Kitabı oku: «Tinman», sayfa 8

CHAPTER II
Ghosts

London terrified me after the long silence of the prison; I was afraid of it. More than that, I discovered that I had forgotten my brief experience of it; so that I should have been unable, even had it been necessary, to find my way to the old rooms in the little street off Holborn, wherein I had dreamed my brief dreams, and wherein the Law had so suddenly gripped me, and swept me out of the world twenty years before. But I had this man for guide – this man who had been my guardian, and was now, as it seemed, my friend; I could only cling to him, with some measure of gratitude in my heart that he should have remembered me at all, and have come to my rescue when I was once more flung upon the world.

I gathered that he was poor; there were no signs about him of that prosperity that had once been his. Moreover, on reaching London he hurried me into an omnibus, and took me a long way rattling through an obscure part of the town to a street of mean houses abutting on the river; it was a place of houses evidently let out in rooms. He rang a bell at one house, and after a long time the sound of shuffling feet was heard, and the door opened a little way, and a face looked out. I was not sure at first whether it was the face of a child or of an old and wizened woman. Then, as the door was opened a little wider, I saw that it was a shabby and forlorn-looking girl of about fifteen or sixteen, dressed in an old skirt and blouse much too big for her.

"All right, Moggs," said Fanshawe, "you needn't be afraid to let us in." He thrust her aside as he spoke, and motioned to me with a jerk of the head to follow him. I went in, and the girl closed the door.

"There's a letter for you upstairs, guv'nor," she said, calling after Fanshawe, who was mounting the stairs.

He muttered something, and went on his way; I followed obediently. We came into a forlorn-looking room, with an untidy bed in one corner, and with some wretched scraps of furniture scattered about it; a ragged apology for a carpet covered about half the floor. A cupboard, with a broken hinge to its door, swung open in one corner, and disclosed a few plates and cups and saucers, and some glasses that did not match. The place was destitute of fire, and was bitterly cold. Jervis Fanshawe strode out of the room again, and screamed querulously for the girl. "Moggs! Moggs!"

She came up in a moment or two; listened calmly to his volcanic outburst at her; and proceeded to light the fire. She was the strangest little person I ever remember to have seen; she went on calmly with her work, singing to herself under her breath a sort of melancholy dirge that had no tune nor time about it, but which seemed in some vague way to comfort her, much as a man may suck at an empty pipe, or a baby at a bottle. She took not the faintest notice of Fanshawe, despite all that he said; she only looked at me curiously once or twice before finally quitting the room. By that time my guardian (as I must continue to call him, for want of a better title) was deep in the letter he had found on the table. Finally he thrust it into his pocket, with an exclamation of annoyance, and turned to me.

I suppose the fact of seeing me standing there, huddled as close as I could to the fire, reminded him of something in the past; he looked round the room, and waved his hands, and spoke mockingly.

"Welcome, Charlie Avaline, to my rooms!" he exclaimed. "Perhaps I should say 'room,' because there's only one of 'em. Observe the furniture, the costly appointments, the ease and luxury of it all! To this have we come, Charlie – you and I. Who can say that we haven't done well for ourselves?"

He was on his knees before the fire, stirring it savagely and striving to make it burn, and muttering about it. He looked up at me with that old look of contempt on his face; flung the rusty poker into the grate with a clatter, and got to his feet. He was in a strange mood, and I did not know what to make of him. More than that, I was coming back so slowly to life myself that I did not trouble very much about him; I had just those animal instincts to warm myself, and to get food, and to rest, and nothing more. Whatever old pulses he had stirred in me with his mention of the woman I had loved were dropping back into their old condition. The time was coming when they were to be stirred and shaken, and brought to full and abundant life; but his was not the hand to sweep the strings of my being, and wake any music within me. I had only a dull curiosity concerning him, and that curiosity he presently began to satisfy.

"You're such a bloodless thing – something that has borne a number for years – a slave; one doesn't know how much you understand, or how much you don't," he began, looking at me over his shoulder in that old fashion I dimly remembered.

"I'll try to understand," I replied patiently.

"It is necessary that you should be told certain things; there's work for you to do, and you must remember who you are, and what you have been, before you can undertake it. I've waited a long time for you, on the chance that you might come into my hands again; and I'm getting an old man, and time is precious. Carry your dull mind back, and see if you remember what I was."

I suppose I looked at him in a troubled way, as one not clearly understanding; he beat his fist upon the table, and cried out harshly at me.

"Numbskull! Do you remember what position I occupied?"

"You had money – you lived well – you had many friends," I began slowly; and he interrupted me impatiently.

"Yes, I had friends – money – power," he exclaimed. "The world went well with me, and there were those who trembled at the sound of my voice. Indirectly you brought me to this," he added, waving his hand to indicate the poor room. "When you killed Gavin Hockley, you let loose a cloud of things that had better have been hidden; I had forgotten the possibility of that when I set you on to kill him."

"I killed him because he spoke ill of a woman," I said, like one repeating a lesson.

"You killed him because I had made up my mind that you should," he retorted. "However, that's neither here nor there. Hockley had left behind a cloud of debts; he had paper signed by me; he had letters of mine. Even in those first days, when you were in prison, the thing sprang up alive to confront me; men whispered those ugly words, forgery and fraud. You've not been the only prisoner, my fine fellow."

"You?" I stared at him in amazement.

He laughed disagreeably. "Yes, they shut me away for seven years; and I came out what you see me now – a man ruined and broken, without a friend in the world, and without any one to speak a good word for me. Those I had known were dead, or would not speak to me; I was too old to make new friends of the sort I had known before. So I've lived by my wits, Charles Avaline, just as you'll have to live. While you've been warm and well-cared for at the expense of your country, I've been down into the depths, and have seen strange things. And it's not a nice world for a man under those circumstances. One longs to get hold of another man, and to drag that other man down, and show him that bitter life too," he added savagely.

"I – I'm sorry," I said vaguely; I did not know what else to say. "You see, I have not known what has been happening. In all the long time (they tell me it was twenty years) – in all the long time that I have been there I have not seen the face of any one I ever knew before; and I have not heard a voice that was a voice out of the past, save in dreams. And I never had a letter."

"No – they forget you easily when you go under," said Fanshawe. "As for me, I thought they'd hang you; and by the time they hadn't done that I was too full of my own troubles. I suppose you'd like to know something about the old people and the old days – eh?" He thrust his face towards me across the table; his eyes were hungry. I did not understand then what was in the mind of the man; his brain was clear and strong, and his plans already well thought out. My brain was dull and tired, and I had no plans at all.

"You remember Hammerstone Market?" he went on, watching me, and perhaps noting the expression of my face as I heard names I remembered. "All changed down there, in one way, and yet not changed in another. Some dead, and some alive. You remember Barbara?"

"Yes; I loved – loved Barbara," I whispered brokenly.

"You shall see her again; talk with her again; come into her life again." There was a fierce eagerness about him that held me and frightened me. "That's what I'm going to do for you; that's what I meant when I said that I would bring you back to love and life and laughter. Look round this room – and then see it all swept away," he went on with growing excitement. "I've found one friend who will help us both; it may happen that we are not poor and forlorn any more. We have both suffered; it is right that we should have some little joy in our lives."

"What are you going to do with me?" I asked him, as I had asked before; but he laughed, and would not answer me.

I spent the rest of the day in that place, cowering over the fire, and striving hard to look back into the past. I found it difficult at first; it was like a closed book to me, in which only here and there, when I was able at last to open it, could I decipher a few words – a few broken sentences that came like the sigh of a dead wind blowing over the dead years back to me. I got up mechanically when I was called to eat what simple food he put before me, going back afterwards to crouch over the fire, and to start that burrowing process again into the lost years.

It was late in the evening when I saw him reading again that letter he had taken from his pocket, and muttering to himself over it. At last he seemed suddenly to make up his mind about it; he crammed it back into his pocket, and put on his hat, and announced that he was going out. "You can stay here," he told me curtly; "no one will interfere with you."

I sat still for a little time after he had gone; and then an intolerable restlessness seized upon me. I was like a lost spirit; I did not know what to do with myself. I found myself pacing out again on the floor the steps that for twenty years I had paced out in my cell; and finding the room too large, so that the steps would not fit in. And at last got my hat, and went out into the streets; and looked about me, with a new and definite idea for the first time growing in my mind.

Hammerstone Market! At Hammerstone Market I had been happy once; and there, waiting for me, and preserved in some strange fashion through all the years, was the life I had laid down and left behind me. Why had I not thought of this before? It was the simplest thing in the world; I had but to go to that place where I had been happy to pick up again the thread of my life, and to put together successfully the puzzle I did not now understand. So I set out for the place, with a new and happy confidence growing in my mind.

I was but groping yet, and I did not understand fully what I meant to do. I was but a poor thing, striving hard to get back to some life I had lost; and so it happened that I set about it as a child might have done, and in what seemed to my childish mind the simplest and most direct way.

I have wondered since what I must have looked like to any one who saw me then, wandering about in search of Hammerstone Market. I have a vision of myself as being tall and thin, and gaunt and old-looking; with deep eyes that must have been pathetic in the hopeless weariness that was in their depths. My years counted as nothing; I was a shabby tired old man, going back, pathetically enough, to pick up here and there a thread of the life that had been snatched so suddenly from me. I knew of no way to reach the place of my dreams, except to walk; and I only knew dimly that it lay in a county not very far to the north of London.

By little short of a miracle I found the place, after walking through the best part of a long winter night. When once I had got out of London the road had proved to be a straight one; I walked on and on with dogged persistency. By the time the morning light was beginning to break over the country that stretched before me, I was within reasonable distance of the place, and my heart was light with a hope it had not known for years. For I was coming back to the place where for a little time at least I had lived and loved and suffered – and I was to see Barbara!

Even then I had no thought that she could be anything but the bright girl I had left. Time had stood still with me, and my life had been so completely a thing of dreams that she was a dream creature in my mind still; I could think of her in no other way. I came back to the place where I had known her after that lapse of twenty years, but under what different conditions! I had come there before a mere boy, with the world at my feet; I crept back now, jaded and weary and old, to look on the life I had known, and to find my lost love, who, had I but thought about the matter clearly and sanely, I must surely have understood might well be in her grave years before.

The place was unchanged; the mere sight of the old houses and of the quaint High Street stirred my memory, and made me see more clearly into that past in which I was groping. I went on eagerly; I wanted to find again all that I had lost so long ago.

Perhaps it was characteristic of my wasted life that it should be winter now, instead of the summer when I had first met Barbara in the woods; it was as though the joy and beauty of it all had been stripped away. But when I came to the wood at last, with the bare branches of the trees standing up nakedly against the sky, a gleam of sun struck across it, making fanciful patterns on the snow. I sat down on a fallen tree, and looked about me, with my mind clearing more and more every minute.

Have you ever closed your eyes, and seen suddenly and vividly in a mental picture some scene that was enacted years and years before – seen the figures moving in it, just as they did long ago? That was what I saw then, or began to see, when, suddenly raising my eyes, I saw standing in the sunlight an easel with a canvas upon it. I knew then that in some extraordinary fashion I had dropped back through the years, and had come again as a young man into the wood. Yet not as a young man; because now I was poor and old, and shabby and tired – and it was winter. There could be no getting away from that; in spite of the sunlight it was winter.

I walked up to the canvas, and touched it, to be sure that it was real. And then, knowing my way clearly, as it seemed, I walked on into the depths of the wood, looking about me.

God of mercy! – she was there! I saw her coming straight through the wood – Barbara, with her hands outstretched, and a smile on her face; I knew her in a moment. And going towards her, as it seemed, was myself – a tall straight youth, with an easy step and an eager manner, meeting her and holding her hands, and looking into her eyes. I had slipped behind a tree, so that they did not see me; I stood there with my hands pressed against my throbbing temples, looking on at what seemed to be a dream picture of something that had happened years and years before – looking on at myself, and seeming to live again my own hopeless love story. For now I saw that the boy held her close in his arms, and whispered to her; and she seemed to be weeping.

My first thought was that I must have suddenly gone mad, or that this was some dream out of which I should presently wake. But while I stood there staring at them, I went over in my mind all that I had done the previous night and that day: my long walk from London – and the coming into the old town at break of day – then this further journey here. I looked down at my shabby clothes, and stared in bewilderment at my coarsened hands with the broken nails. Yes – I was convict No. 145 – once Charlie Avaline; and these were no dream figures, but two people living out again, in some strange fashion, the life that I had lived in a few short hours with Barbara Patton. Yet here was Barbara herself – with the eyes of my Barbara, and the face of my Barbara – all unchanged, as I had dreamed of her so often in my cell in prison! How was I to account for that?

I remained hidden at no great distance from them; I saw them presently part. The boy was impressing something upon her; I saw her dry her tears, and listen, and even strive to smile at something that he said. Then they clung together for a moment or two – and she ran away through the woods, waving her hand to him as she went. He walked back dejectedly to his easel, and packed up his things, and went away. And I, in a fever of anxiety and remorse and wonder, followed him.

Perhaps the strangest thing of all was to see him go to that inn where I had once stayed – going into it with the light step that I must have had twenty years before. It was as though the ghost of myself had come back, in a better shape than I, to take up the life I had dropped.

I watched him all that day; which is to say that I hung about the little town, and waited for him, wondering what he would do. I was not surprised when, as it was growing dark, he came out into the High Street, and set off at a swinging pace in the direction of the house I had known as belonging to old Patton. With the trot that had been mine for so long in the exercise ground of the prison, I went after him.

It was obvious that he was not so lucky as I had been, in that he must not enter the house. I crept into the grounds, and presently saw him standing on that very terrace on which I had stood with my Barbara – looking in at the windows and listening; I was below the terrace, crouched among some bushes, watching him, and watching the lighted windows. Presently a man walked to one of them, and opened it a little way, and returned into the room; and still I lay there, watching and thinking and wondering.

Then across the silence of the night there broke the sound of music, and the voice of a girl singing. I dropped my head upon my arms as I lay there; it seemed as though I could not bear it. For this was a song I had heard twenty years before in that very room, and it seemed to me that the voice was the same, coming hauntingly and wonderfully out of the past. The boy stood listening too; every word and every note floated to us clearly. It seemed as though out of the deep night of the years Barbara's voice came to me, singing to me as she had sung before.

The song ceased, and the last notes died away. The girl came to the open window, and looked out into the night; I saw the boy crouching there, watching her. Then from somewhere in the room a man's voice sounded quite clearly and distinctly.

"Barbara, you have your mother's voice."

She turned her head, and looked back into the room. "Thank you, father," she said; "I like to hear you say that."

I lay still, with a full understanding coming to me for the first time. This was not my Barbara; this was her child. I had come back, to find the mother gone, and the child in her place – in her very likeness. And I had come back, as it seemed, to touch again a love story as hopeless and as broken as my own had been. While the girl stood at the window, and the boy crouched in the shadows watching her, I lay there – thinking – thinking!

Presently the window was fastened, and the shutters drawn; lights began to appear in the upper windows. The boy lingered for a long time, but presently stole away; I crept after him. I did not know what to do, or what to think; I was like a lost soul wandering the earth, forlorn and hopeless and helpless. But he, going on through the night back to his lodging, was so much a part of myself, sprung up suddenly out of the past, that I could not bear to lose sight of him; I was close behind him when we came to the outskirts of the little town. There he turned suddenly, and faced about, looking at me.

"Why do you follow me?" he asked suspiciously.

"I meant no harm," I replied. "I beg you won't take any notice of me; I'm only a poor wanderer."

I saw his hand go to his pocket, as though he would have given me money; I drew back hastily. "Not that," I said; "I don't need that. But I was once like you – God knows how many years ago! – and so I liked to feel that I was near you. I'm sorry … good-night!"

I went away quickly, leaving him staring after me. Presently, when he had gone on again, I followed him, at a greater distance; came to the inn where he was stopping, and stood outside for a long time, wondering passionately and despairingly if I could help him; and then laughing at that thought, ruefully enough, when I remembered my own forlorn condition.

The hopelessness of doing anything there, where I was merely a penniless waif, was borne in upon me more forcefully the next day. I had found shelter in a barn, and I begged my breakfast from a charitable woman at a cottage. Then I set out again to walk to London. It was only when I was many miles on my journey that I stood still in the road, with a hand pressed to my forehead, and with a new light breaking in upon me.

Jervis Fanshawe had tried to tell me of this new Barbara! Why had I forgotten that; why hadn't I understood what he meant? Jervis Fanshawe had told me that I should see my Barbara again, as I had seen her in the past; that I should come back to love and life and laughter. Jervis Fanshawe understood; surely he would be able to show me what was best to be done. I set off at a greater rate than ever for London, determined that I must see him at the earliest opportunity, and tell him the wonderful thing that I had discovered.

I could think only of that discovery; I forgot completely what the man was whose services I desired to enlist – forgot all he had done, and all I had suffered indirectly through him. I had no one in the world to whom I could turn, save this man; and I only remembered with gratitude then that he had come to me at the moment of my release from prison, and had given me food and lodging.

It was very late when I reached the shabby little street in the neighbourhood of the river; I must have found it by a sort of instinct, for I did not even know its name. I came to the house, and rang the bell; the child my guardian had called Moggs opened the door. She grinned when she saw me, and jerked her head towards the staircase.

"Lucky you've come," she said, in a sort of hoarse whisper. "'E's bin carryin' on like mad, blamin' me for it, of all fings. I made sure you'd cut yer lucky."

I guessed dimly that my guardian had wondered at my absence; I went quickly up the stairs. I opened the door, and went eagerly into the room, with my tale at my very lips; but I stopped short when I saw that another man was seated at the table from which Fanshawe had risen.

"So you've come back, have you?" sneered my guardian, looking me over with no very favourable eye. "And by the look of you, I should think you've been out of doors a little."

I became suddenly aware how deplorably muddy and dirty I was. Like a scolded child, I pulled off my hat, and stood there with bowed head, unable to say a word. I raised my head when I heard the other man speak to Fanshawe.

"Is this the fellow?"

It was a curiously hard voice, a cold metallic voice. I looked at the speaker, and saw a man a little over thirty years of age, with a strong, rather heavy face; I noticed that his dark hair grew low on his forehead, and rather forward at the temples. He was very well-dressed – so well-dressed, in fact, that his being in that place at all on friendly terms with the shabby Jervis Fanshawe seemed incongruous in itself.

"Yes, this is the fellow," said Fanshawe, taking me by the sleeve and drawing me forward. "You can speak to him yourself."

The man lounging at the table looked up at me contemptuously enough – studied me as he might have studied a dog he meant to buy if he approved of it.

"You've been in prison?" he said at last.

I bowed my head, and dropped my eyes. "A long time," I replied.

"And now are thrown on the world, with a living to get if possible, and with no trade at your fingers' ends – eh? Well, I may be able to help you. We are friends here, and so I can speak freely. You killed a man?"

"A long time ago," I said, without raising my eyes.

"There's nothing to be ashamed of," he retorted, with a disagreeable laugh – "in fact, you're a man to know. I've been talking to Fanshawe here about you, and I think you may serve my purpose."

"In a word, Charlie," broke in Fanshawe excitedly, "there's a chance for you to get back a little payment for what you have suffered – to pay off old scores – to get a little cheap revenge. Don't stare at me like that; pull your wits together, and listen."

"To pay off old scores? Revenge?" I stared at him, wondering if he knew what I had seen in that old place of my dreams – wondering what he would say next.

"You have served a long term of imprisonment – your life has been broken and spoilt and ruined," went on the man at the table, setting my guardian aside. "Naturally you hate those who have drawn you into that; naturally your mind is filled with the desire to get even with them – to settle that old account."

"I don't understand," I murmured, looking from one to the other.

Jervis Fanshawe seized my arm, and shook me fiercely. "Years ago you suffered, like a fool, for the sake of a woman; she cared nothing for you, and married another man. Do you remember that?"

"Yes. Her name was Barbara," I replied slowly.

Fanshawe turned to the stranger. "You see he remembers something," he said. Then he turned again impatiently to me. "I have already told you that a new Barbara has sprung up in her place – a child – a girl."

Glancing at the face of the stranger at the table, I decided to hide my knowledge of what I had seen; I said nothing. Perhaps here I was to be shown the way to do what was in my mind; perhaps I was to be helped, as I had never expected to be helped at all.

"You understand, Avaline," went on the stranger, in his deadly voice, "that I take an interest in this new Barbara, who is like the Barbara you so mistakenly loved twenty years ago. In other words, for her own sake it is necessary that I should see much of her – communicate with her often. That is difficult without a third person, because the lady herself is a little obdurate. Do you follow me?"

"Yes," I replied, looking at him for a moment, and then turning to my guardian. "I begin to understand."

"So that if I can introduce to her some one she does not know – some one who is bound, by reasons of policy, to do what he is told, without thought of the consequences – I am a gainer," went on the man at the table. "You have reason to hate a girl, so unfortunately formed in the image of the woman who deceived you, and brought disaster upon you; you have reason to be loyal to me, because I can keep you from starving, and can give you clothes and shelter. You're a poor broken worn-out thing, and I take pity on you. Now do you understand the situation?"

I understood it so well that my mind, for the first time since I had stepped out from the prison gates, was clear, and I was fully alive. I looked eagerly from one to the other; I told the man brokenly that I would do all he asked; I think I suggested that I would be his slave. He might tell me to do anything; I was eager to take up that old story that I had been compelled to lay down.

"For your revenge?" he asked, with a grin.

"For my revenge!" I said; and burst into a shout of laughter.

"Don't take any notice of him," I heard my guardian whisper. "The poor fool is only half-witted; his years of prison life have told upon him. But he's the man you want!"