The Crime Doctor Part 9

"Oh, bring it up!" cried Croucher under his breath.

"Well, if you didn't stiffen that copper on the night o' the sufferygite disturbance--an' we know you didn't--then somebody else did!"

"You don't mean to tell me you know who did?"

There had been a tense though tiny pause; there was another while Shoddy changed the torch to his right hand, and blew a cloud over the head of his now rec.u.mbent companion.

"I know what everybody says, Alfie."

"More than their prayers, I'll bet, like they did before. Wot do they say?"

"One o' the sufferygites----"

"Corpsed the copper?"

"That's it, old man."

"And I never thought of it!"

"It bears some thinkin' about, don't it?" said Shoddy. "Why, you're trem'lin' like a blessed leaf!"

"I should think I was trem'lin'! So would you if you'd been through wot I been ... Shod!"

"Yuss, Alfie?"

"I see the 'ole blessed thing!"

"I thought you would."

"It was 'er wot broke the jooler's winder for me!"

"That's wot they say."

"They? Who?"

"Lots o' people. I 'eard it down some mews: some o' the pipers 'ave 'inted at it. Topham's in fair 'ot water all round; they say 'e's 'ushed it up because she's in serciety."

"Wot's 'er nime, Shod?"

"Lidy Moyle--Lidy Vera Moyle, I think it is. And 'ere's another thing, a thing that I was forgettin'."

"Out with it."

"I see 'er come 'ere this afternoon, whilst I was watchin' the 'ouse in case you come out."

"My Gawd, Shoddy! Let me sit up. I can't breathe lyin' down."

"She 'ad some flowers wiv 'er," said Shoddy, pursuing his reminiscences.

"Looks as though she's got a friend in the 'ome."

"I'm the friend," said Mr. Croucher grimly. "Take and run yer light over that wash-stand; the guv'nor brought 'em up 'isself wiv these 'ere smokes."

"Roses, in the month o' March!" murmured Shoddy, as a bowl of beauties filled the disk of light; "'ot'ouse flowers for little Alfie! Why, the girl's fair struck on you, cully!"

"I'll strike 'er!" said Alfie, through teeth that chattered with emotion. "I very near 'anged for the little biter, and don't you forget it!"

"Not me," said Shoddy, steering for the bed with his headlights of white-hot filament and red-hot cigar. "That's wot brought me 'ere through thick and thin."

"So she's the great unknown!" said Croucher more than once, but not twice in the same tone. "So it was 'er, was it?" he inquired as often, until Shoddy insisted on a hearing.

"Don't I keep tellin' yer?" said Shoddy. "That's wot brings me, at the gaudiest risks you ever see--only to 'ear you gas! Can't you listen for a change? There's a big thing on if you've guts enough for the job."

It was a simple thing, however, like most big things; the projector had it at his finger-ends; and in a very few minutes Mr. Croucher was considering a complete, crude, and yet eminently practical proposition.

"There's money in it," he was forced to admit, "if there ain't the big money you flatter yerself. But I believe she thinks o' givin' me a start in life any'ow."

"This'd be a start an' a finish, Alfie! Besides, it'd be your revenge; don't you forget wot you've been through," urged the other.

"Catch me!" said Croucher, eagerly. "But--don'cher see? I been through so much that I was lookin' forward to dossin' down 'ere a bit. I ain't the man I was. It's wot I need. Where's the fire, as I said afore? The gal won't run away."

"That's just wot she will, Alfie; goin' abroad any day--an' might get married any day, a piece like 'er. Then you might find it more of a job.

There's another 'old we've got, an' might lose any old day."

The other hold appealed with peculiar power to the character and temperament of Alfred Croucher, and not less strongly to a certain sagacity which added more to his equipment. But he had never been quite so comfortable in his life; comfort had never been so decidedly his due; and the substance of present luxury (with a fresh start in the near future) was not lightly to be exchanged for a gold-mine, with all a gold-mine's gambling chances, including the proverbial optimism of prospectors.

The discussion ended in a compromise and the withdrawal of Shoddy by the catlike ways and means of his arrival. But he did not depart without pointing, through the open window and a forest of chimney-stacks, to a lighted but uncurtained square on a lower level. And thither, at certain appointed hours, the patient might have been caught peeping, or even in the act of rude and furtive signals, for several days to come.

Handled as it deserves, the tale of those days would make a psychological chapter of dual interest, and for reasons that may yet appear. But for the moment Alfred Croucher holds the stage, and soliloquies are out of vogue. Yet even his objective life had points of interest. He slept less than he had planned to sleep, but read more than he had ever read in all his life; and his reading, if not a sign of grace, was at least a straw that showed the way the wind might have blown but for the intrusive Shoddy.

Out of the doctor's little typewritten list, the patient in the top-floor-back began by choosing _For the Term of His Natural Life_. It held him--with a tortured brow that sometimes glistened. When the book was finished, he was advised that _It Is Never Too Late to Mend_ was a better thing of the same kind; "In spite of its name," added Dollar, in studied disparagement. Croucher took the hint, and was soon breathing as hard as he had done before he knew that Shoddy was Shoddy; was heard blaspheming over Hawes in his solitude, and left wondering what Tom Robinson's creator would have made of Alfred Croucher. Something of that speculation found its way into words, with the return of the book, and was the cause of lengthier visitations from the doctor, whose eye began to brighten when it fell on Croucher, as that of a man put on his mettle after all.

And then one morning he came in with a blue review and a new long poem, which might have hurt but might have helped; only it had no chance of doing either, because the top back room was empty of Alfred Croucher, who had walked out of the house in the loudest of his brand-new clothes.

III

The Rome Express had left Paris sprinkled with the green flakes of a precocious spring; and it hummed through a mellow evening into a night of velvet clasped with a silver moon. The famous train was not uncomfortably crowded; it is not everybody who will pay two pounds, eight s.h.i.+lling, seven pence for a berth in a sleeper which in Switzerland, say, would cost some twenty francs. Most of those who had committed the extravagance seemed by way of getting their money's worth; even the lady traveling alone in the foremost _wagon-lit_, though she refrained from dining in the restaurant-car, would have struck an acquaintance as in better spirits than for some months past. And so she was. But she was still far from being the Lady Vera Moyle of last year's fogs.

She was going to her mother, who had been seriously ill since Christmas, but was now completing her recovery in Rome. And yet her illness had meant less to Lady Armagh than to the wayward child who had been told (by the rest of the family) to consider herself its cause; it might indeed have been a direct dispensation to tie Lady Vera's hands and tongue; and in the _train de luxe_, perhaps for the first time, she herself recognized the merciful wisdom of Providence in the matter.

Alfred Croucher was a free man: that was the great thing. There were moments when it was an even greater thing than Lady Armagh's convalescence. But there was later and greater news yet for Lady Vera to gloat over in the train. Not only was poor Croucher a free man, but that dear Doctor Dollar had hopes of him at last! He had said so the day she left for Paris; he had never said anything of the kind before.

Nothing could have been more pessimistic than the crime doctor's first report on his latest patient; nothing franker than the way he had made room for him in the home, merely and entirely to gratify her whim.

Alfred Croucher was "not his style," and there had been an end of him but for the fact that Lady Vera was.

She belonged to the cla.s.s that he was pleased to consider as potentially the most criminal of all. She was well aware of it, and the knowledge provided her with a considerable range of feelings as the train flew on and on. She felt herself the object of a purely pathological interest; she felt almost as small as a specimen under a microscope; she felt lonelier than ever in her life before....

Lonely she was in the way that mattered least. She was traveling for once without a maid. The faithful creature (a would-be militant of the blood-thirstiest, in her day) had been with her dear ladys.h.i.+p over the Sunday in Paris (hobn.o.bbing with certain exiles for the Cause); but just as they were leaving their hotel a telegram had come to summon her to a bucolic death-bed. Esther would have let her old father die without her, but her beloved ladys.h.i.+p, still quick with her own filial awakenings, had sent her about her dismal business with a kiss.

The compartment was overheated; they always are unless you complain in time. Lady Vera had made her efficient little fuss too late, and the result was not apparent before the small hours and Modane. During the long wait there she lay awake, though she had duly entrusted her keys to the conductor, and the voices of those who had omitted that precaution caused a welcome change in her "long, long thoughts." She put her mind to her fellow-pa.s.sengers, and kept it on them with native resolution.