Elk 01 The Fellowship of the Frog (29 page)

“Do you like Johnson?” he asked.

“Yes, he’s a nice man,” she nodded. “I don’t know a great deal about him; indeed, I’ve only met him once or twice, but he was very kind to Ray, and saved him from getting into trouble. I am wondering whether, now that he is rich, he will induce Ray to go back to Maitlands.”

“I wonder if he will induce you—” He stopped.

“Induce me to what?” she asked in astonishment.

“Johnson is rather fond of you—he’s never made any disguise of the fact, and he’s a very rich man. Not that I think that would make any difference to you,” he added hastily. “I’m not a very rich man, but I’m comfortably off.”

The fingers in his hand stole round his, and pressed them tightly, and then suddenly they relaxed.

“I don’t know,” she said, and drew herself free.

“Father said—” She hesitated. “I don’t think father would like it. He thinks there is such a difference between our social positions.”

“Rats!” said Dick inelegantly.

“And there’s something else.” She found it an effort to tell him what that something was. “I don’t know what father does for a living, but it is…work that he never wishes to speak about; something that he looks upon as disgraceful.”

The last words were spoken so low that he hardly caught them.

“Suppose I know the worst about your father?” he asked quietly, and she stood back, looking at him from under knit brows.

“Do you mean that? What is it, Dick?”

He shook his head.

“I may know or I may not. It is only a wild guess. And you’re not to tell him that I know, or that I’m in any way suspicious. Will you please do that for me?”

“And knowing this, would it make any difference to you?”

“None.”

She had plucked a flower, and was pulling it petal from petal in her abstraction.

“Is it very dreadful?” she asked. “Has he committed a crime? No, no, don’t tell me.”

Once more he was near her, his arm about her trembling shoulders, his hand beneath her chin.

“My dear!” murmured the youthful Public Prosecutor, and forgot there was such a thing as murder in the world.

John Bennett was glad to see him, eager to tell the news of his triumph. He had a drawer full of press cuttings, headed “Wonderful Nature Studies. Remarkable Pictures by an Amateur,” and others equally flattering. And there had come to him a cheque which had left him gasping.

“This means—you don’t know what it means to me, Mr. Gordon,” he said, “or Captain Gordon—I always forget you’ve got a military title. When that boy of mine recovers his senses and returns home, he’s going to have just the good time he wants. He’s at the age when most boys are fools—what I call the showing-off age. Sometimes it runs to pimples and introspection, sometimes to the kind of life that a man doesn’t like to look back on. Ray has probably taken the less vicious course.”

It was a relief to hear the man speak so. Dick always thought of Ray Bennett as one who had committed the unforgiveable sin.

“This time next year I’m going to be an artist of leisure,” said John Bennett, who looked ten years younger.

Dick offered to drive him to town, but this he would not hear of. He had to make a call at Dorking. Apparently he had letters addressed to him in that town (Dick learnt of this from the girl) concerning his mysterious errands. Dick left Horsham with a heart lighter than he had brought w that little country town, and was in the mood to rally Inspector Elk for the profound gloom which had settled on him since he had discovered that there was not sufficient evidence to try Balder for his life.

Lew Brady sat disconsolately in Lola Bassano’s pretty drawing-room, and a more incongruous figure in that delicate setting it was impossible to imagine. A week’s growth of beard had transfigured him into the most unsavoury looking ruffian, and the soiled old clothes he wore, the broken and discoloured boots, the grimy shirt, no less than his own personal uncleanliness of appearance made him a revolting object.

So Lola thought, eyeing him anxiously, a foreboding of trouble in her heart.

“I’m finished with the Frog,” growled Brady. “He pays—of course he pays! But how long is it going on, Lola? You brought me into this!” He glowered at her.

“I brought you in, when you wanted to be brought into something,” she said calmly. “You can’t live on my savings all your life, Lew, and it was nearly time you made a little on the side.”

He played with a silver seal, twiddling it between his fingers, his eyes gloomily downcast.

“Balder’s caught, and the old man’s dead,” he said. “They’re the big people. What chance have I got?”

“What were your instructions, Lew?” she asked for the twentieth time that day.

He shook his head.

“I’m taking no risks, Lola. I don’t trust anybody, not even you.”

He took a small bottle from his pocket and examined it.

“What is that?” she asked curiously.

“Dope of some kind.”

“Is that part of the instructions too?”

He nodded.

“Are you going in your own name?”

“No, I’m not,” he snapped. “Don’t ask questions. I’m not going to tell you anything, see? This trip’s going to last a fortnight, and when it’s finished, I’m finished with Frog.”

“The boy—is he going with you?”

“How do I know? I’m to meet somebody somewhere, and that’s all about it.” He looked at the clock and rose with a grunt. “It’s the last time I shall sit in a decent parlour for a fortnight.” He gave a curt nod and walked to the door.

There was a servants’ entrance, a gallery which was reached through the kitchen, and he passed down the stairs unobserved, into the night.

It was dark by the time he reached Barnet; his feet were aching; he was hot and wretched. He had, suffered the indignity of being chased off the pavement by a policeman he could have licked with one hand, and he cursed the Frog with every step he took. There was still a long walk ahead of him once he was clear of Barnet; and it was not until a village clock was striking the hour of eleven that he ambled up to a figure that was sitting on the side of the road, just visible in the pale moonlight, but only recognizable when he spoke.

“Is that you?” said a voice.

“Yes, it’s me. You’re Carter aren’t you?”

“Good Lord!” gasped Ray as he recognized the voice.

“It’s Lew Brady!”

“It’s nothing of the kind!” snarled the other man. “My name’s Phenan. Yours is Carter. Sit down for a bit. I’m dead beat.”

“What is the idea?” asked the youth as they sat side by side.

“How the devil do I know?” said the other savagely as, with a tender movement, he slipped off his boots and rubbed his bruised feet.

“I had no idea it was you,” said Ray.

“I knew it was you, all right,” said the other. “And why I should be called upon to take a mug around this country, God knows!”

After a while he was rested sufficiently to continue the tramp.

“There’s a barn belonging to a shopkeeper in the next village. He’ll let us sleep there for a few pence.”

“Why not try to get a room?”

“Don’t be a fool,” snapped Lew. “Who’s going to take in a couple of tramps, do you think? We know we’re clean, but they don’t. No, we’ve got to go the way the tramps go.

“Where? To Nottingham?”

“I don’t know. If they told you Nottingham, I should say that’s the last place in the world we shall go to. I’ve got a sealed envelope in my pocket. When we reach Baldock I shall open it.”

They slept that night in the accommodating barn—a draughty shed, populated, it seemed, by chickens and rats, and Ray had a restless night and thought longingly of his own little bed at Maytree Cottage. Strangely enough, be did not dwell on the more palatial establishment in Knightsbridge.

The next day it rained, and they did not reach Baldock until late in the afternoon, and, sitting down under the cover of a hedge, Brady opened the envelope and read its contents, his companion watching him expectantly.

“You will branch from Baldock and take the nearest G.W. train for Bath. Then by road to Gloucester. At the village of Laverstock you will reveal to Carter the fact that you are married to Lola Bassano. You should take him to the
Red Lion
for this purpose, and tell him as offensively as possible in order to force a quarrel, but in no circumstances are you to allow him to part company from you. Go on to Ibbley Copse. You will find an open space near where three dead trees stand, and there you will stop, take back the statement you made that you are married to Lola, and make an apology. You are carrying with you a whisky flask; you must have the dope and the whisky together at this point. After he is asleep, you will make your way to Gloucester, to 289 Hendry Street, where you will find a complete change of clothing. Here you will shave and return to town by the 2.19.”

Every word, every syllable, he read over and over again, until he had mastered the details. Then, striking a match, he set fire to the paper and watched it burn.

“What are the orders?” asked Ray.

“The same as yours, I suppose. What did you do with yours?”

“Burnt them,” said Ray. “Did he tell you where we’re going?”

“We are going to take the Gloucester Road; I thought we should. That means striking across country till we reach the Bath Road. We can take a train to Bath.”

“Thank goodness for that!” said Ray fervently. “I don’t feel I can walk another step.”

At seven o’clock that night, two tramps turned out of a third-class carriage on Bath station. One, the younger, was limping slightly, and sat down on a station seat.

“Come on, you can’t stay here,” said the other gruffly. “We’ll get a bed in the town. There’s a Salvation Army shelter somewhere in Bath.”

“Wait a bit,” said the other. “I’m so cramped with sitting in that infernal carriage that I can hardly move.”

They had joined the London train at Reading, and the passengers were pouring down the steps to the subway. Ray looked at them enviously. They had homes to go to, clean and comfortable beds to sleep in. The thought of it gave him a pain. And then he saw a figure and shrank back. A tall, angular man, who carried a heavy box in one hand and a bag in the other.

It was his father.

John Bennett went down the steps, with a casual glance at the two unsavoury tramps on the seat, never dreaming that one was the son whose future he was at that moment planning.

John Bennett spent an ugly night, and an even more ugly early morning. He collected the camera where he had left it, at a beerhouse on the outskirts of the town, and, fixing the improvised carrier, he slipped the big box on his back, and, with his bag in his hand, took the road. A policeman eyed him disapprovingly as he passed, and seemed in two minds as to whether or not he should stop him, but refrained. The strength and stamina of this grey man were remarkable. He breasted a hill and, without slackening his pace, reached the top, and strode steadily along the white road that was cut in the face of the hill. Below him stretched the meadow lands of Somerset, vast fields speckled with herds, glittering streaks of light where the river wound; above his head a blue sky, flecked white here and there. As he walked, the load on his heart was absorbed. All that was bright and happy in life came to him. His hand strayed to his waistcoat pocket mechanically. There were the precious press cuttings that he had brought from town and had read and re-read in the sleepless hours of the night.

He thought of Ella, and all that Ella meant to him, and of Dick Gordon—but that made him wince, and he came back to the comfort of his pictures. Somebody had told him that there were badgers to be seen; a man in the train had carefully located a veritable paradise for the lover of Nature; and it was toward this beauty spot that he was making his way with the aid of a survey map which he had bought overnight at a stationer’s shop.

Another hour’s tramp brought him to a wooden hollow, and, consulting his map, he found he had reached his objective. There was ample evidence of the truth that his chance-found friend had told him. He saw a stoat, flying on the heels of a terrified rabbit; a hawk wheeled ceaselessly on stiff pinions above him; and presently he found the “run” he was looking for, the artfully concealed entrance to a badger’s lair.

In the years he had been following his hobby he had overcome many difficulties, learnt much. To-day, failure had taught him something of the art of concealment, It took him time to poise and hide the camera in a bus of wild laurel, and even then it was necessary that he should take a long shot, for the badger is the shyest of its kind. There were young ones in the lair: he saw evidence of that; and a badger who has young is doubly shy.

He had replaced the pneumatic attachment which set the camera moving, by an electrical contrivance, and this enabled him to work with greater surety. He unwound the long flex and laid it to its fullest extent, taking a position on the slope of the hill eighty yards away, making himself comfortable. Taking off his coat, which acted as a pillow on which his arms rested, he put his field-glasses near at hand.

He had been waiting half an hour when he thought he saw a movement at the mouth of the burrow, and slowly focussed his glasses. It was the tip of a black nose he saw, and he took the switch of the starter in his hand, ready to set the camera revolving. Minutes followed minutes; five—ten—fifteen—but there was no further movement in the burrow, and in a dull way John Bennett was glad, because the warmth of the day, combined with his own weariness and his relaxed position, brought to him a rare sensation of bodily comfort and well-being. Deeper and deeper grew the languorous haze of comfort that fell on him like a fog, until it obscured all that was visible and audible. John Bennett slept, and, sleeping, dreamed of success and of peace and of freedom from all that had broken his heart, and had dried up the sweet waters of life within him. In his dream he heard voices and a sharp sound, like a shot. But he knew it was not a shot, and shivered. He knew that “crack,” and in his sleep clenched his hands convulsively. The electric starter was still in his hand.