Part 30 (2/2)

”Couldn't lay 'ands on a sc.r.a.p.”

”Hadn't you the waiting-room to yourself?”

”My witin'-room was the street, gov'nor.”

”Well, I must have a sheet or two as soon as you can stick them in the post; three or four would be safer, and at least a couple of his envelopes, in case of accidents. Now tell me everything that happened; and perhaps you _shall_ have a drink before you go.”

There was no light that night in the window with the broken pane pasted over with newspaper; next day it was mended properly, and the sodden billyc.o.c.k removed from the roof before Alfred Croucher awoke from his innocent and protracted slumbers in the crime doctor's patent chamber of perpetual peace.

His first impression was that some mysterious miracle had been performed expressly for his behoof. He must have been drunk to have slept so sound, and yet he had none of the disagreeable sensations which a long experience a.s.sociated with the ordinary orgy. He felt profoundly rested and refreshed; never had he lain in so luxurious a bed; and the air was faintly scented, subtly soothing, and there was plenty of it, yet not a sound except the gentle stirring of his own breathing body between the sheets. His palate was clean and cool beyond belief. He opened his eyes, and saw a plain room sharp as crystal to the sight: not the bronze bedchamber that he suddenly remembered, but the same place steeped in purest suns.h.i.+ne, and ten thousand times fairer for the change.

Then he knew where he was, and precisely why he was there; and it was the mental equivalent of what Mr. Croucher called ”'ot coppers,” only this made him hot all over. He might have been in a fever; he hoped violently that he was. He remembered his cough, and began to practise it. A determined paroxysm revived his spirits; he was not fit to get up, and other people would just have to wait until he was, and serve 'em jolly well right!

Other people couldn't get at him there; yet one other person could, and did, to Mr. Croucher's mingled discomfort and relief. The doctor duly kept him in bed; but there was too much of the doctor; and yet the time hung heaviest when he was not there, and there were heavier burdens even than the time. The patient had lost his liking for a book. Conversation was more to his taste this time. His mind would wander when he read. It would follow the doctor down-stairs to his consulting-room, or across the landing to the room in which he slept. The man haunted him; it was better to have him there in the flesh, than to see him as Croucher continually saw him when he was not there at all.

Better, again, to talk of some things than to dwell on them night and day, especially when those subjects seemed to possess an equally awful fascination for the crime doctor. Of course, they were in his line; that accounted for the doctor's morbid taste, and the patient's most terrible experience was quite enough to account for his. There was nothing unnatural in their talks. They had the thing in common, only from opposite poles of experience, which enormously enhanced the mutual interest. If there was one subject they were bound to have discussed, with no false delicacy on either side, each being what he was, it was the subject of the sixth commandment.

”Of course you think about it,” said Dollar, dismissing an incoherent excuse on the second day. ”It must haunt you; it's only natural that it should. All I should like you to do, since you never committed one, and are the last man in the world to commit one now, is to take a rather lighter view of that particular misdeed.”

”A lighter view!” repeated Croucher, goggling; and he added with a shuddering inconsequence: ”The lor o' the land don't make light of it!”

”Literature has been known to,” rejoined the doctor, with as little apparent point. ”But you are not the reader you were last year; otherwise there's a little thing, _On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts_, that I should like to lend you.”

”One o' the 'ow much?” said Mr. Croucher, uncertain whether to grin, or frown, and meanwhile glaring more than he supposed.

Dollar went for the book, and read a few extracts aloud. They appeared to afford him extraordinary enjoyment; they were altogether over the bullet head on the pillow. Croucher could only gather that some people seemed to imagine it was good sport to commit a murder. Funny fools! Let them try a fortnight in the condemned cell, for one they never did commit, and see how they took to that!

But he could understand them that knew nothing about it writing a lot of rot like this; what beat him was that the crime doctor, of all people, and with all his uncanny knowledge of the subject, that even he was able to view the worst of crimes in a light which would never have dawned on the independent intellect of Alfred Croucher. It seemed to him a more lurid light than any in which he himself, at his worst, had ever seen such things; horrible, to his mind, that one who ran every risk of being murdered should sit there gloating over ”the shades of merit” in one murder, and over others as ”the sublimest and most entire in their excellence that ever were committed.” What was more horrible, however, was the hollow note of Mr. Croucher's own laughter, and the furtive gleaming of his restless eyes, while his body twitched between the sheets.

He asked for the book when Dollar rose to go; and was discovered, in due course, bathed in a perspiration which he made less effort to conceal.

”It ain't all like them funny bits,” he a.s.sured the doctor, with an open shudder. ”There's a bit I struck about a servant gal, on one side of a door, an' a bloke wot's done the 'ole bloomin' family in on the other.

My cripes! I 'ad to 'old me breff over that, and it's made me sweat like a pig.”

”On which side of the door were you?”

”Wot's that?”

”In your mind's eye, my good fellow!”

Mr. Croucher had seldom found it easier to tell the truth, and he made the most of his opportunity.

”I felt as if I was the gal,” said he. ”Shouldn't wonder if I dreamt I was 'er to-night!”

”Ah! I always find myself on the inside,” said Dollar, with extraordinary gusto. ”I'd much rather have been the girl. She had the open street behind her, and the street-lamps; he had only his own handiwork in the dark, and hardly room enough to step out of the way of it. She got away, too, whereas he had to make away with himself. But I always would rather be the victim; he doesn't know what's coming; and it's not a thousandth part as bad as--the other thing--when it does come.... I'm sorry, Croucher! You shouldn't have asked me to leave you the book; but there's nothing like looking at a thing from all sides, and it may console you to know that you've perspired over the best description of a murder ever written.”

Yet that was not the last of their morbid conversations; they would hardly be five minutes together before the noxious subject would crop up, nearly always through some reluctant yet irresistible allusion on the patient's part. The doctor might come in overflowing with deliberate gaiety; there was something about him that set the bulbous eyes rolling with uneasy cunning, the c.o.c.kney tongue wagging in its solitary strain, as it were under protest from the beaded brow.

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