida's great eyes were in some other world. Baumgartner subjected them both to a jealous scrutiny, and suddenly cried out upon his own bad memory. It appeared there was a concert at the Albert Hall, where “the most popular and handsome pair in England” (the inverted commas were in the doctor's sneer) were being welcomed on their return from the ends of the earth. He had intended going to hear what they could do; but Phillida should go instead; she was not past the ballad stage.
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