The Camera Fiend, E. W. Hornung [important of reading books txt] 📗

Yet he had gone to the nearest chemist first!”

“The nearest butcher was next door; but he was so short about Baumgartner that I scented a true-green vegetarian. It was a false scent, Mr. Upton; not to mention the baker and the candlestick-maker, there's a little restaurant in the same row, which was about the fifth place where I began by asking if they knew where a Dr. Baumgartner lived in that neighbourhood. The little Italian boss was all over me on the spot! The worthy doctor proved to be his most regular customer, having all his meals sent in hot from the restaurant in quite the Italian manner. I don't suppose you see how very valuable this was to me. Germans love Italy, the little man explained; but I said that was the one point on which I should never yield to Germany—and I thought I was going to be kissed across the counter! It seems the good doctor lives alone with his niece (not always even her), and keeps no servants and never entertains. Yet on Friday, for the first time since the arrangement was made, the old chap went to the restaurant himself to complain of short commons; there had not been enough for them to eat on the Thursday night!”

[pg 196]

“Had they been alone?” asked Mr. Upton, with a puzzled face.

“That's the whole point! My little Florentine understood they were, but I deduced one extra, and then conceived a course that may astonish you. It was the bold course; but it nearly always pays. I lunched at my leisure (an excellent Chianti my little friend keeps) and afterwards went round and saw the doctor himself. The niece opened the door—I wish I'd seen more of her—but she fetched her uncle at once and I begged for an interview on an urgent matter. He consented in a way that, I must say, impressed me very favourably; and the moment we were alone I said, ‘I want to know, Doctor, who you bought those asthma cigarettes for last Thursday!’ ”

“That took him aback, but not unduly; so then I added, ‘I'm an inquiry agent with a very delicate case in hand, and if you'll tell me it may solve at heart-breaking a mystery as I've ever handled.’ Is was treating him like a gentleman, but I believe in that; there's no shorter cut to whether a man is one or not.”

“Well, his face had lit up, and a very fine face it is; it hadn't blackened for the fifth of a second; but I had a disappointment in store. ‘I'd tell you his name with all my heart,’ he said, ‘only I don't really know it myself. He said it was [pg 197] John Green—but his handkerchiefs were marked “A. A. U.” ’ ”

“Tony's initials!” cried Tony's father.

“But it never was Tony under a false name,” his sister vowed. “That settles it for me, Mr. Thrush.”

“Not even if he'd got into some scrape or adventure, Miss Upton?”

“He would never give a name that wasn't his.”

“Suppose he felt he had disgraced his name?”

“My brother Tony wouldn't do it!”

“He might feel he had?”

“He might,” the father agreed, “even if he'd done no such thing; in fact, he's just the kind of boy who would take an exaggerated view of some things.” His mind went back to his last talk with Horace on the subject.

“Or he might feel he was about to do something, shall we say, unworthy of you all?” Thrush made the suggestion with much delicacy.

“Then I don't think he'd do it,” declared loyal Lettice.

“Let us hear what you think he did,” said Mr. Upton.

“It's not what I think; it's what this man Baumgartner thinks, and his story that you ought to hear.”

And that which they now heard at second-hand [pg 198] was in fact a wonderfully true version—up to a point—of poor Pocket's condition and adventures—with the sleep-walking and the shooting left out—from the early morning of his meeting with Baumgartner until the late afternoon of that day.

Baumgartner had actually described the boy's long sleep in his chair; it was with the conversation when he awoke that the creative work began in earnest.

“That's a good man!” said Mr. Upton, with unimaginable irony. “I'd like to take him by the hand—and those infernal Knaggses by the scruff of their dirty necks—and that old hag Harbottle by the hair!”

“I think of dear darling Tony,” said Lettice, in acute distress; “lying out all night with asthma—it was enough to kill him—or to send him out of his mind.”

“I wonder if it could have done that,” remarked Thrush, in a tone of serious speculation which he was instantly called upon to explain.

“What are you keeping back?” cried Lettice, the first to see that he had been keeping something all this time.

“Only something he'd kept back from them,” replied Thrush, with just a little less than his usual aplomb. “It was a surprise he sprang on them after waking; it will probably surprise you still [pg 199] more, Mr. Upton. You may not believe it. I'm not certain that I do myself. In the morning he had spoken of the Australian voyage as though you'd opposed it, but withdrawn your opposition—one moment, if you don't mind! In the evening he suddenly explained that he was actually sailing in the Seringapatam, that his baggage was already on board, and he must get aboard himself that night!”

“I don't believe it, Thrush.”

“No more do I, father, for a single instant. Tony, of all people!”

Thrush looked from one to the other with a somewhat disingenuous eye. “I don't say I altogether accept it myself; that's why I kept it to the end,” he explained. “But we must balance the possibilities against the improbabilities, never losing sight of the one incontestable fact that the boy has undoubtedly disappeared. And here's a man, a well-known man, who makes no secret of the fact that he found him wandering in the Park, in the early morning, breathless and dazed, and drove him home to his own house, where the boy spent the day; they took a hansom, the doctor tells me, than which no statement is more quickly and easily checked. Are we to believe this apparently unimpeachable and disinterested witness, or are we not? He was most explicit about everything, [pg 200] offering to show me exactly where he found the boy, and never the least bit vague or unsatisfactory in any way. If you are prepared to believe him, if only for the sake of argument, you may care to hear Dr. Baumgartner's theory as to what has happened.”

Lettice shook her head in scorn, but Mr. Upton observed, “Well, we may as well hear what the fellow had to say to you; we must be grateful to him for taking pity on our boy, and he was the last who saw him; he may have seen something that we shouldn't guess.”

“Exactly!” exclaimed Eugene Thrush; “he saw, or at any rate he now thinks he saw, enough to build up a pretty definite theory on the foundation of fact supplied by me. He didn't know the boy had come up to see a doctor and been refused a lodging for the night; he understood he had come up to join his ship, and suspected he had been on a sort of mild spree—if Miss Upton will forgive me!” And he turned deferential lenses on the indignant girl.

“I don't forgive the suggestion,” said she; “but it isn't yours, Mr. Thrush, so please go on.”

“It's an idea that Dr. Baumgartner continues to hold in spite of all I was able to tell him, and we mustn't forget, as Mr. Upton says, that he was the last to see your brother. Briefly, he believes [pg 201] the boy did meet with some misadventure that night in town; that he had been ill-treated or intimidated by some unscrupulous person or persons; perhaps threatened with blackmail; at any rate imbued with the conviction that he is not more sinned against than sinning. That, I think, is only what one expects of these very conscientious characters, particularly in youth; he was taking something or somebody a thousandfold more seriously than a grown man would have done. Afraid to go back to school for fear of expulsion, ashamed to show his face at home! What's to be done? He thinks of the ship about to sail, the ship he hoped to sail in, and in his desperation he determines to sail in her still—even if he has to stow away!”

“My God!” cried Mr. Upton, “he's just the one to think of it. His head was full of those trashy adventure stories!”

But Lettice shook hers quietly.

“To think of it, but not to do it,” said she, with a quiet conviction that rather nettled Mr. Thrush.

“But really, Miss Upton, he must have done something, you know! And he actually talked to Dr. Baumgartner about this; not of doing it himself, but of stowaways in general, à propos of his voyage; and how many pounds of biscuit and how many [pg 202] ounces of water would carry one alive into blue water. There's another thing, by the way! He told Baumgartner the ship touched nowhere between the East India Docks and Melbourne; he would be out of the world for three whole months.”

“And she only sailed yesterday?” cried Mr. Upton, coming furiously to his feet. “And you let her get through the Straits of Dover and out to sea while you came down here to tell me this by inches?”

Thrush blinked blandly through his port-hole glasses.

“I'm letting her go as far as Plymouth,” said he, “where one or both of us will board her tomorrow if she's up to time!”

“You said she didn't touch anywhere between the docks and Melbourne?”

“No; your son said that, Mr. Upton, and it was his one mistake. They don't usually touch, but a son of one of the owners happens to have gone round in the ship to Plymouth for the trip. I got it first from an old boatswain of the line who's caretaker at the office, and the only man there, of course, yesterday afternoon; but I've since bearded one of the partners at his place down the river, and had the statement confirmed and amplified. One or two pasengers are only going aboard at [pg 203] Plymouth, so she certainly won't sail again before to-morrow noon, even if she's there by then. You will be in ample time to board her—and I've got a