CHAPTER XXXIX
THE MAN IN THE MASK
Themaster was busy at his desk, but there was no rhyming dictionary at his elbow, and the book of synonyms was suffocating under a pile of papers that were stuffed into a drawer as Tom entered guiltily. The clock—an athletic trophy in the form of a kettle-drum—was then striking midnight, and Daintree wheeled round in his chair with the eleventh stroke. The eye nearest the lamp looked wild, but it was his wedding-day, and plainly he was in tremendous spirits.
“Shut the window,” said he. “I have two things to tell you which I don’t want the girl to hear; if her windows are open she might.”
Peggy happened to be listening at the door.
“In the first place,” proceeded Daintree, “tell me frankly and finally whether you mean to marry the girl or not. Yes or no?”
“No, sir; it is impossible.”
“You shall do just exactly what you like. At the same time, she tells me you did ask her!”
“I did. I wronged her in doing so, but she had the sense to refuse me, and I’m not going to wrong her worse by asking her again.”
“That settles it. I’ve found a captain who’s willing to smuggle you over to America for a consideration. All details to be arranged before I leave Sydney to-morrow. Will you go?”
“Will I not! Thank God for the chance!”
“Then that settles that—for the present. You shall be spirited aboard to-morrow night, and by Monday morning you shall have seen the last of New South Wales for ever.”
Peggy crept away from the door. Her mind was made up.
“The other thing’s a trifle,” said Daintree. “A pretty place this New South Wales! I go to the bank and cash a cheque, come in and shove the notes into one of these drawers, and a man breaks into the house and all but into my desk while I am sitting in the next room at my dinner! Look at this—” and he pointed out the marks of a jemmy on the polished mahogany. The circumstance did not appear to excite him in the least. He smiled loftily on Tom’s concern, and at once exaggerated an attitude which had been perfectly genuine before.
“Ah, Thomas,” he remarked, “even you don’t know your Sydney yet, or you would be like me, and think nothing of such trifles. I was eating my dinner, as I say, when I heard him at his work; unfortunately I let him hear me; still, I chased him out of that and some way down the road, and could have caught him if I hadn’t preferred to come back and finish my dinner. I played a better knife and fork for the exercise.”
“And you gave chase unarmed?” said Tom.
“To be sure, except with these arms,” responded Daintree with equal truth and bravado, as he tapped an enviable biceps. “Your man of muscle has no business with any other, if he but knew how to use his hands as I do. It would have gone hard with our friend, I promise you, if I had laid hold of him!”
“I wish you had,” said Tom. “The blackguard must have dogged you from the bank, and hung about the Pulteney both times you were there.” Tom paused. His heart was back at the hotel, and his gratitude to the man was once more repelling his jealousy and distrust of the bridegroom, when a second thought sprang from his words. “By Jove!” he exclaimed, “I wonder whether it was the fellow who turned up on the beach almost at the instant we went down!”
“What!” cried Daintree. “Did you see him?”
“Yes, I caught a glimpse of somebody as we heeled over. Depend upon it that’s our man!”
Daintree turned nasty in a moment.
“Why depend upon it?” he snapped. “Did you see the man’s face? Would you know him again? Oh, you wouldn’t; then let me recommend you not to make a fool of yourself, my good fellow. Nobody but a fool would connect the two men.”
His ill-temper was inexplicable; yet to treat an attempt upon his property as a joke, and an inoffensive theory of the attempt as something of an insult, was but in accord with the capricious character of the man. And, indeed, Tom would have gone to bed like a lamb, and thought no more about the matter; but yet another caprice detained him. Daintree would not hear of his going; it was their last night together; they most sit up and talk, and he apologised for what he had said. So they sat up once more, but the conversation languished for the first time on these occasions. Something had unnerved and depressed Tom’s master; he was never himself until the last night of his single life was at an end, and in the first light of dawn a full-rigged ship sailed in just as the Rosamund had done on the previous Sunday afternoon..
“Letters!” he cried. “Letters for my wedding-day! Who knows but what I may get the best of news to crown my joys? What if my wife were never to be Mrs. Daintree at all? Yonder ship may dub me baronet; open a bottle, Thomas, and we will drink to all she brings me!”
Then at last they lay down; but sleep came neither to the happy man nor to his miserable valet; and by ten o’clock the one was helping the other into his wedding garments. A few minutes before the hour the coach arrived which was to take the bridegroom in state to church; a few minutes after, a man was observed rowing in the bay, and Daintree insisted on taking a look at him through his spy-glass. Evidently the rower saw him, for he shot out of sight behind a headland, but not before Daintree had brought his telescope to bear upon the rower; and now the glass joggled between fingers which seemed smitten with an ague; and was lowered from a white face that glistened in the sun.
“That was the man,” whispered Daintree; “and he’s after me still! I—I didn’t mind last night—I suppose it takes less to turn one queer on one’s wedding morning.” He was struggling in vain against some growing terror. “Brandy, man, brandy!” he gasped, and subsided in a chair.
Tom rushed downstairs for the decanter, and returning found the terrified man fumbling with his pocket-pistol. He tossed off the spirit and handed the pistol to Tom.
“There,” said he, “better withdraw and reload to make sure. Stop, give it back!” He snatched the pistol and fired excitedly through the open window. “That’ll show him I’m armed,” he cried; “now load up again!”
“You are not going armed—”
“With that fiend at my heels? You must take me for a fool!”
“You would be married with a loaded pistol in your pocket, when you yourself said the only arms—”
“Obey me, sirrah!” thundered Daintree. “Do you know that I could hang you like a dog? Yet you dare to argue with me on my wedding morning!”
He seemed beside himself with excitement. Tom went out without a word, and on his return handed back the pocket-pistol with the same air of tacit disapproval. Daintree cocked it and felt the trigger.
“I’ve a good mind to fire through the window again,” he snarled, “to see if you have loaded it; but I’ll trust you, Thomas; you’re the one man in this world I do trust. And now put on your hat and come in with me to Sydney!”
Tom drew back. This was not in the programme; on the contrary, he was to stay and mind the house.
“Damn the house!” cried Daintree. “The girl can look after the house; your place is at your master’s side, or else you are the foulest ingrate in New South Wales! But you are; I have always known you were; you have only waited for this hour to turn and rend me!”
“You are wrong,” said Tom grimly. “I do not leave your side again.” For the man must be mad: and Tom no longer shirked the ceremony, but for one instant had a mad design himself; the next, his right hand was warmly held.
“Thank God!” cried Daintree in a breaking voice. “I knew you didn’t mean it; no more did I mean anything I said; forgive me, Thomas, and don’t desert me at the last!”
And Tom’s heart sank as it once more softened to the man who was not mad but only unstrung; and again he longed to eschew the church; but he kept his word, and fortune was yet to prove his friend. A mile they had driven when a loud cry broke from Daintree. In his agitation he had forgotten the ring. He burst into tears at the discovery.
“Never mind—never mind!” cried Tom in his oldest rôle. “We can turn back—what, isn’t there time? No, I know it would never do to keep her waiting! Then look here, I’ll run back and gallop in again on your horse; I’ll be there almost as soon as you; and the ring isn’t wanted till quite the end.”
Daintree thanked him through his tears—the first Tom had ever seen in those fiery eyes —and he sped back strangely touched, but strangely comforted too. At least he loved her! The man might be egotistical and vain and overbearing, all three to the verge of lunacy, but that he was marrying for sheer love was even more palpable than it had been before. Tears in those eyes! Tears at the thought of losing her for one more day! Then God grant that with Claire at least he might be unselfish, meek and gentle, though an egotist, a coxcomb and a tyrant to all the world beside!
So praying as he ran—forgetful of his own debt to Daintree—for the moment self-forgetting altogether—Tom was at the bungalow gate in time that would not have shamed the bridegroom in his athletic youth. And in the very gateway he stopped dead. He had caught a glimpse of ragged coat-tails disappearing through the study windows; a crazy skiff lay hauled up on the strand.
Tom kicked off his shoes. He made no sound on the verandah, but he wasted some seconds, and heard two drawers burst open as he crept nearer and nearer. He was totally unarmed; his one chance lay in taking the thief by surprise.
The verandah on this side was in deep shadow all the morning. In the cool dusk of the study a masked man was rifling drawer after drawer and tossing the contents right and left. The floor was strewn with papers as Tom leapt across it and hurled himself upon the thief. They crashed to the ground together: the man’s head caught the corner of the bookshelf, and he lay supine, with a mouthful of crumbling teeth grinning horribly below the mask.
His nerveless fingers still clutched a packet of bluish letters half-torn from their wrapper. Tom took them from him, and rose up panting. A moment later they might have heard his shout at Piper’s Point.
All but one letter had slipped from his trembling hand: on the back of that letter a few lines had been scrawled with a lead-pencil.
It was the Receipt!
Pencilled by Blaydes on the back of a letter, signed by Tom in the moonlit Hampstead fields, and taken by the murderer from his victim’s person, it was neither more nor less than the missing document whose production would have acquitted Erichsen at the Old Bailey. And now after eighteen months, and here on these outlandish shores, it had cast up at his very feet; he held it—held his freedom—in his own trembling hands.
The words spun like midges as the paper rustled and shook. He had to set it on the chimney-piece to read it through:—
“Received from J. Montgomery Blaydes (late Captain, Coldstream Guards) his watch and chain, etc., in settlement of all claims, and in consideration of which I undertake to return pawn-ticket for same to said J. M. Blaydes, Ivy Cottage, West End, within three days from this date.—(Signed) T. Erichsen, April 27th, 1837.”
Words and chirography were as familiar as though he had studied them the night before; the very flourishes were old friends; and the glimmer of a mild London moon seemed still to lurk in the shiny blue paper.
He forgot the wedding-ring, forgot the wedding: he was an innocent man: he could prove it now before all the world, by this incomparable testimony, this inanimate witness that could not lie. That was Tom’s first reflection. His first emotion was a rush of thankfulness, ineffable and unmixed. Curiosity succeeded: how came the receipt here? But as he wondered, as his thoughts flew from the broken-headed robber to his friend Daintree, it was not the bridegroom that they pursued to the church, but Tom’s benefactor that they followed back to Avenue Lodge. Did Daintree know who had committed the murder, and was that the secret of his belief in Tom? Inconceivable; but the document? Tom turned it over in his hand, and the address on the missive came uppermost. It began—Nicholas Harding, Esquire, M.P.
This name plunged Tom in a vortex of new suspicions; it neither recalled the bride as such, nor the marriage, nor the ring. Yet the clock stared him in the face, the short hand almost on the eleven, the long hand rapidly overtaking the short. It was ticking loud enough for dead of night; he both saw the time and heard it flying. But he had forgotten his errand: he could prove his innocence at last. Suddenly there was a groan, then a movement behind him, and as he wheeled round the man in the mask sat up.
“Ha!” said Tom. “So it was you who followed my master from the bank, and tried to break into his desk last night! You’ve succeeded a bit too late. My master’s got his money in his pocket—and he isn’t here!”
With these words Tom remembered where his master was, but only for an instant: small eyes were glinting through the mask, and the crumbling teeth showed again in a contemptuous grin.
“I ain’t after ’is money,” said a harsh high voice.
“What then?”
“What you’ve got in your ’and.”
“This!” cried Tom. “Who are you?”
“Name’s Wyeth. I’m a lag, same as you.”
“Let me see your face.”
Again that grin below the mask, ere it was whipped off, and Tom’s eyes lit upon a horrible face horribly disfigured. It was perfectly flat; disease had razed the nose to below the level of the sunken cheeks; and the beady eyes seemed more prominent by contrast, as they glittered upon Tom’s visible abhorrence. In an instant, however, the abhorrence changed to recognition, and a great light blinded Tom.
“My God!” he gasped. “The man that did it!”
“Did what?”
“What I’m here for—the murder of Captain Blaydes! It was you who killed him—it was you! I saw you close to the spot that night. Never shall I forget you—and this is the receipt I gave him! I took it just now from your hand!”
“An’ where do yer think I took it from?”
“The dead man’s pocket”
“That there desk!”
In the cool dark study there followed no immediate sound save the importunate ticking of the kettle-drum clock—beating a roll-call to deaf ears. At last Tom said, “Tell me—tell me!” And his voice was very weak; he was leaning heavily on the chimney-piece, and now his elbow hid the time.
Wyeth removed a hand from the back of his head, looked at the blood upon it, and grimly showed it to Tom.
“You’ve been rough with me, you ’ave, when you should ha’ taken me to your ’art; but I will tell you, ’cos I ain’t that much to lose, an’ it may mean my ticket if you stand by me like a true man. Say you’ll do that an’ I’ll tell you every blessed thing!”
“I will stand by you through thick and thin,” said Tom.
The other eyed him for several seconds.
“I do believe you will,” said he. “It’s a bargain between true man and true man! Well, then, that night—”
“Stop!” said Tom. “We will have another pair of ears.” He went to the door and called loudly for Peggy. No answer; his voice reverberated through an empty house. He had seen the Fawcetts start for Sydney an hour ago (even now he did not realise why); but Peggy had wilfully deserted; and he was alone on the premises with this hideous ruffian.
“Go on,” said he. “What about that night? I met you not three hundred yards from the stile where the body was found; and you were going that way!”
“I was,” said Wyeth, “an’ when I come near, what d’ye think I heard? A couple of swells having a row; in ’alf a shake it come to blows, an’ I counted five before there was a bit of a thud, and the one who’d been calling out ‘My Gawd—my Gawd!’ ’e shut up, but the other went on saying ‘You devil!’—through ‘is teeth—jes’ like that—until I come up. I keeps quiet and sees one swell take a lot o’ papers outer the other swell’s pocket, when in I steps. You should ha’ seen the one as was pocketin’ the papers! Up he jumps, with a thick stick dripping at the end, and before you can say Jack Robinson ’e ’as me on the conk, an’ that’s the end o’ me!”
“Did you ever see him again?” Tom’s voice rang strange with horror and weariness; he did not want his freedom; he was sick of the life that Daintree had given him back, of the world to which Daintree had restored him. His benefactor! The man filled his mind in that first light only—and in this last!
“Yes, I see him at your trial,” said Wyeth; “but I’m coming to that. Meanwhile I’m only silly, and what do I find when I come to? A dead man, a bloody stick, an’ me lyin’ alongside! Nice, wasn’t it? The moon was on ’im, an’ he made me feel nice, I can tell yer. But I soon see it wasn’t robbery; there was that there diamond pin. I boned it, an’ there was some loose silver in his pockets, an’ that come in ’andy too. I took to my ’eels an’ did a slant the way I come, an’ I never see that swell no more till your trial. I thought ’e might be there, an’ ’e was; so the first day I lied in wait for ’im, but the Charles knoo me an’ I got frightened an’ went an’ lost ’im. The next night I lost ’im again—an accident ’appened—an’ I come out ’ere, I dessay in the ship arter you. An’ yesterday I see ’is lordship comin’ outer the Noo South Wales Bank, as bold as brarse! He never seed me till you got afloat, an’ that’s what upset you all. Arter that I dogged ’im, but dursn’t say a word till I found a card or two to shove up my sleeve. So, thinks I, the man who steals papers may steal ’em to keep; we’ll ’ave a look! An’ so it was; an’ now them papers is yours, an’ you’re as good as a free man. You’ll put in a word for that ticket when you git your own free parding? You won’t go an’ round on a pore chap Gawd Almighty ’as rounded on?” And a hand went in front of the ghastly face, with a gesture which would have added pity to repulsion in a harder heart than Tom’s.
“Heaven forbid!” said Tom, from his knees. “You shall have your ticket if this can get it you and I can help.” He was gathering all the smooth blue letters together again, and thinking of an account which Daintree had given him in that very room, that very week, of his own proceedings on the night of the murder. Suddenly he sprang to his feet, jumped on a chair, and examined the silver cups on the top of the bookshelf, one by one. There were seven; all were for winning the mile; it was his old distance from Avenue Lodge to the hollow tree in the fields, between the Finchley Road and Haverstock Hill. Tom remembered his master’s anger, inexplicable no longer, on the day he cleaned the cups. He jumped down and was looking at the inscription on the clock when it struck eleven in his face.
Tom clapped his hand to his head.
“We shall be too late!”
“Too late wot for?”
“She will be married to a murderer. And I forgot that. God forgive me! God forgive me!” He reeled into the verandah. “No—no—there is one chance. The ring—the ring! This way for your life!”