The Missing Link - Edward Dyson (distant reading txt) 📗

door, a peremptory voice called "Come in," and he opened the door very softly, entered, closed the door very gently behind him, placed his crippled belltopper (rim uppermost) on the small counter that walled visitors off from the severe gentleman dictating to a blonde typewriter and said, with clerical unction.

"Good-day sir. Good-day my dear young lady."

"D-afternoon!" replied the severe gentleman severely.

"Sir. I am here on a mission of charity, if you don't mind. I am the Rev Andrew Rowbottom. I am collecting subscriptions for the widow and family of the late William John Elphinston, a worthy member of my congregation, and a most estimable bricklayers labourer, killed, as you may remember, in the execution of his duty on the 14th September last."

"Bless my soil, I can't be bothered with these matters in business hours," said the gentleman, and is severity was something terrible, but it did not appal the Rev. Andrew Rowbottom.

"I have here a subscription list," continued the intruder suavely. "You will find upon it the name of some of our most prominent business people."

"I'm busy." said the severe gentleman.

"Need I remind you, my very good sir, that the smallest contribution will be thankfully received?"

"Be so good as to close the door after you."

"Certainly, brother, all in good time. Shall we say half-a-crown? Half-a-crown is a nice sum. No? A shilling perhaps?"

"I suppose I shall have to pay for the privilege of being left in peace to the pursuit of my affairs. Here!!" The severe man slapped a shilling on the counter.

"Oh, thank you--thank you so much." said the Rev. Andrew Rowbottom effusively. "What name?"

"Confound the name!" snapped the severe gentle man. "Good-day."

"Oh, to be sure, to be sure--good--day," said the Rev. Andrew, and he smiled and bowed and slid I trough the half-open door.

Nicholas Crips called at many offices. In a few instances the occupants evaded a levy. They were people who had no particular business in hand, and could spare the time to hear all the Rev. Andrew Rowbottom persuasive arguments and stubbornly resist each plea, but the majority of the men were glad to buy the eloquent clergyman off with a small contribution. Sometimes office boys were impertinent, and an occasional business man was insolent and talked of throwing the suppliant out of the window, but Mr. Rowbottom was always suave and conciliatory. He seemed to sympathise with the angry individual whose privacy he was forced to break in pursuit of a sacred duty.

Nickie the Kid reached the fourth floor. It was very quiet, and most of the offices were deserted. He found a pale young typewriter, a slave of the machine, in a room rather larger than an alderman's coffin, and obtained threepence in coppers for the widow and family of the late lamented William John Elphinston. He passed along a dim passage, and came to one of the larger apartments fronting the main street. It was evidently one of a suite. On the door was a brass plate bearing the name. "Henry Berryman."

The Rev. Andrew Rowbottom knocked on his door a meek, appealing summons. He received no reply. Confident that he had heard a movement in the room Andrew knocked again. Still on answer. The Rev Andrew Rowbottorn turned the knob, opened the door a foot or so, and thrust his benignant countenance into the room.

The face when it first appeared to the occupant was lit with a smile, suffused with a tender benevolence, a moment later it was stark and white, drawn with horror, a horror that chilled the blood, and gripped at the heart with a hand of iron.

What the Rev. Andrew Rowbottom saw was a tall, handsome, fashionably-dressed woman of about thirty-six resting with her back to an office table, the position was crouching, her fingers clung to the table's edge; her eyes, large, dark, and instinct with mortal terror, were fixed upon the stranger in the doorway. At her feet was the body of a man, a stout man of perhaps forty. The body lay on its right side, the face turned to the floor, and from somewhere in the breast flowed a red stream that massed in a dark, clammy pool upon the slate coloured linoleum.

Nickie saw a faint, flutter of movement in the limbs of the man on the floor, and his eyes rose to the face of the woman again. Her dry tongue passed over her parched lips, she seemed to be making an effort to speak. On the table near her right hand was a knife.

Nicholas Crips slipped into the room, the door closed softly behind him. He had recognised the woman. She was his Mary Stuart of the Mask Ball. The man on the floor he remembered in the guise of Henry VIII.

For a terrible half-minute the two stared at each other over the dead man.

"You killed him!" whispered Nickie.

The woman tried to moisten her lips again, made an effort to speak, and her voice broke in her throat. She nodded dumbly.

"My God!"

"You-you-what are you going to do?" whispered the woman. "Why don't you call out?" There was a wild hope in her dilated eyes. "You don't! You don't!"

Nickie shook his head. "I don't run for the police?" he said. "No, I am not on speaking terms with the police myself."

"You won't seize me, you won't betray me--you, a clergyman!"

"No." said Nicholas Crips.

The woman moved forward, she laid hands upon him, she looked into his face.

"He was a villain." she said. "He deserved it, but I am a murderess, and you won't--" Her hands gripped him, a new light shone in her eyes.

"Why were you creeping in here?" she said. "You are a thief, That's it--you are a thief. Well, listen, there are five thousand pounds' worth of diamonds in a little leather bag in his breast pocket!" She pointed down at the body. "Five thousand pounds' worth," she said.

"Five thousand!" he gasped. "Five thousand!"

The woman's hand was on the door knob. She opened the door and slipped out. The lock clicked as she closed the door behind her.


CHAPTER VI.

A DEPARTURE INTO ART.

NICHOLAS CRIPS seated-himself on a warm stone, on a convenient boulder spread the contents of yesterday's "Age." The "Age" contents on this occasion was the lunch of Mr. Nicholas Grips. Nickie had been given the meal half-an-hour earlier by a kind soul in one of the suburbs, to whom he had pitifully presented his urgent need of sustenance of an inviting kind. Very adroitly Nickie the Kid had dwelt upon his necessities, while impressing the lady's with the eccentricities of a peculiarly capricious appetite.

It was the day after the distressing incident in Biggs's Buildings. Mr. Crips was no longer dressed in his clerical garments; they were carefully stowed away in a niche in a riverside quarry where he had long kept his wardrobe. To-day Nickie was dressed in the rags of a simple mendicant.

The strongly melodramatic adventure the previous day did not seem to distress Mr. Crips; he ate heartily, but had only reached his second course, which was represented by the chicken, when his attention was attracted by a very lean, very pale, hollow-eyed, sad stranger who had seated himself on a sloping tree nearer the river, and was eyeing the banquet hungrily.

Nickie the Kid, was not selfish. When his own needs were fairly met he could be generous with anybody's property, even his own. He tapped the chicken's breastbone invitingly with his penknife, and addressed the stranger.

"May I offer you a little lunch, sir?" he said urbanely, with quite the air of a generous host.

The long, lean man shook his head in mute melancholy, but accepted the invitation as an offer of friendship, and approached nearer, seating himself on a rock facing Nickie's banquet.

"No, thanks, boss," he said.

"You'll forgive me," said Nickie, after wrenching a mouthful from the back of the pullet, "but you look famished."

"I am," answered the stranger.

"Well, help yourself. These garlic sausage sandwiches are superb. Try the beer."

Nickie pushed his jam tin forward.

The other shook his head very regretfully.

"I mustn't," he said. "Fact is, my livin' depends on me not eatin', an' I've got a wife an' kiddies to support."

Nickie paused with the bottle half-way to his mouth.

"Your living depends on your not eating?" he ejaculated. "What, do you earn anything by starving, then? By Jove, that's a quaint idea."

"I earn all I get by starvin'. My name's Cann--Matty Cann, but I'm known professionally as Bony-part. Ain't yeh seen me advertisements up the main street? I'm drawed on a big poster outside Professer Thunder's Museum iv Marvels, I'm the livin' skelington."

"He isn't ruining himself with your upkeep," Nickie.

"No." replied the Living Skeleton. "I'm allowanced off an' I've got t' eat on'y what he gives me--that's in our contrac'. If I eat more an put on flesh out I go. There's a clause in ther contrac' what sez I'm li'ble t' be fired if goes above seven stone seven. The previous livin' skelington got the run at Barnip fer breakin' out. He was the only original. I'm just a sort iv understudy."

Nickie clicked his tongue sympathetically. "Well," he said, "you might pick a hone. That wouldn't be very fattening, and it might delude your stomach with the idea you were having something to eat."

Bonypart, the Living Skeleton, took the wish-bone with a few shreds of chicken on it.

"Thanks," he said, "it might be a comfort." He sucked the bone fondly.

"You said that Professor Thunder's only original living skeelton broke out at Barnip. What happened to him?"

"He went on the spree," said Matty Cann.

"Drink?" queried Nickie.

"No, food. He got at a bar spread in the Shire hall at Barnip, an' afore they missed him he ate enough fer ten Shire Councillors. He completely rooned that banquet. That was the third time he'd gone on th' spree, an' ther Perfesser 'ad warned him if it 'appened again he'd get the shoot."

Nickie the Kid grinned.

"It isn't a Profession that would suit me," he said. "I have an instinctive fondness for meals. I knew the travelling show' business was a hungry game but I never reckoned on starvation as a means of earning a livelihood."

"Oh. 'tisn't all bad." said Ronypart eagerly. "There's th' Missin' Link, fer instance; he a glutton. Blime, th' food that Missin' Link gets makes me lose all patience, an' sometimes I'd like t' get right up from my chair, an' bite him. He's in the 'ospital just now, sufferin' from his over--feedin'. It's a judgment on him."

"A monkey in the hospital!"

"Well, he ain't exactly a monkey. He was a man done up something like one o' them hoorang-hoo-tangs. Yeh see, part o' Perfesser Thunder's show is called the Descent of Man. It contains ten different kinds of monkeys, from Spider, a little cove 'bout th' size iv a rat, up t' Ammonia, what's a big griller. Th' Missin' Link, he comes next; but as I was sayin' he's out iv it just now, bein' ill, an' Perfesser Thunder ud give ez much ez two quid er week fee a good, reliable Missin' Link what wouldn't over-eat hisself." The Living Skeleton was allowing an inquiring eye to roam over Nickie the Kid.

"I was thinkin' yon was just bout th' build fer a Missin' Link," he said.