The Camera Fiend. E. W. Hornung
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the surgeon who has done so much for your poor mother, so what could one do but give him a trial? The lad wasn't having a fair chance at school. This looked like one. But I dislike his going up to town so often, and I dislike the letters the man writes me about him. He'd have me take him away from school altogether, and pack him off to Australia in a sailing ship. But what's to be done with a boy like that when we get him back again? He'd be too old to go to another school, and too young for the University: no use at the works, and only another worry to us all.”
Mr. Upton spoke from the full heart of an already worried man, not with intentional unkindness, but yet with that unimaginative want of sympathy which is often the instinctive attitude of the sound towards the unsound. He hated sickness, and seemed at present surrounded by it. His wife had taken ill the year before, had undergone a grave operation in the winter, and was still a great anxiety to him. But that was another and a far more serious matter; he had patience and sympathy enough with his wife. The case of the boy was very different. Himself a man of much bodily and mental vigour, Mr. Upton expected his own qualities of his own children; [pg 41] he had always resented their apparent absence in his youngest born. The others were good specimens; why should Tony be a weakling? Was he such a weakling as was made out? Mr. Upton was often sceptical on the point; but then he had always heard more about the asthma than he had seen for himself. If the boy was not down to breakfast in the holidays, he was supposed to have had a bad night; yet later in the day he would be as bright as anybody, at times indeed the brightest of the party. That, however, was usually when Lettice drew him out in the absence of the two athletes; he was another creature then, excitable, hilarious, and more capable of taking the busy man out of himself than any of his other children. But Lettice overdid matters; she made far too much of the boy and his complaint, and was inclined to encourage him in random remedies. Cigarettes at his age, even if said to be cigarettes for asthma, suggested a juvenile pose to the man who had never studied that disorder. The specialist in London seemed another mistake on the part of that managing Lettice, who had quite assumed the family lead of late. And altogether Mr. Upton, though he saw the matter from a different point of view, was not far from agreeing with his eldest son about his youngest.
And what chance was there for a boy whose own father thought he posed, whose brothers considered [pg 42] him a bit of a malingerer, and his schoolfellows “a conscientious ass,” while his sister spoilt him for un enfant incompris? You may say it would have taken a miracle to make an ordinary decent fellow of him. Well, it was a night of strange happenings to the boy and his people; perhaps it was the one authentic type of miracle that capped all in the morning.
The father had gone to bed at midnight, after an extra allowance of whisky-and-water to take the extra worry off his mind; it did so for a few hours only to stretch him tragically awake in the early morning. The birds were singing down in Leicestershire as in Hyde Park. The morning sun was slanting over town and country, and the father's thoughts were with his tiresome son in town. Suddenly a shrill cry came from the adjoining room.
In a trice the wakeful man was at his sick wife's side, supporting her in bed as she sat up wildly staring, trembling in his arms.
“Tony!” she gasped. “My Tony!”
“I was just thinking of him!” he cried. “What about him, dear?”
“I saw him,” she quavered. “I saw him plainer than I see you now. And I'm almost positive I heard—a shot!”
[pg 43]
A GRIM SAMARITAN
Though he afterwards remembered a shout as well, it actually was the sound of a shot that brought the boy to his senses in Hyde Park. He opened his eyes on a dazzle of broad daylight and sparkling grass. The air was strangely keen for the amount of sunshine, the sunshine curiously rarefied, and the grass swept grey where it did not sparkle.
Pocket's first sensation was an empty stomach, and his next a heavy head into which the puzzle of his position entered by laborious steps. He was not in bed. He was not at school. He was not even under the shrub he now remembered in a mental flash which lit up all his adventures overnight. He was wandering ankle deep in the dew, towards a belt of poplars like birch-rods on the skyline, and a row of spiked palings right in front of his nose. He had walked in his sleep for the first time for years, and some one had fired a shot to wake him.
Slow as these automatic discoveries had seemed, they had been in reality so swift that the report was still ringing in his ears when he who must have made it sprang hideously into being across the palings. A hand darted through them and caught Pocket's [pg 44] wrist as in a vice. And he looked up over the spikes into a gnarled face tinged with fear and fury, and working spasmodically at the suppression of some incomprehensible emotion.
“Do you know what you did?” the man demanded in the end. The question seemed an odd one, but a very slight foreign accent, not to be reproduced phonetically, corresponded with the peculiarity of tense, reminding Pocket of the music-masters at his school. It was less easy to account for the tone employed, which was low in pitch and tremulous with passion. And the man stood tall and dominant, with a silver stubble on an iron jaw, and a weird cloak and hat that helped to invest him with the goblin dignity of a Spanish inquisitor; no wonder his eyes were like cold steel in quivering flesh.
“I must have been walking in my sleep,” began Pocket, shakily; further explanations were cut very short.
“Sleep!” echoed the other, in bitter unbelief.
Pocket felt his prime quality impugned.
“Well? I can't help it! I've done it before to-day; you needn't believe me if you don't like! Do you mind letting go of my hand?”
“With that in it!”
The scornful tone made the boy look down, and there was the pistol he had strapped to his wrist, [pg 45] not only firm in his unconscious clasp, but his finger actually on the trigger.
“You don't mean to say I let it off?” cried Pocket, horrified.
“Feel the barrel.”
The tall man had done so first. Pocket touched it with his left hand. The barrel was still warm.
“It was in my sleep,” protested Pocket, in a wheezy murmur.
“I'm glad to hear it.”
“I tell you it was!”
The tall man opened his lips impulsively, but shut them on a second impulse. The daggers in his eyes probed deeper into those of the boy, picking his brains, transfixing the secrets of his soul. No master's eye had ever delved so deep into his life; he felt as though the very worst of him at school was known in an instant to this dreadful stranger in the wilds of London. He writhed under the ordeal of that protracted scrutiny. He tugged to free his imprisoned wrist. His captor was meanwhile fumbling with a penknife in his unoccupied hand. A blade was slowly opened; the leather watch-guard was sliced through in a second; the revolver dropped harmlessly into the dew. The man swooped down and whipped it through the railings with a snarl of satisfaction.
“And now,” said he, releasing Pocket, but [pg 46] standing by with his weapon, “I suppose you know that, apart from everything else, you had no right to spend the night in here at all?”
The boy, already suffering from his humiliating exertions, gasped out, “I'm not the only one!” He had just espied a recumbent figure through the palings; it was that of a dilapidated creature lying prone, a battered hat beside him, on the open grass beyond the path. The tall man merely redoubled his scrutiny of the face in front of, him, without so much as a glance behind.
“That,” said he, “is the sort that staggers in as soon as the gates are open, and spends the day sleeping itself sober. But you are not that sort at all, and you have spent the night here contrary to the rules. Who are you, and what's the matter with you?”
“Asthma,” wheezed