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

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?”

[pg 243]

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 [pg 244] 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 [pg 245] 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 [pg 246] 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 [pg 247] 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 [pg 248] 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 [pg 249] 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.

[pg 250]

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