The Camera Fiend Part 9

"So I did, my young fellow," replied the doctor, with a kinder smile; "at least I can swear that you were walking with your eyes shut, and I thought you were walking in your sleep. It's not quite the same thing. It is near it. But we are talking about my evidence on oath in a court of justice."

"Shall I be tried?" asked the schoolboy in a hoa.r.s.e whisper.

"Perhaps only by the magistrate," replied the other, soothingly; "let us hope it will stop at that."

"But it must, it must!" cried Pocket wildly. "I'm absolutely innocent!

You said so yourself a minute ago; you've only to swear it as a doctor?

They can't do anything to me-they can't possibly!"

The doctor stood looking into the sunless garden with a troubled face.

"Dr. Baumgartner!"

"Yes, my young fellow?"

"They can't do anything to me, can they?"

Baumgartner returned to the fireside with his foreign shrug.

"It depends what you call anything," said he. "They cannot hang you; after what I should certainly have to say I doubt if they could even detain you in custody. But you would only be released on bail; the case would be sent for trial; it would get into every paper in England; your family could not stop it, your schoolfellows would devour it, you would find it difficult to live down both at home and at school. In years to come it will mean at best a certain smile at your expense! That is what they can do to you," concluded the doctor, apologetically. "You asked me to tell you. It is better to be candid. I hoped you would bear it like a man."

Pocket was not even bearing it like a manly boy; he had flung himself back into the big chair, and broken down for the first time utterly. One name became articulate through his sobs. "My mother!" he moaned. "It'll kill her! I know it will! Oh, that I should live to kill my mother too!"

"Mothers have more lives than that; they have more than most people,"

remarked Baumgartner sardonically.

"You don't understand! She has had a frightful illness, bad news of any kind has to be kept from her, and can you imagine worse news than this?

She mustn't hear it!" cried the boy, leaping to feet with streaming eyes.

"For G.o.d's sake, sir, help me to hush it up!"

"It's in the papers already," replied Baumgartner, with a forbearing shrug.

"But my part in it!"

"You said it had got to come out."

"I didn't realise all it meant-to her!"

"I thought you meant to make a clean breast of it?"

"So I did; but now I don't!" cried Pocket, vehemently. "Now I would give my own life, cheerfully, rather than let her know what I've done-than drag them all through that!"

"Do you mean what you say?"

Baumgartner appeared to be forming some conditional intention.

"Every syllable!" said Pocket.

"Because, you know," explained the doctor, "it is a case of now or never so far as going to Scotland Yard is concerned."

"Then it's never!"

"I must put it plainly to you. It's not too late to do whatever you decide, but you must decide now. I would still go with you to Scotland Yard, and the chances are that they would still accept the true story of to-day. I have told you what I believe to be the worst that can happen to you; it may be that rather more may happen to me for harbouring you all day as I have done. I hope not, but I took the law into my own hands, and I am prepared to abide by the law if you so decide this minute."

"I have decided."

"Mind you, it would mean putting yourself unreservedly in my hands, at any rate for the present," said Baumgartner, impressively. "Better come to Scotland Yard this minute than go back to school and blab about the whole thing there!"

"I shouldn't do that."

"I'm not so sure," replied the acute doctor. "I believe I know you better than you know yourself; one learns more of a person in an hour like this than in a whole humdrum lifetime. I believe you would find it very difficult not to tell somebody."

Pocket admitted it with a natural outburst of his leading quality. In truth no previous act or word of Baumgartner's had inspired such confidence as this unerring piece of insight. It seemed to the boy a perfect miracle of discernment. He was not old enough to know that what he would have done, in his weakness, most grown-up men and women of his temperament would have done in theirs.

"Remember," resumed the doctor, "you would have the whole of to-day to account for; it's not as though you wouldn't have some very awkward questions to answer the moment you got back to school."

And again the lad marvelled at this intuition into public-school conditions on the part of one who could have no first-hand knowledge of those insular inst.i.tutions. But this fresh display of understanding only confirmed him in his resolve.

"I trust you, sir," said he; "haven't you done enough for me to make me?

I put myself, as you say, absolutely in your hands; and I'm grateful to you for all you've done and whatever you mean to do!"

"Even though it comes to hiding with us here in London?"

"No matter what it comes to," cried Pocket, strangely exalted now, "so long as my people never know!"

"They may think you dead." He thought of saying that he wished he was; but it would not have been true; even then it would have been a lie, and Pocket was not the boy to tell one if he knew it.

"That would be better than knowing what I have done," was what he said; and in his exaltation he believed no less.

"You quite see that you are taking a step which must be final?"

"It is final-absolutely-so far as I am concerned."

And it was meant to be, in all good faith; the very fulness and fairness of the doctor's warnings served but to strengthen that resolve. But Baumgartner, as if to let well or ill alone, dropped the matter with a clinching shrug; and presently he left his visitor, less wisely, to brood on it alone.

Pocket was a dab at brooding! That is the worst of your conscientious a.s.s; he takes his decision like a man; he means to stick to it like a sportsman; but he cannot help wondering whether he has decided for the best, and what would have happened if he had decided otherwise, and what his world will say about him as it is.

This one went much further in the unique stress of his extraordinary position. He pictured his people dressing for dinner at home; he pictured his form sitting down to private-work in his form-master's hall; there was no end to his mental pictures, for they included one of himself on the scaffold in the broad-arrows of the little old waxwork at Madame Ta.s.saud's! He could not help himself; his mind was crumbling with his dreadful deed and its awful possibilities. Now his heart bled honestly for the poor dead man, now for his own mother and sister, and now not less freely for himself. He had been so innocent in the whole matter; he had only been an innocent and rather sporting fool. And now one of these lives was ended by his hand, and all the rest would be darkened for ever after!

It was too great a burden for a boy to bear; but Pocket bore it far into the long June twilight, scarcely stirring in the big soft chair, yet never leaning back in it again. He sat hunched up as though once more battling for breath, but curiously enough his bodily distress had flown before that of the mind. Pocket would thankfully have changed them back again, for his brain was as clear as his bronchial tubes, its capacity for suffering undimmed by a single physical preoccupation. Between seven and eight the young lady of the house came in with candles and a kind of high-tea on a tray; she also brought a box of d'Auvergne Cigarettes and the latest evening paper, which her uncle thought that Mr. Upton would like to see.

That was how the girl addressed the boy, and the style always made him feel, and wish to seem, something of a man. But his present effort in that direction was sadly perfunctory: he almost ejected little Miss Platts in his eagerness to shut the door on her and see the news.

It was neither unimportant nor at first sight rea.s.suring. The dead man had been identified by the police, who knew him of old, and were reported as hopeful of obtaining a clue through his ident.i.ty. The clue was the point that stuck like a burr in the boyish brain; his idea of a clue was one leading straight to himself; it took Dr. Baumgartner to explain the true value of the ident.i.ty clause, and bid the boy eat his meal.

"Trust the police!" said he. "They're on a false scent already; they may try at that end till it turns their hair grey!"

Pocket disliked this tone; he had begun to think almost as reverentially of his victim as of a dead member of his own family. It appeared thus early, however, that in life the defunct had been by no means worthy of respect. Rowton Houses had been his only home, except when his undistinguished offences got him into gaol; the surrept.i.tious practices of the professional mendicant, his sole means of livelihood. So much was to be read between the few brief lines in the stop-press column of the latest evening paper. Again it required Baumgartner to extract comfort from such items.

"At all events," said he, "you cannot reproach yourself with the destruction of a valuable life! The man was evidently the worthless creature that he looked. You talk about your undesirable aliens, but here in England you breed undesirables enough to manure the world! It's a public service to reduce their number."