LITMIR.BIZ

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‘None of your larks, you blighter – you’re a-comin’ along with me!’”

      That he was, was a condition of affairs so inevitable that the chauffeur made no attempt to evade it; merely put on speed and headed straight for the distant High Street for the purpose of getting rid of his escort as soon as possible; and Lennard, putting on speed, likewise, and keeping pace with him, ran him neck and neck, until the heath was left far and away behind, the darkness gave place to a glitter of street lamps, the lonely roads to populous thoroughfares, and the way was left clear for Cleek to get off unfollowed and unmolested.

      CHAPTER VI

      Screened by that darkness, and close sheltered by the matted gorse which fringed and dotted the expanse of the nearby heath, he had been an interested witness to the entire proceeding.

      “Played, my lad, played!” he commented, putting his thoughts into mumbled words of laughing approval, as Lennard, taking the taxicab under guard, escorted it and its occupants out of the immediate neighbourhood; then, excessive caution prompting him to quell even this little ebullition, he shut up like an oyster and neither spoke, nor moved, nor made any sound until the two vehicles were represented by nothing but a purring noise dwindling away into the distance.

      When that time came, however, he rose, and facing the heath, forged out across its mist-wrapped breadth with that long, swinging, soldierly stride peculiar unto him, his forehead puckered with troubled thought, his jaw clamped, and his lips compressed until his mouth seemed nothing more than a bleak slit gashed in a gray, unpleasant-looking mask.

      But after a while the night and the time and the place worked their own spell, and the troubled look dropped away; the dull eyes lighted, the grim features softened, and the curious crooked smile that was Nature’s birth-gift to him broke down the rigid lines of the “bleak slit” and looped up one corner of his mouth.

      It was magic ground, this heath – a place thick set as the Caves of Manheur with the Sapphires of Memory – and to a nature such as his these things could not but appeal.

      Here Dollops had come into his life – a starveling, an outcast; derelict even in the very morning time of youth – a bit of human wreckage that another ten minutes would have seen stranded forever upon the reefs of crime.

      Here, too – on that selfsame night, when the devil had been cheated, and the boy had gone, and they two stood alone together in the mist and darkness – he had first laid aside the mask of respectability and told Ailsa Lorne the truth about himself! Of his Apache times – of his Vanishing Cracksman’s days – and, in the telling, had watched the light die out of her dear eyes and dread of him darken them, when she knew.

      But not for always, thank God! For, in later days – when Time had lessened the shock, when she came to know him better, when the threads of their two lives had become more closely woven, and the hope had grown to be something more than a mere possibility…

      He laughed aloud, remembering, and with a sudden rush of animal spirits twitched off his hat, flung it up and caught it as it fell, after the manner of a happy boy.

      God, what a world – what a glorious, glorious world! All things were possible in it if a man but walked straight and knew how to wait.

      Well, please God, a part, at least, of his long waiting would be over in another month. She would be back in England then – her long visit to the Hawksleys ended and nothing before her now but the pleasant excitement of trousseau days. For the coming autumn would see the final act of restitution made, the last Vanishing Cracksman debt paid, to the uttermost farthing; and when that time came… He flung up his hat again and shouted from sheer excess of joy, and forged on through the mist and darkness whistling.

      His way lay across the great common to the Vale of Health district, and thence down a slanting road and a sloping street to the Hampstead Heath Station of the Tube Railway, and he covered the distance to such good effect that half-past eleven found him “down under,” swaying to the rhythmic movement of an electric train and arrowing through the earth at a lively clip.

      Ten minutes later he changed over to yet another underground system, swung on for half an hour or so through gloom and bad air and the musty smell of a damp tunnel before the drop of the land and the rise of the roadbed carried the train out into the open and the air came fresh and sweet and pure, as God made it, over field and flood and dewy garden spaces; and away to the west a prickle of lights on a quiet river told where the stars mirrored themselves in the glass of Father Thames.

      At a toy station in the hush and loneliness of the pleasant country ways his long ride came to an end at last, and he swung off into the balm and fragrance of the night to face a two-mile walk along quiet, shadow-filled lanes and over wet wastes of young bracken to a wee little house in the heart of a green wilderness, with a high-walled, old-world garden surrounding it, and, in the far background, a gloom of woodland smeared in darker purple against the purple darkness of the sky.

      No light shone out from the house to greet him – no light could come from behind that screening wall, unless it were one set in an upper window – yet he was certain the place was not deserted; for, as he came up out of the darkness, catlike of tread and catlike of ear, he was willing to swear that he could catch the sound of some one moving about restlessly in the shadow of that high, brick wall – and the experiences of the night made him cautious of things that moved in darkness.

      He stopped short, and remained absolutely still for half a minute, then, stooping, swished his hand through the bracken in excellent imitation of a small animal running, and shrilled out a note that was uncannily like the death squeal of a stoat-caught rabbit.

      “Gawd’s truth, guv’ner, is it you at last, sir? And me never seein’ nor hearin’ a blessed thing!” spoke a voice in answer, from the wall’s foot; then a latch clicked and, as Cleek rose to his feet, a garden door swung inward, a rectangle of light shone in the darkness, and silhouetted against it stood Dollops.

      “What are you doing out here at this time of night, you young monkey? Don’t you know it’s almost one o’clock?” said Cleek, as he went forward and joined the boy.

      “Don’t I know it, says you? Don’t I just!” he gave back. “There aren’t a minute since the night come on that I haven’t counted, sir – not a bloomin’ one; and if you hadn’t turned up just as you did – Well, let that pass, as the Suffragette said when she heaved ’arf a brick through the shop window. Gawd’s truth, guv’ner, do you realise that you’ve been gone since yesterday afternoon and I haven’t heard a word from you in all that time?”

      “Well, what of that? It’s not the first time by dozens that I’ve done the same thing. Why should it worry you at this late day? Look here, my young man, you’re not developing ‘nerves’ are you? Because, if you are – Turn round and let’s have a look at you! Why, you are as pale as a ghost, you young beggar, and shaking like a leaf. Anything wrong with you, old chap?”

      “Not as I knows of,” returned Dollops, making a brave attempt to smile and be his old happy-go-lucky, whimsical self, albeit he wasn’t carrying it off quite successfully, for there was a droop to his smile and a sort of whimper underlying his voice, and Cleek’s keen eyes saw that his hand groped about blindly in its effort to find the fastenings of the garden door.

      “Leastwise, nothing as matters now that you are here, sir. And I am glad yer back, guv’ner – Lawd, yuss! ‘Nothin’ like company to buck you up,’ as the bull said when he tossed the tinker; so of course – ”

      “Here! You let those fastenings alone. I’ll attend to them!” rapped in Cleek’s voice with a curious note of alarm in it, as he moved briskly forward and barred and locked the wall door. “If I didn’t know that eating, not drinking, was your particular failing – ”

      Here he stopped, his half-uttered comment cut into by a bleating cry, and he screwed round to face a startling situation. For there was Dollops, leaning heavily against a flowering almond tree, his face like a dead face for colour, and his fingers clawing frantically at the lower part of his waistcoat, doubling and twisting in the throes of an internal convulsion.

      The gravelled pathway

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