Dead Man's Love

When I recovered consciousness I got slowly to my knees, and looked about me. My head ached fearfully, but I seemed to have no very great injuries. A dozen yards in front of me lay the grey monster, with three wheels left to it, and those three upreared helplessly in the air. My friend the driver I could not see anywhere. I staggered to my feet, relieved to find that I could walk, and went forward to the car; and there, on the other side of it, lay my friend, doubled up and unconscious. He, too, seemed to have escaped any very great injury as by a miracle. I straightened him out and touched him here and there, in the hope to discover if any bones were broken; he only groaned a little, and even that sound was cheering. The man was not dead.

I had no thought of my own safety until I heard the rumble of wheels, and saw the cause of all the disaster – that hay-waggon – coming towards me. From the opposite direction, too, I heard the sharp toot-toot of a motor horn, and knew that help was coming. And then, for the first time, I realised that that help was not for me, and that I must not remain where I was a moment longer: for if my situation had been bad before, it was now truly frightful. I was somewhere in the neighbourhood of London – near to a northern suburb – and I was in convict garb, partially concealed by a short grey coat, and I was hatless.

Fortunately for me, by this time it was dark, and I had only seen that hay-waggon looming up, as it were, against the evening sky. Knowing that my friend must soon receive better help than I could give him, I decided that that episode in my life at least was closed. I slipped off my goggles and dropped them beside him; then, after a momentary glance round, I decided to try for a fence at one side, opposite that bank that had been our undoing. It was not very high, just within reach of my hands. I made a jump for the top and scrambled over, and dropped among some undergrowth on the further side of it.

There is a humorous side to everything; even in my plight I was compelled to laugh at what I now saw through a chink in the fence. I peered out to see what became of my friend, and as I did so I saw that another motor-car had stopped by the overturned one, and that the driver had got down. Greatly to my relief I saw my friend sit up and stare about him; even saw him smile a little ruefully at the sight of his grey monster in its present condition. And then, although I could not hear what he said, I saw that he was asking questions eagerly about me.

For he had lost me entirely; it was evident that the poor fellow was in a great state of perplexity. I sincerely hope that some day he may read these lines, and so may come to an understanding of what happened to me; I heartily wished, as I looked through the fence then, that I could have relieved his perplexity. It was evident that after his accident he was not at all sure whether he had left me on the road at some place or other, or whether by a miracle I had been in some fashion snatched off the earth, and so snatched out of my predicament. As I feared, however, that he and the other man, together with the driver of the waggon, might begin some regular search for me, I decided that I could no longer remain where I was. I began to walk away, through thick rank grass and among trees, going cautiously, and wondering where I was.

In truth I was so shaken that I staggered and swayed a little as I walked. I tried to get my ideas into some order, that I might make myself understand what was the best thing for me to do. I came to the conclusion that I must first get a change of clothing; there was no hope for me unless I could do that. By this time telegraph wires would have carried messages to all parts describing me, and those messages would have travelled much faster even than that unfortunate racing car by which I had come so far. If I could break into a house, and by some great good chance find clothing that would fit me, all might be well. But at the moment I stood marked and branded for all men to discover.

Somewhat to my relief and also to my dismay, I found presently that I was walking in the grounds of a private house. I came upon a large artificial lake or pond, with stone seats dotted about here and there near the margin of it; the stone seats were green and brown with moss and climbing plants that had been allowed to work their will upon them. In fact, all the grounds had a neglected appearance, and so had the house, too, when presently I came to it. I was just making up my mind which was the best window by which I might effect an entry, when I heard voices quite near to me, and dropped at once on an instinct, and lay still.

The two figures, I now discovered, were those of a man and woman, standing close together in a little clump of trees. They had been so still that I had walked almost up to them, and might indeed have blundered against them but for the voices. As I lay now I could hear distinctly every word they said. The man was speaking.

"My dear, dear little friend," he said, "you know I would do anything in all the world to help you. You're not safe here; I dread that man, and for your sake I fear him. Why don't you let me take you away from this dreadful house? You know I would be good to you."

"Yes, I know that, Gregory," replied the girl softly. "But I can't make up my mind – I can't be sure of myself. I can't be sure even that I love you well enough to let you take care of me."

"But you don't love anyone else?" he pleaded. And now, for the first time, as he turned his head a little, I saw the man's face. He was quite young, and I noticed that he was tall, and big, and dark, of about the same style and appearance, and even of the same age, I should conjecture, as myself. He was holding the girl's hands and looking down into her eyes. I could not see her face clearly, but I judged her to be small, and fair, and slight of figure.

"No, there is no one else I love," she answered him. "Perhaps, some day, Gregory, I may make up my mind – some day, when things get too terrible to be borne any longer here. I'm not afraid; I have a greater courage than you think. And, after all, the man dare not kill me."

"I'm not so sure of that, Debora," said the man.

They walked away in the direction of the house, and I lay still among the dank grasses, watching them as they went. They disappeared round a corner of it, and still I dared not move.

After quite a long time I thought I heard in the house itself a sharp cry. Perhaps I had been half asleep, lying there with my head on my arms, but the night was very still, and it had seemed to me that I heard the cry distinctly. At all events it roused me, and startled me to a purpose. I must get into that house, and I must get a change of clothing. I made straight for it now, and presently found a window at a convenient height from the ground, and some thick stems of creeper up which I could climb to reach it. I stood there on the window-sill for a moment or two, a grey shadow among grey shadows; then I opened the window, and, hearing nothing, stepped down into a room.

I found myself in intense darkness. I left the window open so that I might make good my escape, and I began to fumble about for something by which I could get a light. I stumbled against a chair, and stood still to listen; there seemed to be no sound in the room. And then while I moved, in the hope to find a fireplace and some matches, I had that curious skin-stirring feeling that there was someone or something in the room with me, silent, and watchful, and waiting. I could almost have sworn that I heard someone breathing, and restraining their breathing at that.

I failed to find the mantelshelf, but I stumbled presently against a table. I stretched out my hands cautiously about it, leaning well forward over it as I did so, and my forehead struck against something that moved away and moved back again – something swinging in mid-air above the table.

I thought it might be a lamp, and I put out my hand to steady it. But that which I touched was so surprising and so horrifying that for a moment I held it, and stood there in the darkness fumbling with it, and on the verge of shrieking. For it was a man's boot I held, and there was a foot inside it. Someone was hanging there above me.

I made straight for the window at once; I felt I was going mad. Needless to say, I failed to find the window at all, but this time I found the mantelshelf. There my hand struck against a match-box, and knocked over a candlestick with a clatter. After two or three tries I got a light, and stooped with the lighted match in my hands and found the candlestick, and set it upright on the floor. So soon as I had steadied my hands to the wick and had got a flame, I looked up at the dreadful thing above me.

Suspended from a beam that went across the ceiling was a man hanging by the neck, dead – and the distorted, livid face was the face of the man I had seen in the garden but a little time before – the face of the man who had talked with the girl!

Nor was that all. Seated at the table was another man, with arms stretched straight across it, so that the hands were under the dangling feet of the other, and with his face sunk on the table between the arms. And this seemed to be an old man with grey hair.

CHAPTER II.

I AM HANGED – AND DONE FOR

So soon as I could get my eyes away from that thing that swung horribly above the table, I forced them to find the window. But even then I could not move. It was as though my limbs were frozen with the sheer horror of this business into which I had blundered. You will own that I had had enough of sensations for that day; I wonder now that I was able to get back to sane thoughts at all. I stood there, with my teeth chattering, and my hands clutching at the grey coat I wore, striving to pull myself together, and to decide what was best to be done. To add to the horror of the thing, the man who lay half across the table began to stir, and presently sat up slowly, like one waking from a long and heavy sleep. He sat for some moments, staring in front of him, with his hands spread out palms downwards on the table. He did not seem to see me at all. I watched him, wondering what he would do when presently he should look round and catch sight of me; wondering, for my part, whether, if he cried out with the shock of seeing me, I should grapple with him, or make for the window and dash out into the darkness.

He did a surprising thing at last. He raised his eyes slowly, until they rested upon what gyrated and swung above him, and then, as his eyes travelled upwards to the face, he smiled very slowly and very gently; and almost on the instant turned his head, perhaps at some noise I made, and looked squarely at me.

"Good evening, sir!" he said in a low tone.

Think of it! To be calmly greeted in that fashion, in a room into which I had blundered, clad grotesquely as I was, and with that dead thing hanging above us! Idiotically enough I tried to get out an answer to the man, but I found my tongue staggering about among my teeth and doing nothing in the way of shaping words. So I stared at him with, I suppose, a very white face, and pointed to that which hung above us.

"He's very quiet, sir," said the old man, getting to his feet slowly. "I was afraid at first – I didn't understand. I was afraid of him. Think of that!" He laughed again with a laughter that was ghastly.

"Cut – cut him down!" I stammered in a whisper, holding on to the edge of the mantelshelf and beginning to feel a horrible nausea stealing over me.

He shook his head. "I can't touch him – I'm afraid again," said the old man, and backed away into a corner.

What I should have done within a minute or two I do not really know, if by chance I could have kept my reason at all, but I heard someone moving in the house, and coming towards the room in which I stood. I did not think of my danger; everything was so far removed from the ordinary that it was as though I moved and walked in some dream, from which presently, with a shudder and a sigh of relief, I should awake. Therefore, even when I heard footsteps coming towards the room I did not move, nor did it seem strange that whoever came seemed to step with something of a jaunty air, singing loudly as he moved, with a rather fine baritone voice. In just such a fashion a man flung open the door and marched straight into the room, and stopped there, surveying the picture we made, the three of us – one dead and two alive – with a pair of very bright, keen eyes.

He was a tall, thin man, with sleek black hair gone grey at the temples. He had a cleanly-shaven face, much lined and wrinkled at the corners of the eyes and of the mouth; and when he presently spoke I discovered that his lips parted quickly, showing the line of his white teeth, and yet with nothing of a smile. It was as though the lips moved mechanically in some still strong mask; only the eyes were very much alive. And after his first glance round the room I saw that his eyes rested only on me.

"Who are you? What do you want?" he demanded sharply.

I did not answer his question; I pointed weakly to the hanging man. "Aren't you going – going to do anything with him?" I blurted out.

He shrugged his shoulders. "He's dead; and the other one," – he let his eyes rest for a moment on the old man – "the other one is as good as dead for anything he understands. The matter is between us, and perhaps I'd better hear you first."

"I can't – not with that in the room!" I whispered, striving to steady my voice.

He shrugged his shoulders again, and drew from his pocket a knife. Keeping his eyes fixed on the swaying figure above him, he mounted to a chair, and so to the table, deftly and strongly lifted the dead man upon one shoulder while he severed the rope above his head. Then he stepped down, first to the chair and then to the floor, and laid the thing, not ungently, on a couch in the corner. I was able now to avert my eyes from it.

"Does that please you?" he asked, with something of a sneer. "Get forward into the light a little; I want to see you."

I stepped forward, and he looked me up and down; then he nodded slowly, and showed that white gleam of his teeth. "I see – a convict," he said. "From what prison?"

"Many miles from here," I answered him. "I escaped early this morning; someone brought me as far as this on a motor-car. I broke in – because I wanted food and a change of clothing. I was desperate."

"I see – I see," he said, in his smooth voice. "A change of clothing, and food. Perhaps we may be able to provide you with both."

"You mean you'll promise to do so, while you communicate with the police, I suppose?" I answered sullenly.

He smiled, and shook his head. "That is not my way of doing things at all," he said. "You are desperate, you tell me, and I have no particular interest in your recapture. If it comes to that, I have trouble enough of my own." He glanced for a moment at the body behind him. "I should like to know how it comes about that you are a convict – for what particular crime, I mean?"

I told him, as briefly as I could, the whole story, not painting myself too black, you may be sure. He listened with deep attention until I had finished, and then for a minute or two he stood still, with his arms folded, evidently considering some point deeply. I waited, forgetful of all else but the man before me, for he seemed to hold my fate in his hands. All this time the old man I had found in the room stood in a corner, smiling foolishly, and nibbing his hands one over the other. The other man who dominated the situation took not the faintest notice of him.

"How long have you been hanging about this place, waiting to break in?" demanded the man who had come into the room last. "Speak the truth."

"I don't exactly know," I answered. "I fell asleep while I lay in the grounds, and lost count of time. But I saw him," – I nodded my head towards that prone figure on the couch – "I saw him in the grounds."

"Alone?" He jerked the word out at me.

"No, there was a lady."

"Since you know that, you may as well know the rest," he replied. "This young man has had a most unhappy attachment for a young lady in this house, who is my ward. He has persecuted her with his attentions; he has come here under cover of the darkness, over and over again, against my wishes. She liked him – "

"I heard her say that," I broke in, incautiously.

"Then you only confirm my words," he said, after a sharp glance at me. "Perhaps you may imagine my feelings when to-night I discovered that the unhappy boy had absolutely taken his revenge upon me, and upon her, by hanging himself in this very room. So far I have been able to keep the knowledge from my ward, – I think there's a possibility that I may be able to keep it from her altogether."

I did not understand the drift of his thought then, nor did I see in what way I was to be concerned in the matter. He came a little nearer to me, and seated himself on the table, and bent his keen glance on me before going on again. I think I muttered something, for my own part, about being sorry, but it was a feeble mutter at the best.

"Perhaps you may wonder why I have not sent at once, in the ordinary course, for a doctor," he went on. "That is quite easily explained when I tell you that I am a doctor myself. The situation is absurd, of course. Perhaps I had better introduce myself. I am Dr. Bardolph Just." He paused, as though expecting that I should supply information on my side.

"My name is Norton Hyde," I said brusquely.

"And you speak like a gentleman, which is a passport at once to my favour," he assured me, with a bow. "Now, let us get to business. A young man comes here to-night and hangs himself in my house. I have a deep respect and liking for that young man, although I am opposed to the idea of his aspiring to the hand of my ward. He hangs himself, and at once scandal springs up, bell-mouthed, to shout the thing to the world. The name of an innocent girl is dragged in; my name is dragged in; innocent people suffer for the foolish act of a thoughtless boy. The question in my mind at once is: Can the penalty be averted from us?"

I must own the man fascinated me. I began to feel that I would do much to help him, and to help the girl I had seen that night in the grounds of the house. Fool that I was then, I did not understand and did not know what deep game he was playing; indeed, had I known, how could I have stood against him?

"I am, I trust, always a friend to the friendless and the helpless," he went on. "You are friendless, I take it, and very helpless, and although I am no opponent of the law, I have yet the instinct which tells me that I should help a fugitive. Now let us understand one another."

At this point we were interrupted, horribly enough, by a cry from the old man in the corner – a cry like nothing earthly. He advanced a few steps towards where we stood, and looked from one to the other of us, with his hands plucking nervously at his lips.

"I don't understand, gentlemen – I don't understand," he said, in a feeble voice. "He was alive and well and strong this morning; he clapped me on the shoulder, and said – what was it that he said?" The man put one hand to his head and looked at me in a lost fashion. "I forget what it was; something seems to have gone here!" He struck his forehead sharply with his knuckles, and again looked at us with that feeble smile.

"Get out of the way!" said Dr. Just fiercely. "Take no notice of him," he added to me. "He babbles about things he doesn't understand."

The old man slunk away, and sat down on a chair in the corner and dropped his forehead in his hands. And from that time he did not move until my strange interview with Dr. Just was over.

"Now, what I suggest is this," the doctor said, leaning towards me and impressing his points upon me by stabbing one white forefinger into the palm of his other hand. "We will say that you have suffered for a crime which was not morally a crime at all. We will put it that you, by all the laws of humanity, had a right to escape from the hideous doom to which you had been consigned. You have escaped, and by the strangest chance you have found a friend at the very outset."

He smiled at me, if that quick baring of his teeth could be called a smile, and I tried to thank him with broken words. Then he went on again —

"Before you can enter the world again it is necessary that you should have clothing which does not brand you as that dress does," he said. "Therefore I want for a moment to put a case clearly to you – to let you see what is in my mind. Suppose that this convict, fleeing from pursuit, haunted by the thought that he may be recaptured, and may have to serve a yet longer period for his escapade – starving, and fainting, and hopeless; suppose this convict enters a house, and, finding the means ready to his hand, puts an end to the business once for all, and throws up the sponge. In other words, suppose that convict hangs himself, and so gets the laugh of those who are hunting him down. Do you follow me?"

I was so far from following him that I shook my head feebly, and glanced first at my own clothes and then at the man who had hanged himself, and who now lay on the couch. Then I shook my head again.

The doctor seemed to lose patience. "I'm afraid you haven't a very quick brain," he exclaimed testily. "Let me make myself more clear. A young man of good family and good standing in the world, comes in here to-night and commits suicide; soon after an outcast, flying from justice, follows him, and breaks in also. In appearance the two are something alike; both are tall, and strong, and dark; each man – the one from compulsion – has closely cropped dark hair. Suppose I suggest that, to avoid a scandal, it is the convict who has hanged himself, and that the other man has not been here at all. In other words, as you need a change of clothing, I propose you change with that!"

I gasped at the mere horror of the idea; I shuddered as I looked at the dead man. "I couldn't – I couldn't!" I whispered. "Besides, what would become of me?"

"I don't ask you to take the place of the other man; that would be too risky, and would, in fact, be impossible," he said quietly. "I am merely asking you to assist me to cover up this unfortunate business and at the same time to save yourself."

There was no time for me to think; I was like a rat in a trap. Nevertheless, on an impulse, I refused to have anything to do with so mad a notion. "I won't do it; it's impossible!" I said.

"Very good, my friend!" He shrugged his shoulders and moved quietly across the room towards the bell. "Then my duty is clear – I give you up to those who must be anxious concerning your safety. I've given you your chance, and you refuse to take it."

His hand was on the bell when I called to him, "Stop! is there no other way?"

He shook his head. "No other way at all," he replied. "Come, be reasonable; I'm not going to land you into a trap. Put the matter clearly to yourself. You are a pariah, outside the pale of civilised things; I offer you a fresh start. Mr. Norton Hyde, the convict, commits suicide – I pledge my word to you that the fraud shall not be discovered. A certain young girl is saved from much trouble, and sorrow, and anxiety; I also am saved from the consequences of a very rash act, committed by our dead friend here. So far as you are concerned, you can start afresh, with your record wiped out. Come – yes or no?

"I don't trust you," I said. "What do you want to do with me? what purpose have you in this, apart from the hushing up of a scandal?"

He became thoughtful at that; presently, looking up, he answered me with what seemed to be a charming frankness, "You have the right to ask, and although I might refuse to reply, I want to treat you fairly," he said. "In a certain business in which I am interested – a certain scheme I have on hand – I want help. You will be a man who has thrown everything, as it were, into the melting-pot of life: you will have everything to win, and nothing to lose. In other words, you are just the creature I want – the man ready to my hand, to do anything I may suggest. You haven't answered me yet; is it to be yes or no?"

I said, "No!" quickly, and he moved towards the bell with an impatient frown. He had only three steps to take, but in that brief moment I had a vision of myself handcuffed and going back to my prison; I could not bear it. He was within an inch of the bell, when I cried out the word that was to change all my life, and was to set me upon the most desperate venture I had yet had anything to do with. I cried out, "Yes."