Fenn had wandered some way when the sound of someone whistling a popular music-hall song came to him through the gloom. He had never heard anything more agreeable.
“I say,” he shouted at a venture, “can you tell me the way to the High Street?”
The whistler stopped in the middle of a bar, and presently Fenn saw a figure sidling towards him in what struck him as a particularly furtive manner.
“Wot’s thet, gav’nor?”
“Can you tell me where the High Street is? I’ve lost my way.”
The vague figure came closer.
“‘Igh Street? Yus; yer go—”
A hand shot out, Fenn felt a sharp wrench in the region of his waistcoat, and a moment later the stranger had vanished into the fog with the prefect’s watch and chain.
Fenn forgot his desire to return to the High Street. He forgot everything except that he wished to catch the fugitive, maltreat him, and retrieve his property. He tore in the direction whence came the patter of retreating footsteps.
There were moments when he thought he had him, when he could hear the sound of his breathing. But the fog was against him. Just as he was almost on his man’s heels, the fugitive turned sharply into a street which was moderately well lighted. Fenn turned after him. He had just time to recognise the street as his goal, the High Street, when somebody, walking unexpectedly out of the corner house, stood directly in his path. Fenn could not stop himself. He charged the man squarely, clutched him to save himself, and they fell in a heap on the pavement.
XVI
WHAT HAPPENED TO FENN
Fenn was up first. Many years’ experience of being tackled at full speed on the football field had taught him how to fall. The stranger, whose football days, if he had ever had any, were long past, had gone down with a crash, and remained on the pavement, motionless. Fenn was conscious of an ignoble impulse to fly without stopping to chat about the matter. Then he was seized with a gruesome fear that he had injured the man seriously, which vanished when the stranger sat up. His first words were hardly of the sort that one would listen to from choice. His first printable expression, which did not escape him until he had been speaking some time, was in the nature of an official bulletin.
“You’ve broken my neck,” said he.
Fenn renewed his apologies and explanations.
“Your watch!” cried the man in a high, cracked voice. “Don’t stand there talking about your watch, but help me up. What do I care about your watch? Why don’t you look where you are going to? Now then, now then, don’t hoist me as if I were a hod of bricks. That’s right. Now help me indoors, and go away.”
Fenn supported him while he walked lamely into the house. He was relieved to find that there was nothing more the matter with him than a shaking and a few bruises.
“Door on the left,” said the injured one.
Fenn led him down the passage and into a small sitting-room. The gas was lit, and as he turned it up he saw that the stranger was a man well advanced in years. He had grey hair that was almost white. His face was not a pleasant one. It was a mass of lines and wrinkles from which a physiognomist would have deduced uncomplimentary conclusions as to his character. Fenn had little skill in that way, but he felt that for some reason he disliked the man, whose eyes, which were small and extraordinarily bright, gave rather an eerie look to his face.
“Go away, go away,” he kept repeating savagely from his post on the shabby sofa on which Fenn had deposited him.
“But are you all right? Can’t I get you something?” asked the Eckletonian.
“Go away, go away,” repeated the man.
Conversation on these lines could never be really attractive. Fenn turned to go. As he closed the door and began to feel his way along the dark passage, he heard the key turn in the lock behind him. The man could not, he felt, have been very badly hurt if he were able to get across the room so quickly. The thought relieved him somewhat. Nobody likes to have the maiming even of the most complete stranger on his mind. The sensation of relief lasted possibly three seconds. Then it flashed upon him that in the excitement of the late interview he had forgotten his cap. That damaging piece of evidence lay on the table in the sitting-room, and between him and it was a locked door.
He groped his way back, and knocked. No sound came from the room.
“I say,” he cried, “you might let me have my cap. I left it on the table.”
No reply.
Fenn half thought of making a violent assault on the door. He refrained on reflecting that it would be useless. If he could break it open—which, in all probability, he could not—there would be trouble such as he had never come across in his life. He was not sure it would not be an offence for which he would be rendered liable to fine or imprisonment. At any rate, it would mean the certain detection of his visit to the town. So he gave the thing up, resolving to return on the morrow and reopen negotiations. For the present, what he had to do was to get safely back to his house. He had lost his watch, his cap with his name in it was in the hands of an evil old man who evidently bore him a grudge, and he had to run the gauntlet of three house-masters and get to bed via a study-window. Few people, even after the dullest of plays, have returned from the theatre so disgusted with everything as did Fenn. Reviewing the situation as he ran with long, easy strides over the road that led to Kay’s, he found it devoid of any kind of comfort. Unless his mission in quest of the cap should prove successful, he was in a tight place.
It is just as well that the gift of second sight is accorded to but few. If Fenn could have known at this point that his adventures were only beginning, that what had taken place already was but as the overture to a drama, it is possible that he would have thrown up the sponge for good and all, entered Kay’s by way of the front door—after knocking up the entire household—and remarked, in answer to his house-master’s excited questions, “Enough! Enough! I am a victim of Fate, a Toad beneath the Harrow. Sack me tomorrow, if you like, but for goodness’ sake let me get quietly to bed now.”
As it was, not being able to “peep with security into futurity,” he imagined that the worst was over.
He began to revise this opinion immediately on turning in at Kay’s gate. He had hardly got half-way down the drive when the front door opened and two indistinct figures came down the steps. As they did so his foot slipped off the grass border on which he was running to deaden the noise of his steps, and grated sharply on the gravel.
“What’s that?” said a voice. The speaker was Mr Kay.
“What’s what?” replied a second voice which he recognised as Mr Mulholland’s.
“Didn’t you hear a noise?”
“‘I heard the water lapping on the crag,’” replied Mr Mulholland, poetically.
“It was over there,” persisted Mr Kay. “I am certain I heard something—positively certain, Mulholland. And after that burglary at the school house—”
He began to move towards the spot where Fenn lay crouching behind a bush. Mr Mulholland followed, mildly amused. They were a dozen yards away when Fenn, debating in his mind whether it would not be better—as it would certainly be more dignified—for him to rise and deliver himself up to justice instead of waiting to be discovered wallowing in the damp grass behind a laurel bush, was aware of something soft and furry pressing against his knuckles. A soft purring sound reached his ears.
He knew at once who it was—Thomas Edward, the matron’s cat, ever a staunch friend of his. Many a time had they taken tea together in his study in happier days. The friendly animal had sought him out in his hiding-place, and was evidently trying to intimate that the best thing they could do now would be to make a regular night of it.