CHAPTER VI

Screened by that darkness, and close sheltered by the matted gorse which fringed and dotted the expanse of the nearby heath, he had been an interested witness to the entire proceeding.

“Played, my lad, played!” he commented, putting his thoughts into mumbled words of laughing approval, as Lennard, taking the taxicab under guard, escorted it and its occupants out of the immediate neighbourhood; then, excessive caution prompting him to quell even this little ebullition, he shut up like an oyster and neither spoke, nor moved, nor made any sound until the two vehicles were represented by nothing but a purring noise dwindling away into the distance.

When that time came, however, he rose, and facing the heath, forged out across its mist-wrapped breadth with that long, swinging, soldierly stride peculiar unto him, his forehead puckered with troubled thought, his jaw clamped, and his lips compressed until his mouth seemed nothing more than a bleak slit gashed in a gray, unpleasant-looking mask.

But after a while the night and the time and the place worked their own spell, and the troubled look dropped away; the dull eyes lighted, the grim features softened, and the curious crooked smile that was Nature’s birth-gift to him broke down the rigid lines of the “bleak slit” and looped up one corner of his mouth.

It was magic ground, this heath – a place thick set as the Caves of Manheur with the Sapphires of Memory – and to a nature such as his these things could not but appeal.

Here Dollops had come into his life – a starveling, an outcast; derelict even in the very morning time of youth – a bit of human wreckage that another ten minutes would have seen stranded forever upon the reefs of crime.

Here, too – on that selfsame night, when the devil had been cheated, and the boy had gone, and they two stood alone together in the mist and darkness – he had first laid aside the mask of respectability and told Ailsa Lorne the truth about himself! Of his Apache times – of his Vanishing Cracksman’s days – and, in the telling, had watched the light die out of her dear eyes and dread of him darken them, when she knew.

But not for always, thank God! For, in later days – when Time had lessened the shock, when she came to know him better, when the threads of their two lives had become more closely woven, and the hope had grown to be something more than a mere possibility…

He laughed aloud, remembering, and with a sudden rush of animal spirits twitched off his hat, flung it up and caught it as it fell, after the manner of a happy boy.

God, what a world – what a glorious, glorious world! All things were possible in it if a man but walked straight and knew how to wait.

Well, please God, a part, at least, of his long waiting would be over in another month. She would be back in England then – her long visit to the Hawksleys ended and nothing before her now but the pleasant excitement of trousseau days. For the coming autumn would see the final act of restitution made, the last Vanishing Cracksman debt paid, to the uttermost farthing; and when that time came… He flung up his hat again and shouted from sheer excess of joy, and forged on through the mist and darkness whistling.

His way lay across the great common to the Vale of Health district, and thence down a slanting road and a sloping street to the Hampstead Heath Station of the Tube Railway, and he covered the distance to such good effect that half-past eleven found him “down under,” swaying to the rhythmic movement of an electric train and arrowing through the earth at a lively clip.

Ten minutes later he changed over to yet another underground system, swung on for half an hour or so through gloom and bad air and the musty smell of a damp tunnel before the drop of the land and the rise of the roadbed carried the train out into the open and the air came fresh and sweet and pure, as God made it, over field and flood and dewy garden spaces; and away to the west a prickle of lights on a quiet river told where the stars mirrored themselves in the glass of Father Thames.

At a toy station in the hush and loneliness of the pleasant country ways his long ride came to an end at last, and he swung off into the balm and fragrance of the night to face a two-mile walk along quiet, shadow-filled lanes and over wet wastes of young bracken to a wee little house in the heart of a green wilderness, with a high-walled, old-world garden surrounding it, and, in the far background, a gloom of woodland smeared in darker purple against the purple darkness of the sky.

No light shone out from the house to greet him – no light could come from behind that screening wall, unless it were one set in an upper window – yet he was certain the place was not deserted; for, as he came up out of the darkness, catlike of tread and catlike of ear, he was willing to swear that he could catch the sound of some one moving about restlessly in the shadow of that high, brick wall – and the experiences of the night made him cautious of things that moved in darkness.

He stopped short, and remained absolutely still for half a minute, then, stooping, swished his hand through the bracken in excellent imitation of a small animal running, and shrilled out a note that was uncannily like the death squeal of a stoat-caught rabbit.

“Gawd’s truth, guv’ner, is it you at last, sir? And me never seein’ nor hearin’ a blessed thing!” spoke a voice in answer, from the wall’s foot; then a latch clicked and, as Cleek rose to his feet, a garden door swung inward, a rectangle of light shone in the darkness, and silhouetted against it stood Dollops.

“What are you doing out here at this time of night, you young monkey? Don’t you know it’s almost one o’clock?” said Cleek, as he went forward and joined the boy.

“Don’t I know it, says you? Don’t I just!” he gave back. “There aren’t a minute since the night come on that I haven’t counted, sir – not a bloomin’ one; and if you hadn’t turned up just as you did – Well, let that pass, as the Suffragette said when she heaved ’arf a brick through the shop window. Gawd’s truth, guv’ner, do you realise that you’ve been gone since yesterday afternoon and I haven’t heard a word from you in all that time?”

“Well, what of that? It’s not the first time by dozens that I’ve done the same thing. Why should it worry you at this late day? Look here, my young man, you’re not developing ‘nerves’ are you? Because, if you are – Turn round and let’s have a look at you! Why, you are as pale as a ghost, you young beggar, and shaking like a leaf. Anything wrong with you, old chap?”

“Not as I knows of,” returned Dollops, making a brave attempt to smile and be his old happy-go-lucky, whimsical self, albeit he wasn’t carrying it off quite successfully, for there was a droop to his smile and a sort of whimper underlying his voice, and Cleek’s keen eyes saw that his hand groped about blindly in its effort to find the fastenings of the garden door.

“Leastwise, nothing as matters now that you are here, sir. And I am glad yer back, guv’ner – Lawd, yuss! ‘Nothin’ like company to buck you up,’ as the bull said when he tossed the tinker; so of course – ”

“Here! You let those fastenings alone. I’ll attend to them!” rapped in Cleek’s voice with a curious note of alarm in it, as he moved briskly forward and barred and locked the wall door. “If I didn’t know that eating, not drinking, was your particular failing – ”

Here he stopped, his half-uttered comment cut into by a bleating cry, and he screwed round to face a startling situation. For there was Dollops, leaning heavily against a flowering almond tree, his face like a dead face for colour, and his fingers clawing frantically at the lower part of his waistcoat, doubling and twisting in the throes of an internal convulsion.

The gravelled pathway gave forth two sharp scrunches, and Cleek was just in time to catch him as he lurched forward and sprawled heavily against him. The man’s arms closed instinctively about the twisting, sweat-drenched, helpless shape, and with great haste and infinite tenderness gathered it up and carried it into the house; but he had scarcely more than laid the boy upon a sofa and lit the lamp of the small apartment which served them as a general living-room, when all the agony of uncertainty which beset his mind regarding the genesis of this terrifying attack vanished in a sudden rush of enlightenment.

All that was left of a bounteous and strikingly diversified afternoon tea still littered the small round dining table, and there, on one plate, lay the shells of two crabs, on another, the remains of a large rhubarb tart, on a third, the skins of five bananas leaning coquettishly up against the lid of an open pickle jar, and hard by there was a pint tumbler with the white blur of milk dimming it.

“Good Lord! The young anaconda!” blurted out Cleek, as he stood and stared at this appalling array. “No wonder, no wonder!” Then he turned round on his heel, looked at the writhing and moaning boy, and in a sudden fever of doing, peeled off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and made a bolt for the kitchen stove, the hot-water kettle, and the medicine chest.

The result of Master Dollops’ little gastronomic experiment scarcely needs to be recorded. It is sufficient to say that he had the time of his life that night; that he kept Cleek busy every minute for the next twenty-four hours wringing out flannels in hot water and dosing him with homely remedies, and that when he finally came through the siege was as limp as a wet newspaper and as feeble as a good many dry ones.

“What you need to pull yourself together is a change, you reckless young ostrich – a week’s roughing it in the open country by field and stream, and as many miles as possible from so much as the odour of a pastry cook’s shop,” said Cleek, patting him gently upon the shoulder. “A nice sort of assistant you are – keeping a man out of his bed for twenty-four hours, with his heart in his mouth and his hair on end, you young beggar. Now, now, now! None of your blubbing! Sit tight while I run down and make some gruel for you. After that I’ll nip out and ’phone through to the Yard and tell Mr. Narkom to have somebody look up a caravan that can be hired, and we’ll be off for a week’s ‘gypsying’ in Yorkshire, old chap.”

He did – coming back later with a piece of surprising news. For it just so happened that the idea of a week’s holiday-making, a week’s rambling about the green lanes, the broad moors, and through the wild gorges of the West Riding, and living the simple life in a caravan, appealed to Mr. Maverick Narkom as being the most desirable thing in the world at that moment, and he made haste to ask Cleek’s permission to share the holiday with him. As nothing could have been more to his great ally’s liking, the matter was settled forthwith. A caravan was hired by telegram to Sheffield, and at ten the next morning the little party turned its back upon London and fared forth to the pleasant country lands, the charm of laughing waters, and the magic that hides in trees.

For five days they led an absolutely idyllic life; loafing in green wildernesses and sleeping in the shadow of whispering woods; and this getting back to nature proved as much of a tonic to the two men as to the boy himself – refreshing both mind and body, putting red blood into their veins, and breathing the breath of God into their nostrils.

Having amply provisioned the caravan before starting, they went no nearer to any human habitation than they were obliged to do in passing from one district to another; and one day was so exact a pattern of the next that its history might have stood for them all: up with the dawn and the birds and into woodland pool or tree-shaded river; then gathering fuel and making a fire and cooking breakfast; then washing the utensils, harnessing the horses, and moving on again – sometimes Cleek driving, sometimes Narkom, sometimes the boy – stopping when they were hungry to prepare lunch just as they had prepared breakfast, then forging on again until they found some tree-hedged dell or bosky wood where they might spend the night, crooned to sleep by the wind in the leaves, and watched over by the sentinel stars.

So they had spent the major part of the week, and so they might have spent it all, but that chance chose to thrust them suddenly out of idleness into activity, and to bring them – here, in this Arcadia – face to face again with the evils of mankind and the harsh duty of the law.

It had gone nine o’clock on that fifth night when a curious thing happened: they had halted for the night by the banks of a shallow, chattering stream which flowed through a wayside spinney, beyond whose clustering treetops they had seen, before the light failed, the castellated top of a distant tower and, farther afield, the weathercock on an uplifting church spire; they had supped and were enjoying their ease – the two men sprawling at full length on the ground enjoying a comfortable smoke, while Dollops, with a mouth harmonica, was doing “Knocked ’Em in the Old Kent Road,” his back against a tree, his eyes upturned in ecstasy, his long legs stretched out upon the turf, and his feet crossed one over the other – and all about them was peace; all the sordid, money-grubbing, crime-stained world seemed millions of miles away, when, of a sudden, there came a swift rush of bodies – trampling on dead leaves and brushing against live ones – then a voice cried out commandingly, “Surrender yourselves in the name of the king!” and scrambling to a sitting position, they looked up to find themselves confronted by a constable, a gamekeeper, and two farm labourers – the one with drawn truncheon and the other three with cocked guns.