Part 30 (1/2)

”Only take me away from 'im, before it's too late!” he implored, reluctant murder in the whites of his rolling eyes. ”'E's a bad man, a very bad man 'e is! The 'appiest days o' me life was wot I spent in 'ere eighteen munf ago. It seems more like eighteen years--'ard. I never should've quit but for Shod, wot's got a good long stretch for 'is pines. 'E's another bad man; but for 'im you 'ad me in the 'oller of yer 'and, and might 've made a man o' me in no time.”

”Yet you went straight from me to threaten and rob the lady who sent you here!”

It was a dangerous opening, but Croucher did not take it. In ign.o.ble emotion he fell upon the knees of a flash pair of trousers, which still showed the track of an ineradicable crease, and once more sued for the mercy and forgiveness already vouchsafed to him. And Lady Vera turned from the sly, leering, blinking, darting eyes to a pair turned hard as nails, and the harder for an oblique inner twinkle all their own.

”All right!” snapped Dollar, to her intense relief. ”I'll take you in, Croucher, for better or worse. Well make it for better, if we can; but do get to your two legs, man, instead of fawning on all four! Are you free to stop as you are, or is there anything you want to settle up first?”

”There's me rooms,” said Croucher, eagerly. ”There's nuffink worth fetching, but I shouldn't like to bilk the people, 'speshly w'en 'er lidys.h.i.+p's gawn an' give me the money, Gawd bless 'er!”

Dollar precipitated the creature's exit, on the verge of fresh saurian tears, of which there were further signs for his benefit on the mat. He might be a bad man, too, might Mr. Croucher, but he wasn't as bad as Mostyn Scarth. And in that modest claim, at least, there was a bitter sincerity which received its due in a nod of keen acknowledgment.

”I never did think you were more than a second murderer, Croucher!”

”Wot's that?”

The whites of those quick, furtive eyes were showing quite horribly in a moment.

”Only a technical expression, Croucher, meaning the minor malefactor.”

And he returned rather slowly into the eager presence of Lady Vera Moyle.

”I suppose I mustn't fawn, either,” she said, in the softened tone of one of her rare rebukes. ”But--_do_ you think you can make anything of him--this time?”

”I hope so; but I shall be very glad to have him back, even if I fail again.”

”Why?”

The crime doctor gave her another of his oblique smiles.

”I shall be all the better able to watch Scarth's latest move,” he said.

II

Over against the back windows of a nice new street of tall red houses, beyond the high red wall enclosing their common strip of shrubs and gravel, runs a humbler row of windows in connection with a mews. In one you may still catch a coachman shaving for the box, but more likely a chauffeur's lady engrossed in her novelette; and on the next sill are pots of geraniums, while the next but one keeps the evening's kippers nice and fresh. Most of the windows have muslin curtains, and in some the lights are on all night. Last October there was only one without any kind of covering, except a newspaper stuck across a broken pane.

It was the scandal of the row; a battered billyc.o.c.k lay rotting on the roof above; strange fragments of song were always liable to burst from within, as of a gentleman roistering in his sleep, and at times a bristly countenance would roll red eyes over the backs of the red houses, beginning and ending with the flats at the bottom of the street.

If a dark handsome face appeared simultaneously at a top flat window, the chances were that both would vanish, but it would have been difficult to detect the exchange of actual signals.

On the return of Alfred Croucher, shaven and collared, from the audience in Welbeck Street, he went so far as to wink and wave from the window that disgraced the mews to the one that crowned the flats. His rolling eyes still had their whites about them; his wrists were still in unaccustomed cuffs; and Mostyn Scarth was at his elbow before it could be lifted with the bottle brought in to celebrate the occasion.

”Just one!” said Croucher, pitching his mongrel whine in the key of comic extravaganza. ”I deserve all ten fingers for what I got to tell yer!”

”Not a drop, my Lazarus!” said Scarth. ”When do you move in?”

”To-day--now.”

”You shall have the whole bottle when you come out. You may want it.

What about that stamped note-paper?”