The Crime and the Criminal. Marsh Richard

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СКАЧАТЬ anxiety constrained me to the search. Pilbeam, who always travels with me to town, displayed almost as much interest in the papers as I did. He wanted to know why I had bought them. He became facetious in his way-which is his way, and, thank Providence, his way only. I listened to Pilbeam's facetiæ while I was mentally asking myself if it would be better-for me-for her to be found living or dead. In the one case I knew that she would denounce me at once to the police, and I should sleep that night in gaol-and then, what could I say or do? In the other, the odds might be slightly in my favour. Under the circumstances, I naturally enjoyed Pilbeam's jokes. They were so funny, and so suited to my mood.

      That was a dreadful day. There was no business doing. Had there been I might have been saved from thinking-and from drinking. As a rule, I never drink anything in town. But that day I had to. I was too invertebrate to keep going without it.

      Soon after midday I was sitting in one of the City bars-one of those in which men play chess and draughts and dominoes. I was leaning on one of the little marble tables scribbling aimlessly upon a sheet of paper. Some one, standing in front of me, addressed me by my name. I looked up. It was a man with whom I had occasionally done business-a man named Townsend, a tall, well-built fellow, with what one sometimes hears called the "beauty of the devil." He had always been something of a mystery to me. Although I had done a good deal for him at one time or another, he had never given me an address at which, in case of necessity, I could find him. His reference, which hitherto had been a sufficient one, had been a City bank. He used to give me instructions, and then would call at the office to see what I had made of them. He certainly seemed to get hold of reliable information, principally about mining securities; but that he was no City man I was persuaded. There was about him an indefinable something which irresistibly suggested the West End. He struck me as some butterfly of fashion with opportunities and tastes for punting of various kinds. That he confined his transactions to me I never for a moment believed, and in spite of his being the best dressed and the handsomest man I ever saw, whenever he gave me anything like a large line, before I operated I was always careful to have an eye for cover.

      "I've been looking for you," he said, as I glanced up at him. "They told me at the office I should probably find you here. I want you to do a little deal for me." He dropped into a chair on the other side of the table. "What's this you've been scribbling here; anything private?"

      He referred to the piece of paper on which I had been allowing my pencil to scrawl, I knew not what. "It's nothing; only rubbish."

      He picked the piece of paper up; I was watching him as he did so. As his eyes fell on it, not a little to my surprise a most singular change took place in his countenance. Although his face was clean shaven, and, therefore, as one would have thought, likely to give visual evidence of any passing shades of feeling, it had always seemed to me the most inscrutable of masks. Neither success nor failure seemed to make the slightest difference to him. His expression was ever the same. The change which now took place in it therefore, was all the more surprising. In an instant there came into his face a look of the most unmistakable terror. His eyes dilated, his jaw dropped open. He sat staring at the paper as if paralysed by horror.

      "What the devil's this?" he gasped, when his attitude and his continued silence were beginning to make me conscious of discomfort, and, goodness knows, I had been, and was, uncomfortable enough without his help!

      I had not the faintest notion what it was which had had on him so singular an effect. I took the paper out of his momentarily nerveless hands. So soon as I saw what was on it, I too had something like a fit of the horrors. "Goodness gracious!" I exclaimed.

      It showed in what sort of groove my mind had been working. Unconsciously I had been scribbling the name of the woman whom the stranger, when we had been together in the cab the night before, had told me he had been searching for in Brighton. There it was, "Louise O'Donnel, Louise O'Donnel," scrawled all over the paper, perhaps fifty times.

      "What an extraordinary thing," I murmured.

      And, indeed, it seemed to me to be a very extraordinary thing; and by no means a pleasant thing either. Very much the other way. It showed what I was capable of doing without being aware of it. I did not like it at all.

      By the time I had regained some of my composure Mr. Townsend appeared to have regained some of his. He had called the waiter, from whom he was ordering brandy. I ordered brandy too-a shillingsworth; what they give you for sixpence would have had no effect upon me. We both drank before anything was said. Then Mr. Townsend looked at me over the top of his glass.

      "May I ask, Mr. Tennant, what you know about Louise O'Donnel?"

      The effect which the discovery of that name upon the sheet of paper-my sheet of paper-had had upon me was sufficiently capable of explanation. Only too capable. Why it should have affected Townsend surpassed my comprehension. I hardly knew what to answer when he put his question.

      "Know! I know nothing."

      "Is that so? Then how came you to write the name upon that scrap of paper?"

      "I know no more than the man in the moon."

      "Indeed. Then are you suggesting that its presence there is an illustration of the new kind of force which promises to be the craze-telepathic writing, don't they call it?"

      This was said with a sneer. Something about the tone, the manner in which it was uttered, reminded me forcibly of some one I had heard quite recently elsewhere. The resemblance was so strong that it came to me with the force of a sudden shock. To whom could it be? It came to me in a flash; the stranger of the night before. Directly he had appeared at the carriage door he had reminded me of some one. Now I knew of whom. He was sitting in front of me at that moment-Mr. Townsend. His tone was the stranger's, his manner was the stranger's; even his face, in some strange fashion, was the stranger's too. The stranger wore side-whiskers and a moustache, he was older, he was not nearly so good-looking, he lacked Mr. Townsend's peculiar air of polish, but in spite of the differences which existed between them, there was the resemblance too. The more I stared-and I did stare-the more the resemblance grew. Mr. Townsend leaned towards me across the table. The attitude was the stranger's.

      "Are you trying to think of where you heard the name before? I see that you have heard it."

      "Yes; last night."

      "Last night!"

      He was holding the glass in which the waiter had brought his brandy in his hand. As he echoed my words he brought it down upon the marble-topped table with a crash. It was strange that it was not splintered.

      "Last night, as I came from Brighton."

      Mr. Townsend must have been in an oddly clumsy mood. As I spoke it seemed to me that he deliberately knocked his glass off the table on to the floor. When he bent over it, it was to find it shivered into fragments. From the waiter, who came to remove the broken remnants, he ordered a fresh supply of brandy. I had my glass replenished too.

      "Have you a double, Mr. Townsend, moving about the world?"

      He was raising his glass to his lips when I put the question. He spoke before he drank. "A double? What on earth do you mean?"

      "Because it was from the lips of your double I heard the name of Louise O'Donnel."

      "My double?" He put down his glass, untasted.

      "I came up with him in the same train last night from Brighton."

      "You came up with him in the same train last night from Brighton? With whom?"

      "Your double."

      His face was absolutely ghastly. He had gone white to the lips, СКАЧАТЬ