Tom Gallon - Tinman

"Better come home with me," he whispered; "they'll look for you at your place first."

"It won't make much difference," I said; "they'll have to find me some time." Nevertheless I went home with him, walking the short distance to his place in Bloomsbury.

He watched me as we went along, and I saw that he watched me with an increasing sense of wonder. I was something detached – apart from all the world – something he had not looked upon before. He was afraid of me, and yet attracted to me in a fearful way; he spoke to me, when he spoke at all, with a strange deference. I wondered about it, as I might have wondered about anything that was happening to some other person, until at last it struck me, and that with no sense of fear, that he looked upon me as one already dead. And so we came to the house in which he lived, and went up in silence to his rooms.

He turned up the light in that room in which we had played cards, and motioned to a chair; but I did not sit down. Now that I could see his face distinctly, I read again in it that look of fierce and eager excitement that I had seen before; I understood, too, that I was nothing to him, and only what I had done made me important in his eyes. I had something to say to him, and I said it quickly.

"He told me that he had not yet had the money to redeem my I.O.U.'s," I said. "I suppose the cheque was delayed?"

"It wasn't sent," he said in reply. "I never meant to send it."

I turned on him fiercely, and spluttered out his own words: "Never meant to send it? What do you mean?"

"You don't want to murder me ," he muttered, putting the table between us, and grinning weakly. "I tell you I never meant to send it – I never had the money to pay it."

I sat down and looked at him; the horror of the other business was falling away from me in the contemplation of this treachery. "I want you to explain," I said patiently.

"You young fool!" he exclaimed with sudden violence, as he saw how tame and quiet I was, "don't you understand that I meant this to happen from the first? Don't you understand what every one is going to say when they find him, and when they find what is in his pockets? You owed him money; you had been gambling with him, and had nothing to pay him with. You quarrelled with him at Hammerstone Market; you were heard to threaten to kill him. You follow him to his rooms; he demands the money; there is a quarrel, and the stronger and the younger man wins. Oh, you fool!"

"Why have you done it?" I asked him, still very quietly.

He paced about the room for a minute or two, and then came back to me. I knew that there was time enough, and so I waited; I did not see daylight yet.

"I have been in Hockley's clutches for years," said Jervis Fanshawe, speaking in a matter-of-fact tone; "he has bled me steadily for a long time past. I began gambling with him, and I lost; tried to retrieve my losses, and lost more. Every penny I ever had has gone to him – and other money besides."

"What other money? Mine?"

He nodded slowly. "Every bit of it, and more besides that. I'm deeply involved with the firm; that was my chief reason for trying to get hold of that girl, for with her I could have stopped all tongues wagging, and could have paid Hockley off. It was when I saw you, hot-headed and hot-blooded, and only too eager to quarrel with the man, that the idea came into my mind that I might use you. That – and the story I heard."

I remembered in a flash the story the doctor had told at that dinner party at the house of old Patton; of the man who worked on the jealous feelings of another that he might kill a third man. But my mind moved slowly, and even yet I did not even quite see what this man had done.

"I can tell you this now, because you're a dead man to all intents and purposes," said Jervis Fanshawe, leaning across the table and looking hard at me. "I always hated you – hated you, I think, for your youth and your strength, and that fair boyish face of yours that gave you a chance with women I never had. You've served my purpose, and in a way I never expected."

"Then, when they bring me to justice – when they try me for what I have done," I said slowly and patiently, "that is the story you will tell them?"

"Undoubtedly," he replied. "And you cannot contradict it."

"I would not contradict it if I could prove the truth to every one," I assured him earnestly. "And I thank you from the bottom of my heart."

He stared at me in amazement. "Are you mad?" he gasped.

I shook my head, and smiled. "No, I'm not mad," I replied. "Only this gives me the chance I never hoped to get – the chance to keep her name out of it. I was afraid you might drag that in, tell of the quarrel between Hockley and myself, and have sharp lawyers turning and twisting that lie this way and that. Tell your tale, by all means; I shall keep silent. Now give me something to eat; I'm faint and worn out."

I do not think he had understood me before; I caught him more than once stopping, as he moved about the room, to look back at me, and to ponder over me and to shake his head. I was indifferent to everything; I only thought how wonderfully it had all come about, that Barbara's name would never be mentioned; I had not hoped to kill the lie so completely as this. I ate the food he gave me, and presently lay down on the hard horsehair sofa in his sitting-room, and was fast asleep in a minute. I only woke once during the night, and then I found him bending over me with a flaring candle held above his head; there was still that wondering awestruck look in his face.

I went out long before he was awake in the morning; I had not yet decided what I should do. That it would be done for me pretty quickly I already realized; for it was not likely, after his declaration of the previous night, that Jervis Fanshawe would long leave me at liberty. So I took what was to prove my last walk through London, for that time at least; and presently saw what I had expected to see. Flaring lines on newspaper placards told me and all the world of London what had happened, and the lines were strengthened as hour after hour went by. In face of them I had a curious satisfaction in my present liberty, a curious wonder at the power that was mine. I could have gone up to any respectable citizen jogging along his respectable way, and have told him the truth calmly; I could have shouted it in the streets, and then have run, with a hundred at my heels. I was a pariah, walking the streets of a great city with men hunting for me; I had nothing in common with respectability or decency.

I remember that I tried experiments that day; touched the very fringe of what was waiting for me, in a sense, to try how near I could go to the actual danger without grasping it. I sat in a crowded restaurant at lunch time, and heard men talk of what had happened, giving details of how the man had been struck down, and offering suggestions as to the motive. I that was already dead could listen to them with equanimity; could wonder a little what would have happened had I suddenly declared how much deeper my knowledge of the business was than theirs.

One man was quite blatant about it; he had already formed his own idea of the matter, and had summed it up. There was a woman in it, of course; everything pointed to the fact that a woman had struck the fatal blow. In the first place there was no evidence of any struggle; and mark you, gentlemen, a woman bent on such a business as that would creep upon the poor devil unawares, and strike him down before he had a chance to defend himself. It being pointed out to this clever person that a poker had been found clasped tight in the hand of the murdered man, he was ready in a moment with a smiling explanation of that. The woman had put it there, the better to make out her defence if necessary. He was quite surprised that no one had thought of that.