CHAPTER XXI

PALMER AT WORK

‘Go and catch a falling star.’

――_Donne._

In full view of the Weston family Palmer took his seat in the car, closed the door, and nodded reply to the chauffeur’s “All right, sir?”――nevertheless, this was not the way he would have managed things himself. Much better to have done it quietly on the following evening, and without sending the car at all. For Palmer was, after his own fashion, a true artist, and showiness did not appeal to him, though there might be a bit of swagger when the work was done. He felt no admiration, rather a good-natured contempt, for those who run unnecessary risks, and if he sometimes modelled his manner upon that of certain story-book heroes, he did so simply to satisfy his dramatic instinct, and only when there was no danger of its interfering with his plans. The whole thing was a game, an elaborate and curious game. Those day-dreams in which Inspector X. of Scotland Yard happily remarked, ‘It’s well for us, Mr. Dorset, you’re on the side of the law!’ were really but a survival from the period when he had sailed under the skull and cross-bones, or taken to the road on a coal-black stallion, a true minion of the moon.

He had been frightfully lucky, he considered, to have chanced on these two cases――mentally he always referred to the unfortunate George as a case――the only drawback had been their simplicity. He had been frightfully lucky, even though the cases were not up to the standard of those he sometimes conducted in imagination. Of course, for the real thing, he was badly handicapped. He had no electric torch, no disguises, no burglar’s kit, no means of taking casts of footprints, no chemicals by which to secure the prints of fingers. The persons he pursued did _not_ drop cigarette ashes, and if they had done so, he couldn’t see how it would have helped matters. George, if he smoked cigarettes at all, almost certainly smoked Woodbines:――and at any rate establishment of identity was not the question in either case. It was of no importance whether Mr. Bradley left finger-prints on the church music, of no importance that there was a slight twitching in his left eyelid――all such things availed nothing: he had to work at present on the impalpable stuff of intuition and imagination.

It might, for instance, be important that Mr. Bradley appeared, as he walked along the road, now and then to cast a furtive glance at some invisible thing beside him. Palmer had had a little talk with Aunt Caroline that afternoon before tea, and he had tried an experiment with Grif――a very small one, it is true, for he had been mortally afraid of going too far――but the results had left him nothing solid to work upon. How could they? he reflected, since a sane mind cannot possibly put itself into touch with an insane one, cannot follow a reasoning which itself follows no law. It was like trying to catch a will-o’-the-wisp, or build walls round a mirage.

The car stopped at Doctor O’Neill’s, and he got out. He rang the bell, and was shown into the consulting-room, where the doctor was busy, seated before a large roll-top desk.

He glanced up as the door opened. “That you, Palmer? I’ll have finished directly.” He scribbled something in a book, while Palmer looked slowly round him.

Presently the doctor closed the book with a snap and threw it into a drawer. He pushed back his chair a little, and smiled at his visitor. “So you managed to get away? No further news, I suppose?”

Palmer shook his head, and the doctor opened another drawer, from which he took a revolver――not the old one Palmer had been obliged to relinquish, but a new one, smaller and lighter. The boy examined it admiringly before dropping it into his coat pocket.

“That is a present from me,” said the doctor, “though I couldn’t get you a licence for it, because they won’t issue licences to anyone under eighteen. You must keep it a secret,――I mean, until you go back to your own home. Miss Annesley would only be nervous if she knew you had it.”

Palmer took out the revolver and examined it anew. “Thanks, awfully,” he murmured, his face beaming with pleasure.

“As an expression of confidence I think it really _does_ go pretty far,” the doctor admitted. “In fact, from this on, I’ll probably suffer agonies of remorse. My only stipulation is that you tell your father about it.”

“I promise to tell him,” said Palmer.

“That’s all right then. And now I suppose we may as well go and call upon our friend.”

Palmer looked up in surprise. “It’s too soon,” he exclaimed. “We must wait till it gets dark; otherwise, we won’t be able to tell whether he is in or out.”

“Can’t we ask?”

“Of course; but that won’t be much good if he happens to be there. You see, we must call when he’s _not_ in.”

The doctor looked doubtful. “You still keep to that plan?”

Palmer was silent, sitting with lowered eyes. “I fancy perhaps I’d better do it alone,” he said at last.

“You think I’m trying to back out of it?” the doctor laughed.

Palmer had once more taken the revolver from his pocket, and this time he laid it quietly down on the desk. At the same moment he got up and looked round for his cap. The doctor placed his hands on his shoulders, and pushed him back into his chair. He felt slightly annoyed, but he also felt――perhaps unnecessarily――that he was in the wrong, and apologized. “Come, you mustn’t mind what I said. I undertook this job and I’ll go through with it.” As a matter of fact, he regretted his undertaking, but he was at the same time young enough to be amused by it, and his curiosity was keen.

Palmer was easily appeased, and very soon, on their former footing, they were talking together, Palmer describing to the doctor a method of reading cyphers of the simpler kind, in which letters are replaced by arbitrary signs. There was, in the lucidity of his exposition, something which gave his companion a pleasure that was almost æsthetic. The exhibition of this fresh young intelligence at work was to him extremely fascinating, and the difficulty he experienced in getting at any conception of the temperament behind it added to his interest.

“Aren’t you very good at mathematics?” he asked.

“Fairly good. Not good enough to specialize――at least, I don’t want to specialize. There are three or four chaps at school who are probably just as good as I am; and of course they work a great deal harder.”

But darkness had crept up while they were talking, and Palmer signified that they might now proceed with what they had to do. “If he is in, there will be a light in his window: if there isn’t a light, we can call. I don’t fancy he is a person who sits much in the dark when he is alone.”

They walked up the street in the direction of the house where Mr. Bradley lodged. This house stood on the extreme outskirts of the town; nevertheless, it did not take them many minutes to reach it. They had chosen the farther side of the road, so that they could see from some distance whether there was a light in the window or not. There was none, and they were about to cross over when Palmer suddenly pulled his companion back into the shadow of a gateway. Simultaneously, the door of Mr. Bradley’s house opened, and the organist himself came out. They watched him walk on down the street.

“That was a close shave,” Palmer murmured. “I think we’d better wait for ten minutes, just to see if he turns up again. He may only have gone to the post or something, and it will take him about ten minutes to go there and back. If I had been alone I would have followed him till I was sure of not being interrupted. You see, he hasn’t taken the direction of the church.”

“Oh, he’ll not come back,” said the doctor, optimistically, as they strolled on. “The shops are closed: he has gone for a walk.”

“He may have. He had his stick with him, and he would hardly have taken that if he had only been going to the post. Besides, he hadn’t a letter, unless it was in his pocket. Still, I fancy it would be better to give him a quarter of an hour.”

The doctor, however, was impatient, and in the end Palmer allowed himself to be persuaded. They retraced their steps and knocked at the door. Mr. Bradley’s landlady informed them that the organist was out, but could give no information as to when he would return.

“Perhaps we could wait for a few minutes?” the doctor suggested.

“Certainly, Doctor O’Neill. I’m sure he’d be sorry if he thought he had missed you.”

She took them upstairs and lit the lamp, lingering for a little to discuss the weather and the crops, much to Palmer’s annoyance. At last she left them, and the boy, gliding across the room noiselessly as a cat, opened the door and listened.

“She’s gone into the kitchen,” he said. “It’s all right.”

He looked about him eagerly. It was a fair-sized room, with two windows giving on the street, and two doors, one by which they had entered, and another which, as Palmer opened it, they saw led into a bedroom. Between the two windows was a bookcase, and in a corner by the bedroom door was a writing-table, with two rows of drawers. By the wall, facing the bookcase, stood a piano.

With the exceptions of a table and half a dozen chairs and a gilt-framed mirror above the fireplace, this was all the furniture the room contained: there were no pictures, no ornaments of any sort. Palmer went straight to the bookcase and took out an armful of the oldest-looking volumes. Presently he handed one of these to the doctor, open at a page across which Mr. Bradley’s name was scribbled; and next he gave him a book which had evidently been bought not long ago.

“They seem to be the same,” the doctor murmured, gathering that he was expected to compare the autographs.

“Yes; but the original fly-leaf of the old book has been torn out. It’s the same with all of them: it’s not a mere matter of chance. He has been pretty careful. It was in a manuscript music book that I saw his full name written: it ought to be about here somewhere.” He went to the piano and turned over rapidly a pile of music. In a few moments he found what he was in search of, and brought it to the doctor. “You see, the writing is the same. Only the name was then Clement Bradley Tennant. The two pages have got stuck together. That’s why he didn’t notice it perhaps; or he may have pasted them together purposely, to keep the music that is written on the other side. If you hold it up to the light you can make it out quite distinctly. It was the pages being stuck together that attracted my attention.”

The doctor gazed at the signature. “It certainly appears to be the same,” he admitted.

Palmer replaced the books and began to prowl about once more. He approached the writing-table, and Doctor O’Neill, with qualms of conscience, watched him examine the contents of a letter-rack, and then turn over the leaves of a blotter. This last he brought to the mirror and held each leaf of it separately up before the glass, scanning it closely, though the blotting-paper was so much used that very little could have been decipherable. The boy’s movements were extraordinarily rapid and silent, and the doctor could only stare at him with a growing consciousness of disapproval. In the end nothing but the recollection of his promise not to interfere prevented him from direct remonstrance.

Palmer, however, apparently did not find what he wanted, for he muttered to himself, and at last replaced the blotting-book and turned his attention to the drawers. Two of these were unlocked, and Palmer searched them swiftly, but it was when he asked the doctor to lend him his keys, and at the same time produced a penknife and a piece of wire from his pocket, that the latter felt constrained to speak. “I say――you can’t do that, you know!” And he half rose from his chair.

Palmer paused. “Perhaps it won’t be necessary,” he answered; and crossing the room he disappeared into the bedroom.

The doctor followed him, and saw him light a candle, and then softly lock the bedroom door giving on the landing. “You promised not to interfere,” he whispered back over his shoulder.

“I know I did, but――――”

“If you go back to the other room you won’t see me. Open the door a little, so that you will be able to hear if anybody comes upstairs.”

The doctor returned to the sitting-room, and in quite a short time Palmer rejoined him there. “I’ve got what I wanted. I think we may go now.”

The doctor looked at him questioningly. “I hope you didn’t pick any locks.”

“No; I didn’t want to try the locks if I could avoid it. I haven’t got the proper things to pick them with, and I don’t want to leave any marks.”

“And what have you discovered?”

Palmer slipped past him and closed the door, while the doctor, at the same time, became aware of footsteps approaching along the pavement of the street. The footsteps stopped and they heard the rattle of a latch-key.

“We’re in for it now,” the doctor murmured, conscious that his own share in the performance was about to begin, and not feeling happy at the thought.

They heard Mr. Bradley running up the stairs. Then the door was flung wide, and he stood on the threshold, gazing from one to the other of his visitors, while the flush on his face deepened. It was obvious that he was more astonished than pleased by this unexpected civility, and the situation was an awkward one, for he advanced no further, nor did he make any attempt to pretend that he was glad to see them. He simply stood there in silence, as if awaiting an explanation.

The doctor had not been prepared for this attitude of immediate hostility, and the words he uttered, as he found himself apologizing, sounded remarkably lame. Palmer, however, had a better excuse.

“Grif has lost the music of that thing he was to sing in church on Sunday. I don’t think he’ll be well enough to sing, but I thought, as we were passing your house, I would ask you if you had another copy. He was hunting everywhere for it to-day.”

“Yes, he can have my own copy. I expect it is down in the hall. I’ll just go and see.”

He left them and they heard him running downstairs.

“He’s gone to ask the landlady how long we’ve been here,” said Palmer.

“It doesn’t matter. That was rather a lucky whopper of yours.”

“It wasn’t a whopper. He _has_ lost it, because I took it myself; and he was looking for it all over the place this morning.”

“Well, I fancy it might be better for you to cut along as soon as you get the music, and leave me to tackle him alone.”

“He’ll think it queer if I go, when we came together.”

“I fancy he thinks it pretty queer as it is. My idea, you know, was to speak perfectly openly to him, and I can hardly do that if you’re here.”

“What do you want to speak to him about?”

“About Grif, of course. I shall approach the subject as gently as possible.... Do you _want_ to stay?”

“Only for a few minutes. Do you mind sitting there? and I’ll sit here.” He moved the lamp a little, also the chair which Mr. Bradley presumably would take.

The organist came in. It seemed that the music wasn’t downstairs after all; he must have left it in the church: but he did not ask how Grif was, which was what Doctor O’Neill wanted him to do.

The doctor was himself obliged to broach the subject, saying that the little boy was not getting on so well as he had expected; but Mr. Bradley’s regrets were politely indifferent――so markedly so, that the doctor decided he had better defer any further mention of the matter till Palmer should be gone. Presently he made a sign to the boy, but Palmer appeared all at once to have grown stupid, and merely gazed at the doctor with an irritating blankness of expression.

They discussed music, of which the doctor knew nothing, and Mr. Bradley, with an air of boredom so profound that it must have been assumed, listened to the remarks he hazarded. They talked on, and never in his life had Doctor O’Neill been subjected to such a subtle rudeness. He felt that he should not be able to stand it much longer. Every observation Mr. Bradley now let drop was, he knew, a more or less direct invitation for them to take their departure, and the doctor at last began to experience a certain curiosity as to how far such a conversation could go before it became brutally explicit. He had endeavoured to lead Mr. Bradley to talk about the past, but very soon he had seen the uselessness of such an attempt. Mr. Bradley, he now felt sure, knew precisely what they were there for, and it was only because he derived a malicious satisfaction from the doctor’s discomfort that he did not cut the interview short on the spot. Certainly, if he _had_ seen through them, he was taking an ample revenge.

The doctor felt at present that where he had made a fatal mistake was in bringing Palmer. It was Palmer who had aroused the organist’s suspicions: without Palmer all might have been well. Meanwhile, the red-haired boy seemed to take no notice of anything they were saying. He had begun to examine the books on the shelf near him, reading out several of the titles in an undertone.

“_Hallucinations!_ My father has that book, I think.”

Mr. Bradley glanced malevolently in the boy’s direction, and the doctor asked politely, “Are you interested in the subject?”

“Not in the least,” replied the organist, coldly. “Half those books don’t even belong to me――that is to say, I didn’t buy them. I read very little.”

“Isn’t an hallucination a kind of ghost that isn’t really there?” Palmer innocently inquired, turning to Mr. Bradley.

“Yes, something like that:――an idea that enters the heads of stupid people, and leads them to make themselves ridiculous.”

The doctor laughed. He decided that, since Palmer was evidently determined not to budge without him, they had both better go. After all, his coming here had probably conveyed to Mr. Bradley the message, or the warning, which was all――considering he had no definite knowledge to go upon――that at the best he could have given him.

“Well, I expect it’s about time we moved on,” he murmured, preparatory to getting up; but Palmer sat staring at the wall opposite him as if he had not heard. His face had altered, his forehead was wrinkled up, and a curious, fixed expression had come into his eyes. The doctor, who had half risen from his chair, sat down again. If ever anyone had the appearance of being confronted by an hallucination, it was Palmer at that moment.

The organist was watching him too, and, as he watched, his long thin fingers all at once began to move nervously. He seemed on the verge of saying something; his lips parted to speak; but he checked himself. At last he broke into a thin high laugh. “What are you staring at?” he asked.

Palmer started up out of a dream. “Nothing,” he answered a little confusedly. And then, as if in spite of himself, “I was just looking at your shadow on the wall.”

The organist moved quickly, and pushed back the lamp.

“Don’t,” said Palmer, getting up. “There’s a boy at school who can do ripping silhouettes from people’s shadows:――some of them are awfully queer!... If I had a piece of paper I could do yours.”

As he spoke he took a pencil from his pocket, and moved towards the writing-table. Simultaneously Doctor O’Neill became aware that something had happened. A moment previously he had had before him an elderly gentleman, perhaps a little eccentric-looking, but obviously refined, and even distinguished, in appearance. What was it, then, that had taken place; what incredible transformation? For in that white grimacing mask of hate turned towards the back of the retreating boy he saw only the face of a devil.

The impression passed so quickly that had it been less vivid he might have doubted of its reality. Mr. Bradley recovered himself even before Palmer had time to reach the desk. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to do your drawing to-night,” he said acidly. “I must go now. I want to try over some music before it gets too late.”

The doctor rose to his feet at once. “I really must apologize for keeping you.”

“Not at all; it has been delightful. I was under the impression you were very busy, otherwise we might have had more of these pleasant evenings together. Does this interesting boy――I hope he will pardon me for not knowing his name?――does he invariably accompany you on your rounds?”

“Oh, we’re great pals,” the doctor said, with a rather pumped-up geniality. He pushed Palmer out of the room before him, for Mr. Bradley’s little bow, delivered with his hands clasped behind his back, was quite sufficient indication that they were dismissed.

The doctor was conscious that all through he had played a subordinate and rather hopeless part, and that he had played it extremely badly. “You’re right,” he remarked, when they once more found themselves in the street. “The man is certainly insane――I should think dangerously so. I wonder how long he has been like this? At any rate, steps must be taken at once: in fact, I don’t know whether I oughtn’t to warn the people he is with now.”

“You saw his face when I got up to draw his shadow? That’s the way he looked when he caught me in the church――only to-night he was a good deal worse. If you hadn’t been there there might have been developments.”

“Perhaps too many developments,” said the doctor briefly.

“I was ready for him; I was watching him in the mirror.”

“I don’t think he’d have given you much time. And at any rate, if you _had_ used your revolver, what would you have felt like afterwards?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I’d have felt a great deal.”

“I expect your bark is worse than your bite, Palmer.... Well, I’m coming home with you. I must have a talk with Canon Annesley.”

“About this?”

“Yes; something will have to be done. The man isn’t safe.”

They walked side by side along the road, in the direction of the Glebe, the doctor a good deal worried in more ways than one.

“We shouldn’t have gone as we did,” he said at last. “We ought to have managed differently. The worst possible thing was to excite him.”

“But if we hadn’t gone we shouldn’t have known. It was a pity he came back so soon.”

“I might have found out――found out sufficient at all events――simply by leading him on to talk.... That is, if you had given me a hint. _Your_ method, I’m afraid, was rather drastic. Another thing;――I think you should have told me all you knew. I thought you _had_ done so, this afternoon.”

“I did tell you all I knew, sir. This was only a guess――from something Miss Annesley told me Grif had said when he was ill. It was after I had seen you, just before tea this evening, that she told me. And my guess might have been all wrong. I wouldn’t have risked it if I hadn’t seen he knew what we had come about.”

“And what do you make of it now?”

“I can’t make very much of it. But _he_ did. It had some meaning for _him_. And it was because he thought I had hit on the truth that he looked like that. It has something to do with his shadow. I noticed once or twice before, when I saw him out walking, that he kept looking at something――something which seemed to me not to be there....”

The doctor grunted; he felt dissatisfied. “What was it you found in his bedroom?” he asked.

“An address for you to write to――to make inquiries.”

They walked along in silence for a little way, Palmer from time to time glancing uncertainly at his companion. The road was deserted, and the high hedges, black in the still moonlight, seemed to shut them in. A freshening breeze filled the night with murmuring sound, and blew the scent of honeysuckle in their faces.

“Do you think it is rotten――all I have done?”

The doctor started out of a train of uncomfortable cogitation. “No, no; certainly not. I think it very possible you may have averted some――some disaster.”

“You didn’t like it, all the same――when we first went in,” said Palmer despondently.

The doctor forced a laugh. “Oh, well――perhaps not. You see, a person suffering from delusions isn’t exactly a criminal. And then, it was all――rather outside my experience.”

Palmer was silent a moment. Then he said in a low voice, “But you don’t think I’d do that kind of thing without a very good reason, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“I wouldn’t, you know,” said the boy eagerly.

“I’m sure you wouldn’t.” He laid a friendly hand on Palmer’s shoulder.

Palmer, however, was determined to be honest. “The first thing of that sort I tried was at home. It was long ago, and I was only a kid of about ten or eleven. Mamma had lost some money――two sovereigns had been taken out of her purse, she said. I remembered seeing one of the servants, a girl called Jane, come out of mamma’s room, and I remembered that she had hurried past me in the passage. I was sure Jane had taken the money. There was a fuss made, but mamma didn’t want to call in the police or anything like that, though when papa laughed at her it only made her more sure than ever that she had been robbed. I waited till I saw Jane by herself, and then I said to her that perhaps mamma had dropped the money, and that it might have rolled under the fender in her room; but I had first looked under the fender to make sure there was nothing there. Jane was quite excited by the idea, and she ran upstairs, while I dawdled behind so as to give her plenty of time. When I came in she was standing in the middle of the floor, and she called out in a queer nervous kind of way, ‘You can look for yourself, Master Palmer; I won’t have anything to do with it; I won’t go near it.’ So I lifted up the fender, and there were the two sovereigns; and she was so stupid that she had actually laid one exactly on the top of the other. Then suddenly she began to cry. She put her arms round me and kissed me. I told her she must keep the money; that if she didn’t they would know she had stolen it. And in the end she confessed, and told me why she had taken it. It was for one of her brothers, who had got into trouble in some way, and she had intended to pay it back. I promised not to tell, and persuaded her at last to keep the two pounds. She left a little while afterwards, and I never saw her again. But she paid back the money. She sent mamma a postal order nearly a year later, and though they suspected it came from Jane, nobody was ever quite sure.”

“Well, I’m glad you didn’t give the girl away,” said the doctor quietly.