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.
The garden wall was mercifully low. Tom vaulted it, and all but landed in a cucumber-frame upon the other side. He found himself in a nursery-garden, with avenues of crystal roofs shining to the moon in long low parallels. Down one such causeway sped Tom at top speed, getting into another by turning left and right at the first gap. Just then he heard a welcome crash at the cucumber-frame fifty yards back. But now the frontage wall loomed ahead, cutting the stars at an uncomfortable height; and on dashing up to it Tom saw the mistake he had make by changing avenues. He had to turn back to the right to make the gate; and the officers, who had run straight ahead, and thus gained a score of yards, were upon him in full cry.
The gate was a high wooden one, luckily without spikes; the runaway straddled the top just as the pursuers reached the bottom, and left a shoe in their hands, ere he threw himself down upon the other side, and kicked its fellow to the winds.
A stretch of fair road ran right and left between temporary fences and open ground laid out for building. Tom headed to the left, scampering like a mouse in his stocking-soles, with the constables again clattering at his heels. One of the latter seemed to be running lame; and both breathed the music of short wind to Tom’s ears. He was himself lean and hard from little food and much fresh air. With a clear course, he had perfect confidence in his pace and staying powers; and this was then comparatively open country; and the time was between three and four in the morning.
Lightly and rhythmically fell his feet upon the roadside; those of his pursuers rang fainter by degrees; but when at length he glanced over his shoulder, it cost him yards from sheer admiration. Of the four white legs flying after him in the moonlight, one was as if dipped in red from thigh to ankle; yet the limping man led; and Tom, remembering the crash at the cucumber-frame, felt a parenthetic pang at being pitted by fate against this hero.
But now a broad road crossed and ended this one, and Tom tore round to the right. Hardly had he done so when he became aware that the pursuit had suffered a sudden interruption. He heard the blowing of a whistle farther and farther behind him, and guessed that the wounded man had dropped from loss of blood, and was in too bad a case to be left. His heart smote him; he seemed cast for blood-guiltiness after all; still, here was his chance, and he must make the most of it or surely die.
He ran swiftly on, and presently overhauled a cart lumbering westward along the middle of the road. He was passing it at a less suspicious pace when he made a discovery. The driver was bent double and fast asleep.
Tom dropped behind again and peeped in over the back. It was a hay-cart, and the load had been left in town; all that remained was the tarpaulin lying in a crumpled heap. He looked back along the road, but saw nobody. Then he boarded the cart—silently enough in his ragged socks—and curled himself up beneath the tarpaulin.
He had not been there many minutes when the double patter of two pairs of boots came to his ears above the creaking of the cart-wheels and the horse’s sober stride. Louder it grew and louder yet, until once more Tom heard the laboured breath of untrained runners: he heard them pass the cart, one each side; and then, just as he himself had stopped on overhauling it, so did they.
“I see nothing of your man,” said one. “Let’s ask this chap if he has.”
“We might do worse. Hey, driver! Wake up there, will you?”
“What’s the row?”
“You’re asleep!”
“What’s that to you?”
“Everything—when you’re in charge of a horse and cart.”
The man promptly denied having been asleep at all; was asked if he had seen the fugitive; and wanted to know what he was like.
Tom heard himself most inaccurately described. “And I ought to know, because I’ve chased him for a mile already; and only lost him because my comrade was wounded and couldn’t run,” added the ingenious officer.
“Well, what if I did see him?”
“We’re just at the fork; you must have seen which way he went, and you’ve got to tell us.”
“And what if I refuse?”
“Refuse! Why, he’s a desperate burglar, who’s about done for two of us already! Refuse away—but you come along with us.”
“Oh, all right, I did see him,” declared the carter, to Tom’s momentary horror; “but I call it wery ’ard, makin’ one pore chap split on another.”
“And which way did he go when he came to the fork just ahead here?”
“Which way? Why, he kep’ on straight along the Uxbridge Road, and that’s the truth.”
The carter was cautioned, threatened, but finally allowed to proceed upon his way. In a minute or two Tom heard him burst into a laugh, and whip up the draught-horse to an elephantine trot. Meanwhile the police-officers had run out of ear-shot along the Uxbridge Road; and the hay-cart was well upon its way to Turnham Green and Kew.
At the latter place the carter stopped for his breakfast, and Thomas Erichsen made good his escape, not a little encouraged by the fact that his late pursuers had manifestly not known who it was they were pursuing.
Tom had his breakfast in the beautiful early sunshine beside the river’s brim.
Overnight he had avoided the tavern, but not the pastry-cook’s shop; so he had made his supper in the empty house, and was provisioned still; moreover, his pocket was still weighted by poor Blaydes’s broken watch, nor could he make up his mind to pitch into the river his only asset, and one to which he was so justly entitled. He was clear of London now; the early sun gave him confidence and pluck. He would pawn the watch in one of these Thames Valley towns, and then get back to London and the docks by river and in new habiliments. It was Saturday morning; he would wait until that best of times, Saturday night; but first he must find a place to hide his head in during the day.
He found one in the boat-house of a small, new, white-brick villa, with a narrow garden leading down to the river’s edge. The boat-house had an open window. Hardened by his extremity into incredible alacrity in such enterprises, Tom was through it in a twinkling, and well pleased with his discovery. The boat was still hibernating keel upwards on trestles. It would be a very strange thing if that day, of all others, were chosen for launching her for the summer. Determined, at any rate, to risk it, the runaway climbed into a little loft which might have been made for him, and settled down for the day; he rolled himself up in several folds of strawberry-netting, and made another quaint pillow of the box of a mowing-machine, whereon he slept soundly for several hours.
So the morning went; but the livelong afternoon he lay awake beneath the strawberry-nets; and these were his worst hours yet. They gave him pause for thought, and what thoughts were his! The almost inevitable end of this wild-goose flight—that was one. The quite inevitable fate of one standing his ground in circumstances so damning—that was another. The two together led him in circles, so that his brain reeled. The upshot was that he had taken the wrong, and yet the only course. Nor was that the worst, for brooding over all there was the thought of Claire, believing him guilty till her dying day, and never forgiving her own warm heart that had gone out in fearless loving-kindness to the bloody and deceitful man. To have loved one who ended on the gallows! What a memory to take through life! And the poor fellow’s love so quickened his insight that he shed tears for her, but regarded his own case with a growing stoicism.
Yet all the time the changed face of Blaydes at the moonlit stile, and that other foul one seen so shortly after, looked down on him side by side from the boathouse roof; and now he knew them for the faces of murdered man and murderer; but anon he gave it up, and shrugged his cramped shoulders, and left all that on the knees of the gods.
So these black hours wore slowly on, and they were the blacker in that they contained no new alarm to lift his mind from the ultimate. On the contrary, he felt safe enough for the day, for a steady rain had started while he slept, and never a footstep had mingled with its music on the garden paths; a relief, perhaps, but one that brought its own depression.
However, the rain ceased with the day, and when Tom deemed it dark enough for a judicious exit, the wet earth was as fragrant as a flower. He sniffed it joyously through the open window by which he had entered. The garden path was washed very yellow, and bordered by twin canals. There was more light than he had thought when in the loft; still, not a soul was in view, and it had been lighter yet when he arrived. It was necessary, however, to get out of the window legs first, and backwards, and when Tom had done so and turned round, he beheld, standing on the yellow path between the two canals, and quizzically regarding him, the quaintest and the tiniest old gentleman he had ever encountered.
He was certainly not more than five feet high, but he carried himself superbly, and fixed the intruder with a steady, jocular, light-blue eye which inspired respect before fear. He seemed, indeed, the essence of contemplative geniality; but it was his powdered hair, black knee-breeches, and white silk stockings that gave him the picture-book appearance at which even Tom found time to marvel. But he marvelled more when the old gentleman made him a courtly bow, and said in high, chirping tones:—
“I am delighted to see you, sir! I fear my boat-house will have afforded you but indifferent shelter on so vile a day; such as it has been, however, you are welcome to it indeed.”
“Welcome!” exclaimed Tom.
“And why not?” chirruped the other. “Surely we who have must give to you who have not, be it roof or boot? I am sorry, however, to see you bare-footed, for you will permit me to observe that such stockings as you have on are worse than none. If you will have the goodness to come with me, you shall be shod afresh, and join me in a glass of negus before you go.”
“But, sir—”
“Tut! I know what you would say: you have trespassed already, and have no wish to trespass further. Very well, sir, so be it; you shall have your way, and pay the penalty. I condemn you to a glass of negus and a new pair of shoes.”
And with the utmost bonhomie the tiny gentleman drove Tom before him to the house, and through open French windows to a basement room where a lamp and a fire were burning, and a kettle singing on the hob.
“Hungry?” he chirped, giving Tom a playful push in the ribs.
“I had provisions in my pocket,” stammered the youth, in deep embarrassment; “I shall do very well. Indeed, your kindness—”
“Tut, sir, tut! You will please me best by saying no more about that. You are hungry, and I shall order you something upstairs. But here’s the sherry and there’s the boiling water; you can brew your own negus while I am gone; and this is today’s Advertiser. Make yourself at home, I beg!” And with twinkling eyes and brisk gestures the little old gentleman departed, of all Tom’s good Samaritans, assuredly the prince and king.
No sooner was he alone than Tom caught up the Advertiser and found half a column about the murder; and, yes! there was his name. The Adcocks had volunteered it, together with a full description, whose accuracy tempted Tom not to wait for his supper, but to rush through the open window and swim the river in his clothes. Yet there was more that must be read. The case against him was stronger than ever. The threatening letters had been found among the dead man’s effects. The hackney-coachman had told his story, and here it was. But one name was gratefully absent; that of Harding did not occur in the closely printed half-column, which so strangely fascinated Tom that his quaint Samaritan was back before he had put the paper down.
“What! Feeding the mind before the body? Well, well, to be sure!”
“I hadn’t seen to-day’s paper,” said Tom, feebly.
“Aha! I know what you were reading, too.” The old gentleman chuckled as he poured sherry into two tumblers. “I know—I know!”
“What?” asked Tom, hoarsely.
“My eyes are good—my eyes are excellent. You were reading the Hampstead murder.” Tom held his breath. “I never read such things myself,” pursued the other; “but I did when I was young. Oh, Lord, yes! Blood was my negus then.”
And with his childlike laugh he handed Tom one steaming tumbler, mixed another for himself, and insisted on clinking glasses before they drank. Tom spilt some of his portion upon the floor, but his kind host never noticed it. He was next invited to take a pinch from a silver-mounted horn snuff-box. This he refused as politely as his state of mind would permit. He trembled to know whether the old gentleman had really eschewed all accounts of the murder. To make certain he hazarded a leading question.
“It seems to be a queer affair, sir. Do you think they’ll ever catch him?”
“My good fellow, I haven’t read the case.”
Tom drew a deep breath and tossed off his negus at a gulp. At that moment there came a knock at the door, and a small maid entered.
“Ready, Mary?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then come this way, my dear young gentleman,” the old one said, with his most benevolent smile. “Upstairs—follow the maid—I will follow you.”
Tom hesitated, but gave in without a word. He was, indeed, as hungry as he was grateful, and he followed the servant upstairs, with the jolly old fellow chatting pleasantly at his heels.
“The shoes you shall have immediately. What, would you shake my hand? Ah, my good fellow, I fear it’s but meagre entertainment that I can offer you. Well, well, if you insist! But that’s the door; pray walk in. He! he! he! he!”
And ere the chirruping laugh had ended, Tom’s flight was over, and he was in the hands of two policemen, who had securely pinned him by either arm. Resistance was useless. But from the officers’ faces a last hope flickered in his breast.
“What do you want me for?” he cried.
“What is the charge, sir?” asked one of the constables, sotto voce, of the master of the house.
“Can’t you see?” piped that triumphant humourist. “It’s the Hampstead murderer! I knew the fellow with half an eye!”