IX
I went home that night wondering whether Vernon had got rid of the black spaniel. Perhaps he had found it impossible to reconcile it to its new quarters, and had sold it or given it back to the man with the fur cap. Or perhaps it was still in the house. If that were so, it was very strange, very unlike Vernon to have concealed the fact from Arthur Gernham. But, in either case, he had been deceitful, deliberately deceitful, with a friend, and a friend whom he greatly admired and respected.
This incident of my meeting with Gernham deepened my sense of fear, of mystery. My instinct—I now felt sure of it—was right. Some strange under side of Vernon’s character was active at this moment. I knew him only in part; much of him I did not know. A stranger now seemed to confront me in the night, a stranger by whose feet crouched something black and terrified. What was this stranger’s purpose? What could it be?
I reviewed carefully my whole acquaintance with Vernon, but especially the latter part of my acquaintance with him, when Deeming was in relation with us both. It was then, when Deeming came into his life, and only then, that Vernon had shown me for the first time a man in him whose presence I had not suspected, whose exact nature I did not know. This man was roused by Deeming. I should have let him sleep. But, having been roused, he had surely been sleepless ever since. Yes, that was so. Thus far, things were clear to me. Something—the strange man in Vernon—had been wakeful, ardent ever since, was wakeful, ardent now. This man it was who worked shoulder to shoulder with Gernham. This man it was who had bought the black spaniel.
So far, light. But now came the darkness. What had been Vernon’s purpose in buying the black spaniel? When he saw it he had looked at it fatally. At that moment, while he looked at it, his purpose had sprung up full-grown in his mind, full-grown and fierce. I was not to know that purpose. Arthur Gernham was not to know it. He now had some purpose in connection with an animal that Arthur Gernham, his close friend and colleague, his leader in a campaign of kindness, of pity, to which he was dedicating all his activities and giving all his enthusiasm, was not to know or even suspect. That purpose, since it was in connection with an animal, must surely be one of kindness, of pity.
But here my instinct rebelled violently against my knowledge of Vernon. My instinct said that it was not so; that Vernon’s purpose in buying the black spaniel had been sad, even perhaps terrible. Yet how could that be?
The dog’s eyes haunted me. They seemed to me to know what I did not know, to know what Vernon’s purpose was.
Deeming—again I thought of him, of Vernon’s short and strange connection with him. Once Vernon had said to me that he believed Deeming was a man haunted by a mania for persecution. He had spoken without knowledge then. Later, he had travelled to England to gain knowledge. He had taken the house in Wimpole Street to gain knowledge. Had he gained it? I did not know. Vernon had never told me. Was that why I was in the dark now? It began to seem to me that, perhaps, if I could find out what Vernon knew of Deeming I should understand something of his present purpose, of his purpose in buying the black spaniel.
At this stage in my mental debate I reached the Piccadilly corner of Albemarle Street, and was just going to turn towards my house, when a familiar face, a face respectable, close-shaven, English, looked upon me in the lamplight, and a bowler hat was deferentially lifted.
“Cragg!” I said.
“Good-night, Sir,” said Cragg. “A fine night, Sir.”
“Yes—wait a minute, Cragg.”
“Certainly, Sir.”
Vernon’s man stood still.
“Just walk with me to my door, will you?”
“With pleasure, Sir.”
We turned side by side into the comparative quiet of Albemarle Street.
“How is Mr. Kersteven, Cragg?”
“Well, Sir—” The man slightly hesitated. “Oh, Sir, he’s in his usual health, I think.”
“Working hard, isn’t he?”
“Very hard, Sir.”
“With Mr. Gernham.”
“Yes, Sir, with Mr. Gernham.”
“And—and how’s the dog, Cragg?”
I looked at him as I spoke, and saw his forehead contract.
“The dog, Sir?—oh, the dog is getting on all right so far as I am aware.”
“How do you mean—so far as you are aware?”
“Well, Sir, I don’t see much of it. That’s a fact.”
“Really. How’s that?”
I was pumping the man, I acknowledge it. I can make no excuse for it. I was driven by something that seemed to me then more than an ignoble curiosity.
“Well, Sir, Mr. Kersteven keeps the dog shut up mostly. I suppose he thinks that till it gets accustomed to the place and to us it’s better.”
“But if it’s always shut up, how can it get accustomed to you?”
“That’s more than I can say, Sir.”
I could see that the man was constrained, was not telling me something of which his mind was full. We had now reached my door, and I had no further excuse for keeping him with me.
“Well, Cragg,” I said. “Good-night.”
“Good-night, Sir.”
“I hope the dog will settle down and be friendly with you.”
“Friendly with me, Sir! That dog! The Lord forbid!” cried Cragg.
He seemed startled by the sound of his own lamentable exclamation, looked at me as if asking pardon, lifted his hat, and walked quickly away into the darkness. I stood staring after him. I longed to follow him, to question him, to find out what he meant. But how could I?
That night it was late before I went to sleep. The black spaniel seemed to be crouching at the foot of the bed. I seemed to see its yellow eyes fixed upon me, trying to tell me what I longed to know.
Late in the afternoon of the next day I received a very unexpected visit from Arthur Gernham. When I saw him come into my room, dressed in a suit of homespun, with a flannel shirt and a red tie, and holding a soft brown wideawake in his hand, I jumped up from my chair eagerly. I guessed at once that he had something to say with reference to our conversation of the previous night.
“How are you?” he said, in his rasping, energetic voice. “I got your address from the Red Book.”
He sat down and stretched out his long legs.
“I’m delighted to see you,” I said. “You’ve been at work with Vernon?”
“I’ve been with him.”
He ran one hand over his tufts of scanty hair.
“I’m disappointed in Kersteven,” he said. “I never should have thought he was a shifty fellow.”
The word shifty, applied to Vernon, roused my sense of friendship.
“Oh, you’re mistaken,” I exclaimed. “Vernon’s not a shifty man.”
“I beg your pardon—he is.”
I waited in silence for him to explain himself. I saw plainly that he was going to. There was a sledge-hammer honesty about Gernham that was startling but rather refreshing. He now proceeded to give me a specimen of it.
“I can’t stomach a friend who isn’t perfectly straight with me,” he said; “and what’s more, I’m bound to tell him so. I can’t keep anything in. Whatever I feel I have to out with it. That’s my nature. It’s got me into plenty of trouble, and it will get me into plenty more. Fights were my lot at Eton, and fights have been my lot, more or less, ever since.”
He unbuttoned one of the cuffs of his flannel shirt, pushed the flannel higher up his arm, and went on:
“With Kersteven I got on magnificently until to-day.”
“Have you had a wordy fight with Vernon to-day, then?” I asked.
“I went straight to him this morning and told him I’d met you last night. He asked me how I liked you, and I told him, ‘Very much.’ Then I said, plump out, ‘You’ve been tricky with me, Kersteven.’”
“Oh!” I exclaimed.
He took no notice of my interruption, and went on—
“‘You’ve let me make a fool of myself with you. That’s nothing. One makes a fool of oneself most days one way or another.’ ‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘That you’ve allowed me to think that you would never keep a dog or animal of any kind in your house, that you’ve sat here and listened to me trying to persuade you to keep one, while all the time there is—or was—one perhaps within a few feet of me. You’ve let me think what wasn’t true, you’ve made me think what wasn’t true. I don’t know what your reason is, but I know that I hate your action, and that I never thought you were capable of doing such a low thing to a friend.’”
“Pretty strong,” I said. “How did he take it?”
“That’s the nastiest part of all. He took it lying down.”
“Lying down?”
“Yes. Merely said the matter of the dog was such a trifle he hadn’t thought it would interest me to know of it, that he wasn’t sure of keeping it for any time, that he’d been so busy with me that—etc., etc. The lamest excuses man ever offered to man. I was disgusted, and showed it. It’s my way to show things—can’t help doing it. ‘Let’s get to work,’ he said, trying to change the subject. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t work with you to-day. That’s certain.’ And I took up my hat and went.”
“And you—you didn’t see the dog?”
“Oh, dear no. But it wasn’t that I cared about.”
“I wish you had seen it. I wish you would see it.”
I was speaking almost involuntarily, as if the words were forced from me, words scarcely prompted by any thought in me, words that were uttered for me.
“Why?” he asked. “Why? What do you mean?”
His face and manner were always alert, but now they had suddenly become intense with a sort of quivering vivacity.
“What’s wrong about the dog?”
“I don’t know that anything is wrong.”
“Know! Do you suspect anything is wrong?”
I waited a minute. I was repeating to myself Gernham’s question.
“Yes,” I said at last, “I do. But I don’t know why I suspect, and I don’t know what I suspect. That’s the honest truth and vague enough. But I can’t help it.”
He looked me straight in the eyes for a full minute, I should think. Then he said—
“I want you to be less vague, Luttrell; and I think you can. A man doesn’t say such a thing as you’ve said without more meaning than you’ve acknowledged.”
“I assure you—” I began.
But he stopped me.
“Now look here,” he said. “One often has a thought behind one’s thought, like a body behind its shadow. You’ve found the shadow; now look for the body, and I’ll bet you’ll find that too.”
His words seemed to clear away some mystery from my mind, but I shrank from what was now revealed—the body behind the shadow.
“I see you know now what you suspect,” he said, still looking into my eyes with intensity. “What is it?”
“I do know now,” I answered. “But it’s monstrous, and upon my word I’m ashamed to say it. For you must know that I’ve a great regard for Vernon.”
“And so have—or had—I. His tenderness for the suffering of the animal world drew me to him. I can’t forget that even now, after this beastly affair of the dog.”
“His tenderness for the animal world,” I repeated. “It’s just that—just my knowledge of that, which makes my suspicion so monstrous.”
“Let’s have it, I must have it!” he said. “You’re no backbiter, you’re an honest fellow. I can see that. Go ahead. I shan’t mistake your motives.”
There was a compelling frankness about him. I yielded to it.
“My suspicion is that perhaps Vernon is being cruel to that dog,” I said.
Gernham sat quite still. I saw that my words had deeply astonished him. But he did not burst forth, as many another man would have done, in a denial of the possibility of my suspicion being roused by a horrid fact, being well founded. He was a very quick man, and full of finesse despite his bluntness.
“What are your reasons?” he said slowly.
“I can scarcely say I have any. Let me think, though.”
After a minute I described to him minutely how Vernon had regarded the spaniel in the Park, the dog’s fear there, its much greater terror on being brought into the house in Wimpole Street, Vernon’s strange excitement on its arrival, and excitement in which there seemed to be an admixture of triumph, his laughter as he opened the door of the room in which the spaniel was confined; the dog’s rush for safety to Lord Elyn, and shrinking away when Vernon approached it. When I had finished, I added—
“There’s one thing more.”
“What is it?”
Then I related to him my meeting with Cragg on the previous night, and what the man had told me about Vernon’s keeping the spaniel perpetually shut up.
“That’s all,” I ended. “Not much, is it?”
“D’you know,” he said, “what’s far the most striking fact in all that you’ve told me?”
“What?” I asked.
“The dog’s horror of Kersteven. The rest may be nothing—fancy of yours or oddity of manner on Kersteven’s part. But the dog’s horror of Kersteven is very strange, and—unless your suspicion is correct, which God forbid—very unnatural.”
“Unnatural—that’s just what Lord Elyn called it.”
“Ah!”
“And his trying to keep the fact of the dog being in the house from you. Isn’t that very strange?”
“Certainly it is. But—by Jove!—the strangest thing of all would be that Kersteven should be cruel to an animal.”
“Yes, that’s true. I can’t—no, I can’t believe it possible.”
“What could be his motive?”
“I can’t conceive.”
“I know the man. He has a passion of pity in him for the sufferings of the animals, a real passion. Only one thing could account for his being cruel, deliberately and persistently cruel, to a dog.”
“What?”
“If he were mad.”
“Oh, that—impossible!”
“It would be the only thing,” he repeated. “I know something of insanity. A chief feature of it is this, that it often creates in a man the reverse of what he was before it took possession of him. Thus the kind, sane man becomes the cruel madman; the lively, mercurial sane man the bitter, melancholy madman—and so on. You take me?”
“Vernon isn’t mad,” I said with conviction.
“Then he isn’t being cruel to his dog,” he said with equal conviction.
“I can’t understand it,” I said dubiously. “The whole thing’s a mystery. Why should he buy the dog after swearing he would never have another? A whim, he said it was, a caprice. But I don’t believe that. No, there was some deeper, stranger reason. What could it be?”
I was asking myself, not him.
Gernham got up to go.
“One thing I promise you,” he said. “I’ll set at rest your doubts in a very short time. I’ll find out for certain that Kersteven is treating that dog properly. I devote my life to our dumb friends, as you know. Well, they shan’t find me wanting now, though a man who has been my chum and my colleague is concerned in this matter.”
“What are you going to do?”
“To-morrow I ought to be working with Kersteven. After to-day I didn’t mean to go, I didn’t feel as if I could go. But now I will, and I’ll see the spaniel and see him with Kersteven. Never fear!”
He spoke with biting decision. I looked at him and felt that he would do what he said.
“Brush my suspicions away,” I said, “and I’ll be only too thankful. Good-bye.”
He went off quickly.
When the door was shut behind him I thought how strange it was that Gernham’s purpose in connection with Vernon was exactly the same as had been Vernon’s in connection with Deeming when he left Rome for London.
He had wanted to see a black spaniel with Deeming. Gernham wanted to see a black spaniel with him.