Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  But this time the words would not come at all, for Jim’s wife stood in the doorway behind Jim’s chair, and her eyes and Tom’s — the terrified and the guilty — were locked together in a long, dread stare.

  “What’s that about a watch?” she said in a sort of whisper, advancing unsteadily, and leaning a hand upon her husband’s shoulder. “Whose watch?”

  “One belonging a murdered man,” replied Jim. “I’m asking what kind of a one. I say it ought to hang the chap what did it.”

  “It will,” said she hoarsely in his ear. “It’s a repeater, and him that has it sits in front of you in that chair!”

  There followed a silence so profound that Tom could hear the watch itself ticking in his pocket. The coachman then rose, and slowly leaned across the table, resting one hand upon it; the other was half-way to Tom’s throat when he started to his feet, and in so doing pressed his thigh against the table’s edge. Instantly there rang from his pocket a sweet and tiny ting! ting! ting! ting! ting!

  It was the saving of him from Jim the coachman and his wife.

  Both shrank back as Tom darted to an inner door, and so up the stairs which he had descended halfasleep.

  Ere he reached the top there was a crash below; for an instant he thought the man had fallen in a fit; but a volley of oaths proved it only a slip, as Tom slammed and locked the door of the room in which he had slept away the day if not his life. His shoes were still where he had kicked them off. He slipped into them, and, exerting all his strength, pulled the large iron bedstead from its place and wedged it between wall and door. Then he crouched and listened. The man was for taking him single-handed; the woman evidently restraining him by main force.

  “Let me go! Let me go, damn ye!” Tom heard him cry.

  “Never till I drop! Police! police! He sha’n’t murder my Jim too.”

  “So help me, but I’ll strike ye if ye don’t let go!”

  “Strike away. Police! police! police! If you go, I go too.”

  Her cries were not loud; they were smothered in the struggle, which was still continued — now at the foot of the stairs, now on the stairs themselves, and at last on the landing outside the barricaded door. Meanwhile the bird had flown.

  No sooner had Tom realised what was taking place below than he threw up the bedroom window. It overlooked a small and filthy backyard, into which Tom quietly dropped while the pair were still struggling on the stairs. To find his way through the house, through the kitchen itself, and out into the narrow street, was the work of very few moments. The last Tom heard was the belabouring of the locked, blocked door by honest Jim. Nor did his presence of mind desert him yet. He walked out of the narrow side-street, only running when he came to the main thoroughfare, and after a perilous hesitation as to whether he should strike into the City or over Blackfriars Bridge.

  He chose the City, and having chosen, lost his head and ran for his life.

  He darted across the street and plunged into the busy alleys filling the delta between the bridge and St. Paul’s. Here he slackened a little, for the stony, many-windowed ravines were so narrow and so crowded that it was impossible to continue running. But he threw up his heels the instant he emerged on Ludgate Hill, tearing helter-skelter in the middle of the road. He was nearly run over by a van coming out of Paternoster Row, and cursed to the skies by the driver. Faces stopped and turned upon the pavements. He knew the folly of it, and yet ran on with a fiend in either heel.

  “Ba — nk — ba — nk— ‘ere you are, sir, ‘ere you are!”

  Tom was almost up to the omnibus before he realised that this was meant for him; instinctively he waved and nodded, and his mad pace was explained. The omnibus stopped; he jumped in gasping.

  “Thought you was after me,” said the cad, with a grin.

  Tom had no breath to reply. A rubicund old gentleman made a well-meant remark upon the eagerness of youth, and was favoured with a glassy stare. The newcomer sat panting in a corner, the perspiration trickling from his nose.

  But his head was cooler; he saw the needlessness as well as the indiscretion of conspicuous flight. He had slipped through the only hands that were as yet against him; he had eluded the only eyes he need avoid that night. For the hackney-coachman might take his new tale straight to Scotland Yard, but it could hardly be given to the world before morning.

  Tom’s heart leapt as he discovered the temporary strength of his position; next moment it sank, for the cad was collecting the fares, and his single asset was the watch. His bankrupt state had occurred to Tom as he ran for the omnibus, but not again; it was so small a thing compared with the charge now lying at his door. Yet he had just thought of it — his little fraud was so far deliberate — but he had neither the face nor the foolhardiness to sit there and confess his fault. And — situated like the wanted felon he now felt himself to be — it was wonderful and horrible how a felon’s resources came unbidden to his fingers’ ends. He began feeling in pocket after pocket, with a face that lengthened under the frown of the cad, the raised eyebrows of the rubicund gentleman, and the fixed attention of all.

  “I’m afraid I — I don’t seem to have a coin in my pocket!”

  “Oh, you ‘aven’t, ‘aven’t you?”

  “No — I have not! I’m very sorry — I—”

  “You may be! Never mind no tales; you can keep them for the beak, as’ll ‘ave a word to say to you to-morrer mornin’!” And the cad winked at the other passengers, stopped the omnibus, and called a policeman from the curb.

  Tom could have burst into tears. To be wrongly wanted for a crime so terrible, and justly taken for a thing so small! He looked forlornly at his fellow-passengers, with a wild idea that one might come to his rescue; the sole response was a withering frown from the ruddy old gentleman, who also commended the cad, and loudly trusted an example would be made of the case. The desperate Tom began ransacking his pockets in earnest for some overlooked coin, but he had done this so often of late that he felt the futility now. The perspiration froze upon his face; yet even with the policeman’s tall hat poked inside the omnibus, his twitching fingers continued their spasmodic, hopeless search.

  “The flash young spark!” whispered the cad. “Just you frighten ‘im, Sir Robert.”

  “Now then, come along!” said the officer.

  “Good God!” cried Tom.

  “You’ll get all the more for swearing; now, out you come afore you’re made.”

  “Not just yet,” returned the culprit, and handed the conductor one of two halfcrowns found that very moment in a scrap of crumpled paper. “I’m sorry I couldn’t find it before. Kindly give me change.”

  “Where to?” growled the cad, as the constable stepped down.

  Tom did not hear.

  “Can’t you answer? Where to?”

  “Oh, as far as you go!”

  Tom’s eyes were on the crumpled scrap, and filled to overflowing by half-ardozen ill-written words.

  CHAPTER VIII

  HUE AND CRY

  “Wishin good luk, yours respeckfull, J. Butterfield.”

  Those were the words that made full the warm heart and speaking eyes of Thomas Erichsen. He pictured the furtive waggoner slipping the halfcrowns into the waistcoat pocket where he had found them, while he himself lay serenely prone, with the long arm of the law already feeling for him, and nimble pressmen even then indicting paragraphs that should hound him to the gibbet. His new extremity made him the more appreciate this touching tribute. He could not understand why so many persons were so strangely kind to him. He was not aware that there was a something generous in himself which excited the generosity of others possessing that quality. He only knew that of all his like experiences he ranked this first. And then he began wondering what the waggoner would give to recall his crown and his kindness when he came to know the apparent truth.

  It was so apparent that from the first he despaired of ever disproving it, and felt his only chance to lie in flight. To fly and hide was not only his first
instinct, but his comparatively mature judgment in the matter. His stick had been used. He had told people that he intended so to use it himself. He would never be believed about the watch; the paper that alone could prove his word had been stolen with everything else from the dead man’s pocket. Even supposing he had started with a case, he must have spoilt it by his incriminating conduct at the hackney-coachman’s. Yet flight had been and was still his only chance. Innocent as the dead in the grave, as the child in the womb, he was still compelled to choose between a guilty hiding and a surrender tantamount to certain death.

  These thoughts did not all come together, nor in this order. They were interspersed with white-hot memories of poor Blaydes as last seen in the moonlight; of that touch of dignity and of regret that read now as a premonition of his immediate end; and these in their turn were interrupted by visions of a repulsive face, and by the unseen flight of headlong, shambling feet. Perhaps there was no connection between any of these things; it was more than likely there was not. But the fugitive’s heated brain, susceptible enough to sharp and deep impressions, was as yet quite incapable of consecutive thought; besides, he was always wondering whether the footstep behind him conveyed a hand that would close next instant upon his collar; and every minute there were many such in the crowded City streets.

  Towards dusk his eye was taken by a common barber’s pole. Hitherto the desired sign had been that of the three gilt globes, and he had paused at one or two, peering through the windows without daring to enter. The barber was a new idea. Tom felt his chin, looked at it in the window, and found it thinly yellowed over to the depth of half an inch; his fair hair was also very long. He entered, and asked to have it cut and his face shaved. It was quite a small shop, near Finsbury Circus, whither Tom had drifted from the Bank.

  “Another nice murder!” remarked the barber, reluctantly throwing aside the Courier for his scissors.

  “Whereabouts?” said Tom, who had guessed from his face what the man was reading.

  “London again!— ‘Am’sted’Eath way this time.”

  “Ah, that! Yes, I’ve heard of it. I’ll have my hair quite short, please.”

  But the man would talk.

  “Worse than Greenacre, I say.”

  “How so?”

  “Done for robbery; that there watch and diamond pin!”

  “Ah!” —

  “On the other ‘and, Greenacre, ‘e cut ‘er up. You don’t ‘appen to be goin’ to the ‘anging on Tuesday?

  That ought to be prime. I mean to be there if I stand all night for my place! Not fond of an execootion, sir?”

  “I never saw one.”

  “Never saw one! Well, that’s funny; and I ‘aven’t missed one these fifteen years!”

  Tom looked from his own ghastly visage in the mirror to the low, gloating face puckered with sly smiles at ghoulish memories. He went elsewhere for his shave. And slowly but at last the grateful night closed in; the busy City streets became empty, echoing chasms; and Tom, feeling more than ever the guilty cynosure, drifted westward with the ebbing tide of innocent, free men.

  His great dread was of the hackney-coachman. His friend Jim was perhaps the one man in the streets of London who could at present identify him at sight. He squandered fivepence on the latest Globe. It contained no fresh particulars. His name had not yet transpired, so Jim was still his chiefest terror. He tarried in narrow alleys where four wheels could not follow him. In one of these a second-hand bookseller, smoking a churchwarden on his doorstep, stared at Tom critically. Thereupon he slunk into the nearest street. It was Newgate Street. He stood before the sombre walls of the prison itself, and continued so to stand, impersonally fascinated, with a sudden end to all sense of danger, as though a nerve were killed.

  There was no moon, but the wide clear space above the prison walls was pricked with the brightest stars Tom had ever seen. He wondered whether it was in mercy or in mockery that the stars shone their best over that monument of gloom and horror; then his speculations took a more practical direction. How thick were those grimy walls? Where was Greenacre? What was he doing? Where would he be hanged? But this he thought he knew, and turning into the Old Bailey, he stood opposite the place.

  The Old Bailey was all but deserted. Tom stood unseen, and peopled it with the vile crowd he had often read of in those newspaper descriptions which it was easy to condemn but more difficult to skip. He found himself mentally in the midst of that ruthless ritual, just as he was bodily upon its scene. He heard the lewd cheering of throats athirst for blood, the screaming of bruised and trampled women, the clink of wineglasses in the twenty-guinea windows behind and above him. On every face he found the bestial relish that the mirror had shown him at the barber’s shop. And as then he saw his own sickly mask as well, but a long way off now — above the felon’s gate — with the rope round his neck and dangling from the beam. And with that final vision returned the sense of deadly danger, in tenfold force and with sickening poignancy, as the vividness leapt from the inner to the outward eye, and he saw and realised what was then and there taking place.

  A police-officer had emerged from a narrow door in the great grimy walls; his white trousers shone across the street; so did the fluttering paper in his hand. He carried a paste-pot and a brush, and stopping at a point where a black board clung to the black stones, he pasted his paper upon it. Before he began there was a little crowd about him; when he finished it stretched half across the street. And there was Tom still cowering under the windows opposite.

  The first word he heard was his own name bandied from mouth to mouth.

  “Herichsen,” said one. “It’s as good a name as Greenacre. They allus do have good names. Look at Fauntleroy and—”

  “A hundred pounds reward!”

  “Long, fair hair — slight growth on chin—”

  “Medium height — dark brown eyes—” Tom heard no more; sidling warily to the left, he squeezed round the corner into Fleet Lane, while every eye was turned the other way. Out of Fleet Lane there ran another to the right; as Tom dived into it, his shaking hand went to his smooth-shaven chin and short-cut hair; and his quivering lips muttered a new blessing on Jonathan Butterfield and his seed for ever.

  He had spent sixteen pence, which left exactly three-and-eight. Further disguise he must have, and though he tried more than once to pawn the watch, his nerve always failed him on the threshold of the shop. The aimlessness of his proceedings now came home to him, and yet what was he to do? He had heard that London was the best hiding-place in the world, and indeed it had never struck him to break for the country. Nor did it now. But he would try some other end of the town; not the docks, however; he had told everybody he was going there, and could not, therefore, go too far in the opposite direction. —

  The Paddington omnibus was passing as he emerged from Skinner Street. Tom got in, and paid his sixpence, leaving three-and-two.

  So his name had come out already. He had time to think of things in the omnibus, which was half empty, and he soon saw that Jim the coachman could not have supplied the police with the name; he did not know it himself. Other witnesses must have stepped forward already. Who were they? But it mattered very little after all. Not Claire, at any rate; and yet the thought of her brought with it the keenest torture he had suffered yet.

  She would think him guilty; after what had passed between them she could not do otherwise; then guilty let him be, in every earthly eye, and the sooner it was all over the better for him and for her. He had no wish to live if the one sweet judge whose judgment he respected held him worthy of death. And she would — she could not help herself; then what must she think of his love for her? And the thought of her thoughts was worse than that of shameful death before a howling mob.

  He tore up her letter that he had meant to treasure till his death, so that when he was taken no slur should rest upon his beloved; and he distributed the minute fragments at long intervals that night before looking for a place to lay his head. In the end he hit
upon an empty house overlooking the then green enclosure of Westbourne Park; an unfastened window caught his eye; he waited till the road was clear, and then entered like an expert, fastening the window behind him.

  Here he destroyed and hid away his hat, a battered beaver bought in the days of poor Blaydes. In its stead he had obtained from a pawn-shop, and for eighteen pence, an old-fashioned peak-and-tassel cap. But he had not dared to offer the watch in pledge, although he had entered that shop for the purpose.

  It ticked so loud in the empty house that in the dead of night he leapt up in a frenzy and smashed in the works with his heel.

  Before he could lie down again there came a deafening double-knock at the street-door.

  CHAPTER IX

  A GOOD SAMARITAN

  To run no risk of observation through the dirty, bare windows, as well as to secure equidistance from all possible points of approach or escape, the hunted youth had lain him down in the hall, with the bottom stair for his pillow. He was rewarded with the full shock of this ear-splitting tattoo. Yet it shook him less than the insolent, maddening solo of the dead man’s watch; and the hollow house was still resounding like a drum as Tom groped his way on tip-toe to the garden door, and stealthily withdrew the bolts. The door was one-half coloured glass, showing a pink moon in a purple sky, and a neglected garden which by daylight would have been sky-blue with a ruby margin; but now it merely gave another coat to night; and Tom was outside and half-way down the flight of stone steps before he saw that which made the iron balustrade grow colder in his hand. The chimney-pot hat, white trousers and drawn staff of one of the new police awaited him at the bottom.

  “Come along,” said this officer; “it’s no use turning back — hear that!”

  As he spoke the noise of breaking glass came through the open door; and Tom’s mind was made up. Suddenly crouching, with knees and elbows at acute angles, he sprang clean on top of the police-officer, who collapsed beneath him like a house of cards. The fall was bad enough for Tom; his nose was bleeding when he picked himself up; but the other lay motionless on his back, and Tom bent over him in horror. His eyes opened that instant, and he made a grab at Tom, who turned and darted down the garden just as there was a clatter of fresh feet upon the stone stairs behind.