THE PAYING OF THE SCORE.

Next evening, my leave being up, I returned to Aldershot.

Dr. Tredgold had called around early, and after overhauling his patient and dressing the hand, had a.s.sured me there was no cause for anxiety. The fever had gone down, and this allowed us to tackle the main mischief, which was malnutrition. In short, Jack was starving.

"Your man makes an excellent nurse," said the doctor. "I'll tell him to go slow at first, with beef-tea and milk, and to-morrow he can start the works up with a dose of champagne. But I'll drop in to-morrow, to make sure. The wound?--Oh, it's a dog-bite, safe enough, and a rather badly lacerated one. But we cauterised it in time last night, and it shows no 'anger,' as the saying is. Has he told you how he came by it?"

"No," said I. "He has been lying in this lethargy ever since you left him. He wakes up and takes his medicine from Jephson, and then drops back into a doze. I thought it best not to worry him."

"Quite right, too. . . . And I'll not ask questions, either, beyond putting it that he's a friend of yours, gone under, and you're playing the Samaritan. . . . Well, you can go back to duty, and Jephson and I will see this through. It's queer, too. . . . I seem to have seen his face somewhere. . . . But what's queerer is that he isn't dead. He must have had some practice at fasting, poor fellow.

I should say that his stomach hadn't known food for a week."

I duly 'phoned the doctor's report to Constantia. To Jephson my last words were, "Write daily. When Dr. Foe can sit out, dress him in any old suit, shirt, and underwear. I don't see myself out of this khaki for a long time ahead. He will be fit again long before Monday week, when you're to join up: and when he is able to walk, there's an envelope for him in the top right-hand drawer of my writing-table."

Jephson wrote twice to report that Dr. Foe was "going on favourably,"

and on the third day, that he had even dressed himself and taken a walk. He had been away four hours and more--"which caused me much anxiety," added Jephson.

But on the fourth day, on the eve of our starting for Rouen, I got the following letter, in Jack's own handwriting:

"My dear Roddy,--I shall use the old name, since it is the last time I shall address you; and you, starting for France, will have no time to reach me and say that it is forbidden.

"I have killed Farrell. It was a stupid and a sorry ending.

At the last it was even quite brutal--b.e.s.t.i.a.lly different from anything I had imagined--and I had imagined many ways--while I had control of the show.

"I have gone through madness. That again was part of the b.e.s.t.i.a.lity I had not reckoned with. . . . And unless I take steps I shall soon be back in worse b.e.s.t.i.a.lity, worse madness.

But I am taking steps. . . . And in the meantime, when you read this you are to be sure that it is written by a man perfectly sane.

"It is nothing that I have killed Farrell. I could have killed him, as he could have killed me, at any time. I still think that, while the pursuit lay with me, my methods were the more delicate, and that I should never have goaded him to strike as he goaded me.

"But I will grant that his methods were effective enough: and along one line I should have allowed them to be original, if I didn't know that he had picked up the hint of it on the _I'll Away_. It was _rumour_ that had cursed me there, and he started to work upon rumour. I had put up a plate in Harley Street, as you know, upon the dregs of my capital. This meant a certain bluff upon credit. If my reputation lasted me out six months, all would be well. He divined this and struck at it. To do him justice, I suppose that if he had walked up brutally to the Medical a.s.sociation and given them his story, I should have been struck off the Register. He worked more subtly than that.

Indefinable reports started up, spread and followed me. Out of the skies a net of suspicion descended between me and my quite reputable past. For no reason given, my fellow-pract.i.tioners began to shun me.

"I had a bad case, and no money to carry it through. I have heard, Roddy, that he let you into the secret of the island and that you are like to prosper on it: and I wish you well. But I, who brought him to it, lingering him to land--I, but for whose treasured flask he would never have lived to see Santa Island-- could set up no claim on any of that wealth.

"I had deserved this. It was all quite right, and I make no complaint. But I had to throw up Harley Street, and for two years I steadily sank. In the end I came to know worse hunger than I was prepared for. Though you won't have me at any price, I think you would pity if I told you of some of the holes to which I have crept to sleep.

"I suppose--and now I think of it, I might have borrowed some comfort from the thought--I suppose that all the while, being rich, Farrell had hired eyes to watch me. It is certain that he ran across me--always at night, and always in evening dress.

Once, on the Embankment, as I was coiling on a bench, he came down from the Savoy and along, bringing his dog for a walk.

The dog scented me and growled; but I lay out stiff, pretending to sleep.

"Even when it came to a Salvation Army shelter, we were disturbed by a company of the benevolent; Farrell one of them, in a furred coat with an astrachan collar. He saw me stretched there with closed eyes, and said that one half of the world never knows how the other half lives.

"It was going like that with me when the War broke out.

Then--broken, beaten, and in rags--I put all pride in my pocket, walked across the bridge to Silversmiths' College, rang in on Travers, and demanded a job.

"Travers was shocked. . . . I could see also that he was suspicious. Rumour had been at him, too. Finding him less than frank, I turned more than proud: and, his back being up and his conscience uneasy, he did what I could have pardoned in a weaker man; lost his temper, to excuse himself in his own eyes for treating me unjustly. He had scarcely spoken six words before I detected the slime of Farrell's trail. The man had managed to sow rumours, somehow, within the gates of Silversmiths' College, of all places!--rumours that had nothing to do with the island, but suggested that, after all (there being no smoke without fire), there _had_ been dubious and uncleanly experiments in the laboratory during my professorship. I believe that this, when I came to think it over, started my recovery: yes, my recovery.

For it showed me that Farrell was deteriorating, and, renewing a little of my old contempt for the man, raised me by so much above the abject fear of him into which I had sunk. From that moment hope was renewed in me, and I nursed it. So long as he worked on the truth he had me at his mercy: playing with falsehood in this fashion, he was vulnerable, might come to be mortally vulnerable if I watched and waited, and then I should regain the lost mastery, dearer to me than life.

"For the moment, however, Travers claimed all the scorn I carried inside me for use. He hinted that the College had suffered by the scandal of the riot: which no doubt was true to some extent, but not true enough to hide a lie or to cover a meditated betrayal. He said that he had always looked a little askance on my researches, and particularly upon my demonstrations; that they were doubtless astonishing, but had lain, to his taste, a little too near the border-line of quackery,--Yes, Roddy, he said the word, and it did not choke him. On the whole and speaking as a friend (yes, he used that word, too), he must express a hope that I would not press to renew my connection with the Silversmiths' College. It would pain him inexpressibly, remembering old times, to be forced to give me a direct refusal. . . . But was there anything else he could do for me?

"That, Roddy, was the valley of the shadow of my death, and I had no rod or staff to comfort me.

"I did not answer him in words. I gave him a look, and walked out.

"My purpose had been to apply for temporary work, to relieve some younger teacher who wished to enlist for medical work at the front. Had you been in London, Roddy, I'd have pocketed shame and come to you, and borrowed the price of a suit of clothes; inside of which--and may be with your support--I might have walked up boldly for a commission in the R.A.M.C.--for there was nothing definite against me: only I was ruined, and my old credentials, set against my present squalor, were so comparatively splendid as to raise instant suspicion of drink and disgrace. But it was part of my just punishment that, when I most needed help, you should be far abroad searching for the very island on which I had shipwrecked all.

"Finally I found work as a dresser in one of those temporary hospitals which sprang up everywhere in such hurry as the streams of wounded began to pour back from France. Ours was pitched in a derelict pleasure-ground on the right bank of Thames some way below Greenwich. . . . I don't suppose you ever visited Casterville Gardens: as neither had I until I entered them to do stretcher-drill, tend moaning men, and carry b.l.o.o.d.y slops in the overgrown alleys that wound among its tawdry, abandoned glories. It had a half-rotted pier of its own, upon which, in Victorian days, the penny steam-boats had discharged many thousands of crowds of pleasure-seekers. The gardens occupied the semicircle of an old quarry, on which the decorative landscape gardener had fallen to work with gusto, planting it with conifers and stucco statues in winding walks that landed you straight from the sightless wisdom of Socrates and Milton, or the equally sightless allurement of Venus, shielding her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, upon a skittle-alley, a bandstand, a dancing-saloon, or a bar at which stood, for contrast, another Venus, not eyeless, dispensing beer. The conifers, flourishing there, have grown to magnificent height. The effect of rain upon the statues has not been so happy, and I have set my pail down to pick a snail off the saddle-nose of Socrates and meditate and wonder what he would have thought of it all.

"The dancing-saloon--still advertising itself as 'Baronial Hall'--had been converted into a main ward, holding forty beds.

It was there that Farrell found me at work, that night. He had interviewed the Adjutant--as we called the hara.s.sed secretary who, brayed daily between the upper and nether millstones of official instructions and 'voluntary effort,' never left his desk nor dared to wander abroad for fresh air--the gardens having been specially laid out to trick the absent-minded and induce them to lose their way. Farrell had simply told the Adjutant that he wished to see me on urgent personal business.

The Adjutant could not hesitate before a presence that might, in its dress-clothes and sable-lined overcoat, have stood among the statues outside for personified Opulence.

"'Very good,' said he. 'Oh, yes, certainly. I will send for the man. . . . Your business is private, you say? . . . I am very sorry: we are all at sixes and sevens here, with every office crowded. But there's an empty saloon--one of those absurdities with which the management in old days sought to tickle the public taste. They are going to turn it into a ward in a couple of days, and that's why we have left it unoccupied. If that will do, and you'll come with me, we'll see if the electric light functions. I believe the fitters were at work there this afternoon.'"

"That, as Farrell told me ten minutes later, was how it happened.

For me, when answering the message that a stranger had called to see me on urgent business, I walked as directed, across the matted moonlit lawn to this building which I had never visited before--and when, pushing the door wide, I saw Farrell standing under the electric lamps, with his dog beside him--I fell back a pace and half-turned to run for it.

"For he was alone, yet not alone: a hundred Farrells stood there.

No, a battalion, and all of them Farrells! And a battalion of dogs!

"I stepped back from the ledge of the threshold. Above the doorway an inscription in faded gilt letters shone out against the moon--'VERSAILLES GALLERY OF MIRRORS. ADMISSION 3D.'

"Then I understood. This absurd and ghastly apartment was lined, all around its walls, with mirrors, in panels separated only by thin gilt edgings. Dust lay thick on the floor; cobwebs hung from the ceiling in festoons; there was not a stick of furniture in the place. But a battalion of Farrells stood in it, and there entered to it, and stood, under the new electric fittings, a battalion of Foes.

"Farrell's aspect was grave. His eyebrows went up at the choke of half-insane laughter with which I greeted him. 'Foe, my man,' said he, eyeing my khaki. 'So you have come to this, have you?'

"He said it pompously, with a fine air of patronage, and I stifled a second laugh, hugging it inside my ribs: for now I felt that the time would not be long--that, at long last, he would pa.s.s me over the cards. 'We both seem to have come to this, don't we?' I answered with a shrug and a glance around.

"'I have run down here,' he went on, still betrayed back to his old Tottenham Court Road manner, 'because I have an announcement to make to you. . . . Have you read your _Times_ to-day?'

"He was priceless. Oh, he was falling to me--falling to me like a ripe peach! He held out a sc.r.a.p of paper.

"'Do I look like a man that takes in the _Times_?' I purred '--at twopence a day, and the price likely to go up, they tell me. . . . But I can guess your news, for I've watched the house.

. . . You've come all this way to tell me that you're going to marry Constantia Denistoun. . . . Well?'

"'You have been watching the house?' asked he, staring, as it took him aback.

"'Of course I have. . . . And she didn't tell you? . . . Gad! If she didn't tell you, she isn't yours yet, and I've a doubt if she's ever like to be. Did she give you leave to put in that announcement?'

"Farrell cleared his throat. Before he could answer I had chipped in--'No, you liar! I hate men who clear their throats before speaking. It was an old trick of yours, of which I believed myself to have cured you at some pains. . . . So you have played over ardent, and there has been a row, and you have come down here to take it out of _me_. . . . Man, you thought you would: but I have you beaten at last; for I see you--as she will see you--dissolving back into the cad you always were.'

"'I am going to marry her,' Farrell persisted. 'Let that eat into your soul.'

"'It has eaten,' said I, 'these weeks ago, just as far as ever it will get; and that's as far as a rat can gnaw into a marlinespike. . . . Come out of this into fresh air,' said I with another look round on our images repeated in the mirrors.

'There are too many Farrells and Foes here. When I ran the game, at Versailles that afternoon, it had a certain dignity.

. . . But, you! . . . Your primal curse, Farrell, rea.s.serts itself at length. I have done my best with you, but you reproduce it in tawdriness. Out of the Tottenham Court Road you came: and back to your vomit you go.'