And, indeed, the relief was so great that the room swam round as he stared across it at his daughter’s lover, that lover who was also the embodiment of that now awful thing to him, the law. He smiled, rather foolishly, at his visitor; and Chandler felt a sharp wave of irritation, of impatience sweep over his good-natured soul. Daisy’s father was an old stupid—that’s what he was.
And then Bunting grew serious. The room ceased to go round. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, with a good deal of solemnity, even a little dignity, “you have my blessing, Joe. You’re a very likely young chap, and I had a true respect for your father.”
“Yes,” said Chandler, “that’s very kind of you, Mr. Bunting. But how about her—her herself?”
Bunting stared at him. It pleased him to think that Daisy hadn’t given herself away, as Ellen was always hinting the girl was doing.
“I can’t answer for Daisy,” he said heavily. “You’ll have to ask her yourself—that’s not a job any other man can do for you, my lad.”
“I never gets a chance. I never sees her, not by our two selves,” said Chandler, with some heat. “You don’t seem to understand, Mr. Bunting, that I never do see Miss Daisy alone,” he repeated. “I hear now that she’s going away Monday, and I’ve only once had the chance of a walk with her. Mrs. Bunting’s very particular, not to say pernickety in her ideas, Mr. Bunting——”
“That’s a fault on the right side, that is—with a young girl,” said Bunting thoughtfully.
And Chandler nodded. He quite agreed that as regarded other young chaps Mrs. Bunting could not be too particular.
“She’s been brought up like a lady, my Daisy has,” went on Bunting, with some pride. “That Old Aunt of hers hardly lets her out of her sight.”
“I was coming to the old aunt,” said Chandler heavily. “Mrs. Bunting she talks as if your daughter was going to stay with that old woman the whole of her natural life—now is that right? That’s what I wants to ask you, Mr. Bunting,—is that right?”
“I’ll say a word to Ellen, don’t you fear,” said Bunting abstractedly.
His mind had wandered off, away from Daisy and this nice young chap, to his now constant, anxious preoccupation. “You come along to-morrow,” he said, “and I’ll see you gets your walk with Daisy. It’s only right you and she should have a chance of seeing one another without old folk being by; else how’s the girl to tell whether she likes you or not! For the matter of that, you hardly knows her, Joe——” He looked at the young man consideringly.
Chandler shook his head impatiently. “I knows her quite as well as I wants to know her,” he said. “I made up my mind the very first time I see’d her, Mr. Bunting.”
“No! Did you really?” said Bunting. “Well, come to think of it, I did so with her mother; aye, and years after, with Ellen, too. But I hope you’ll never want no second, Chandler.”
“God forbid!” said the young man under his breath. And then he asked, rather longingly, “D’you think they’ll be out long now, Mr. Bunting?”
And Bunting woke up to a due sense of hospitality. “Sit down, sit down, do!” he said hastily. “I don’t believe they’ll be very long. They’ve only got a little bit of shopping to do.”
And then, in a changed, in a cringing, nervous tone, he asked, “And how about your job, Joe? Nothing new, I take it? I suppose you’re all just waiting for the next time?”
“Aye—that’s about the figure of it.” Chandler’s voice had also changed; it was now sombre, menacing. “We’re fair tired of it—beginning to wonder when it’ll end, that we are!”
“Do you ever try and make to yourself a picture of what the master’s like?” asked Bunting. Somehow, he felt he must ask that.
“Yes,” said Joe slowly. “I’ve a sort of notion—a savage, fierce-looking devil, the chap must be. It’s that description that was circulated put us wrong. I don’t believe it was the man that knocked up against that woman in the fog—no, not one bit I don’t. But I wavers, I can’t quite make up my mind. Sometimes I think it’s a sailor—the foreigner they talks about, that goes away for eight or nine days in between, to Holland maybe, or to France. Then, again, I says to myself that it’s a butcher, a man from the Central Market. Whoever it is, it’s someone used to killing, that’s flat.”
“Then it don’t seem to you possible——?” (Bunting got up and walked over to the window.) “You don’t take any stock, I suppose, in that idea some of the papers put out, that the man is”—then he hesitated and brought out, with a gasp—“a gentleman?”
Chandler looked at him, surprised. “No,” he said deliberately. “I’ve made up my mind that’s quite a wrong tack, though I knows that some of our fellows—big pots, too—are quite sure that the fellow what gave the girl the sovereign is the man we’re looking for. You see, Mr. Bunting, if that’s the fact—well, it stands to reason the fellow’s an escaped lunatic; and if he’s an escaped lunatic he’s got a keeper, and they’d be raising a hue and cry after him; now, wouldn’t they?”
“You don’t think,” went on Bunting, lowering his voice, “that he could be just staying somewhere, lodging-like?”
“D’you mean that The Avenger may be a toff, staying in some West End hotel, Mr. Bunting? Well, things almost as funny as that ’ud be have come to pass.” He smiled as if the notion was a funny one.
“Yes, something o’ that sort,” muttered Bunting.
“Well, if your idea’s correct, Mr. Bunting——”
“I never said ’twas my idea,” said Bunting, all in a hurry.
“Well, if that idea’s correct then, ’twill make our task more difficult than ever. Why, ’twould be looking for a needle in a field of hay, Mr. Bunting! But there! I don’t think it’s anything quite so unlikely as that—not myself I don’t.” He hesitated. “There’s some of us”—he lowered his voice—“that hopes he’ll betake himself off—The Avenger, I mean—to another big city, to Manchester or to Edinburgh. There’d be plenty of work for him to do there,” and Chandler chuckled at his own grim joke.
And then, to both men’s secret relief, for Bunting was now mortally afraid of this discussion concerning The Avenger and his doings, they heard Mrs. Bunting’s key in the lock.
Daisy blushed rosy-red with pleasure when she saw that young Chandler was still there. She had feared that when they got home he would be gone, the more so that Ellen, just as if she was doing it on purpose, had lingered aggravatingly long over each small purchase.
“Here’s Joe come to ask if he can take Daisy out for a walk,” blurted out Bunting.
“My mother says as how she’d like you to come to tea, over at Richmond,” said Chandler awkwardly. “I just come in to see whether we could fix it up, Miss Daisy.”
And Daisy looked imploringly at her stepmother.
“D’you mean now—this minute?” asked Mrs. Bunting tartly.
“No, o’ course not”—Bunting broke in hastily. “How you do go on, Ellen!”
“What day did your mother mention would be convenient to her?” asked Mrs. Bunting, looking at the young man satirically.
Chandler hesitated. His mother had not mentioned any special day—in fact, his mother had shown a surprising lack of anxiety to see Daisy at all. But he had talked her round.
“How about Saturday?” suggested Bunting. “That’s Daisy’s birthday. ’Twould be a birthday treat for her to go to Richmond, and she’s going back to Old Aunt on Monday.”
“I can’t go Saturday,” said Chandler disconsolately. “I’m on duty Saturday.”
“Well, then, let it be Sunday,” said Bunting firmly. And his wife looked at him surprised; he seldom asserted himself so much in her presence.
“What do you say, Miss Daisy?” said Chandler.
“Sunday would be very nice,” said Daisy demurely. And then, as the young man took up his hat, and as her stepmother did not stir, Daisy ventured to go out into the hall with him for a minute.
Chandler shut the door behind them, and so w
as spared the hearing of Mrs. Bunting’s whispered remark: “When I was a young woman folk didn’t gallivant about on Sunday; those who was courting used to go to church together, decent-like——”
CHAPTER XXV
Daisy’s eighteenth birthday dawned uneventfully. Her father gave her what he had always promised she should have on her eighteenth birthday—a watch. It was a pretty little silver watch, which Bunting had bought second-hand on the last day he had been happy—it seemed a long, long time ago now.
Mrs. Bunting thought a silver watch a very extravagant present, but she was far too wretched, far too absorbed in her own thoughts, to trouble much about it. Besides, in such matters she had generally had the good sense not to interfere between her husband and his child.
In the middle of the birthday morning Bunting went out to buy himself some more tobacco. He had never smoked so much as in the last four days, excepting, perhaps, the week that had followed on his leaving service. Smoking a pipe had then held all the exquisite pleasure which we are told attaches itself to the eating of forbidden fruit.
His tobacco had now become his only relaxation; it acted on his nerves as an opiate, soothing his fears and helping him to think. But he had been overdoing it, and it was that which now made him feel so “jumpy,” so he assured himself, when he found himself starting at any casual sound outside, or even when his wife spoke to him suddenly.
Just now Ellen and Daisy were down in the kitchen, and Bunting didn’t quite like the sensation of knowing that there was only one pair of stairs between Mr. Sleuth and himself. So he quietly slipped out of the house without telling Ellen that he was going out.
In the last four days Bunting had avoided his usual haunts; above all, he had avoided even passing the time of day to his acquaintances and neighbours. He feared, with a great fear, that they would talk to him of a subject which, because it filled his mind to the exclusion of all else, might make him betray the knowledge—no, not knowledge, rather the—the suspicion—that dwelt within him.
But to-day the unfortunate man had a curious, instinctive longing for human companionship—companionship, that is, other than that of his wife and of his daughter.
This longing for a change of company finally led him into a small, populous thoroughfare hard by the Edgware Road. There were more people there than usual just now, for the housewives of the neighbourhood were doing their Saturday marketing for Sunday. The ex-butler turned into a small old-fashioned shop where he generally bought his tobacco.
Bunting passed the time of day with the tobacconist, and the two fell into desultory talk, but to his customer’s relief and surprise the man made no allusion to the subject of which all the neighbourhood must still be talking.
And then, quite suddenly, while still standing by the counter, and before he had paid for the packet of tobacco he held in his hand, Bunting, through the open door, saw with horrified surprise that Ellen, his wife, was standing, alone, outside a greengrocer’s shop just opposite.
Muttering a word of apology, he rushed out of the shop and across the road.
“Ellen!” he gasped hoarsely, “you’ve never gone and left my little girl alone in the house with the lodger?”
Mrs. Bunting’s face went yellow with fear. “I thought you was indoors,” she cried. “You was indoors! Whatever made you come out for, without first making sure I’d stay in?”
Bunting made no answer; but, as they stared at each other in exasperated silence, each now knew that the other knew.
They turned and scurried down the crowded street.
“Don’t run,” he said suddenly; “we shall get there just as quickly if we walk fast. People are noticing you, Ellen. Don’t run.”
He spoke breathlessly, but it was breathlessness induced by fear and by excitement, not by the quick pace at which they were walking.
At last they reached their own gate, and Bunting pushed past in front of his wife.
After all, Daisy was his child; Ellen couldn’t know how he was feeling.
He seemed to take the path in one leap, then fumbled for a moment with his latchkey.
Opening wide the door, “Daisy!” he called out, in a wailing voice, “Daisy, my dear! where are you?”
“Here I am, father. What is it?”
“She’s all right——” Bunting turned a grey face to his wife. “She’s all right, Ellen.”
He waited a moment, leaning against the wall of the passage. “It did give me a turn,” he said, and then, warningly, “Don’t frighten the girl, Ellen.”
Daisy was standing before the fire in their sitting-room, admiring herself in the glass.
“Oh, father,” she exclaimed, without turning round, “I’ve seen the lodger! He’s quite a nice gentleman, though, to be sure, he does look a cure. He rang his bell, but I didn’t like to go up; and so he came down to ask Ellen for something. We had quite a nice little chat—that we had. I told him it was my birthday, and he asked me and Ellen to go to Madame Tussaud’s with him this afternoon.” She laughed, a little self-consciously. “Of course, I could see he was ’centric, and then at first he spoke so funnily. ‘And who be you?’ he says, threatening-like. And I says to him, ‘I’m Mr. Bunting’s daughter, sir.’ ‘Then you’re a very fortunate girl’—that’s what he says, Ellen—‘to ’ave such a nice stepmother as you’ve got. That’s why,’ he says, ‘you look such a good, innocent girl.’ And then he quoted a bit of the Prayer Book. ‘Keep innocency,’ he says, wagging his head at me. Lor’! It made me feel as if I was with Old Aunt again.”
“I won’t have you going out with the lodger—that’s flat.”
Bunting spoke in a muffled, angry tone. He was wiping his forehead with one hand, while with the other he mechanically squeezed the little packet of tobacco, for which, as he now remembered, he had forgotten to pay.
Daisy pouted. “Oh, father, I think you might let me have a treat on my birthday! I told him that Saturday wasn’t a very good day—at least, so I’d heard—for Madame Tussaud’s. Then he said we could go early, while the fine folk are still having their dinners.” She turned to her stepmother, then giggled happily. “He particularly said you was to come, too. The lodger has a wonderful fancy for you, Ellen; if I was father, I’d feel quite jealous!”
Her last words were cut across by a tap-tap on the door.
Bunting and his wife looked at each other apprehensively. Was it possible that, in their agitation, they had left the front door open, and that someone, some merciless myrmidon of the law, had crept in behind them?
Both felt a curious thrill of satisfaction when they saw that it was only Mr. Sleuth—Mr. Sleuth dressed for going out; the tall hat he had worn when he had first come to them was in his hand, but he was wearing a coat instead of his Inverness cape.
“I heard you come in”—he addressed Mrs. Bunting in his high, whistling, hesitating voice—“and so I’ve come down to ask you if you and Miss Bunting will come to Madame Tussaud’s now. I have never seen those famous waxworks, though I’ve heard of the place all my life.”
As Bunting forced himself to look fixedly at his lodger, a sudden doubt, bringing with it a sense of immeasurable relief, came to Mr. Sleuth’s landlord.
Surely it was inconceivable that this gentle, mild-mannered gentleman could be the monster of cruelty and cunning that Bunting had now for the terrible space of four days believed him to be!
He it was who answered, “You’re very kind, I’m sure, sir.”
He tried to catch his wife’s eye, but Mrs. Bunting was looking away, staring into vacancy. She still, of course, wore the bonnet and cloak in which she had just been out to do her marketing. Daisy was already putting on her hat and coat.
“Well?” said Mr. Sleuth. Then Mrs. Bunting turned, and it seemed to his landlady that he was looking at her threateningly. “Well?”
“Yes, sir. We’ll come in a minute,” she said dully.
CHAPTER XXVI
Madame Tussaud’s had hitherto held pleasant memories for Mrs. Bunt
ing. In the days when she and Bunting were courting they often spent there part of their afternoon out.
The butler had an acquaintance, a man named Hopkins, who was one of the waxworks staff, and this man had sometimes given him passes for “self and lady.” But this was the first time Mrs. Bunting had been inside the place since she had come to live almost next door, as it were, to the big building.
They walked in silence to the familiar entrance, and then, after the ill-assorted trio had gone up the great staircase and into the first gallery, Mr. Sleuth suddenly stopped short. The presence of those curious, still, waxen figures which suggest so strangely death in life, seemed to surprise and affright him.
Daisy took quick advantage of the lodger’s hesitation and unease.
“Oh, Ellen,” she cried, “do let us begin by going into the Chamber of Horrors! I’ve never been in there. Old Aunt made father promise he wouldn’t take me the only time I’ve ever been here. But now that I’m eighteen I can do just as I like; besides, Old Aunt will never know.”
Mr. Sleuth looked down at her, and a smile passed for a moment over his worn, gaunt face.
“Yes,” he said, “let us go into the Chamber of Horrors; that’s a good idea, Miss Bunting. I’ve always wanted to see the Chamber of Horrors.”
They turned into the great room in which the Napoleonic relics were then kept, and which led into the curious, vault-like chamber where waxen effigies of dead criminals stand grouped in wooden docks.
Mrs. Bunting was at once disturbed and relieved to see her husband’s old acquaintance, Mr. Hopkins, in charge of the turnstile admitting the public to the Chamber of Horrors.
“Well, you are a stranger,” the man observed genially. “I do believe that this is the very first time I’ve seen you in here, Mrs. Bunting, since you was married!”
“Yes,” she said, “that is so. And this is my husband’s daughter, Daisy; I expect you’ve heard of her, Mr. Hopkins. And this”—she hesitated a moment—“is our lodger, Mr. Sleuth.”
But Mr. Sleuth frowned and shuffled away. Daisy, leaving her stepmother’s side, joined him.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 87
