Chapter Two.
Bowled Out.
When we reached Fleetwood it was blowing (so I heard some one say) “half a cap.” I privately wondered what a whole cap must be like; for it was all I could do, by leaning hard up against the wind, and holding on my hat—a chimney-pot hat, by the way—to tack up the platform and fetch round for the Belfast steamer, which lay snorting and plunging alongside.
It takes a very good sailor to be cheerful under such circumstances. I felt profoundly melancholy and wished myself safe at home in my bed. The sight of the black and red funnel swaying to and fro raised qualms in me which, although still on terra firma, almost called for the intervention of a friendly steward. Alas! friend there was none.
In my desperation I was tempted basely to compromise with duty. How did I know Michael McCrane was on the steamer at all? He might have dropped out at any one of a dozen wayside stations between Bletchley and here. Indeed the probability was that he had. Or—and I felt almost affectionately towards him as the thought crossed my mind—even if he had come so far, he, like myself, might be a bad sailor, and prefer to spend the night on this side of the angry Channel. I could have forgiven him much, I felt, had I been sure of that.
In any case, I asked myself earnestly, was I justified in running my employers into the further expense of a return ticket to Belfast without being reasonably sure that I was on the right track? And was I reasonably sure? Was I even—
On the steerage deck of the steamer below me, with a portmanteau in one hand and a brand-new hat-box and a rug in the other, a figure staggered towards the companion ladder and disappeared below. That figure, even to my unwilling eyes, was naught else but a tragic answer to my own question.
Michael McCrane was on board, and going below!
A last lingering hope remained.
“Hardly put off to-night, will you?” said I to a mate beside me, with the best assumption of swagger at my command.
He was encasing himself in tarpaulins, and appeared not to hear me.
I repeated my inquiry, and added, in the feeble hope that he might contradict me, “Doesn’t look like quieting down.”
“No,” said he, looking up at the sky; “there’ll be a goodish bit more of it before we’re over. All aboard there?”
“No,” I shouted, rushing towards the gangway; “I’m not!”
Oh, how I wished I could have found myself just left behind. As it was I was precipitated nearly head first down the gangway, amid the by no means friendly expletives of the sailors, and landed at the bottom a clear second after my hat, and two seconds, at least in advance of my umbrella. Before I had recovered all my component parts the Royal Duke was off.
It was not the slightest comfort to me to reflect that if only I had dashed on board the moment I saw my man, and arrested him there and then, we might both be standing at this moment comparatively happy on that quay whose lights blinked unkindly, now above us, now below, now one side, now the other, as we rolled out of the harbour.
“Bit of a sea outside, I guess,” said a voice at my side.
Outside! Then what was going on now did not count! I clapped my hat down on my head and made for the cabin door.
It had entered my mind to penetrate into the steerage at once and make sure of my runaway; but when I contemplated the distance of deck between where I now stood and where I had seen him disappear; and when, moreover, as the boat’s head quitted the lee of the breakwater a big billow from the open leapt up at her and washed her from stem to stern, something within me urged me to go below at once, and postpone business till the morning.
I have only the vaguest recollection of the ghastly hours which ensued. I have a wandering idea of a feeble altercation with a steward on hearing that all the berths were occupied and that he had nowhere to put me. Then I imagine I must have lain on the saloon floor or the cabin stairs; at least, the frequency with which I was trodden upon was suggestive of my resting-place being a public thoroughfare.
But the treading under foot was not quite so bad as being called upon to show my ticket later on. That was a distinctly fiendish episode, and I did not recover from it all the night. More horrible still, a few brutes, lost to all sense of humanity, attempted to have supper in the saloon, within a foot or two of where I lay. Mercifully, their evil machinations failed, for nothing could stay on the table.
Oh, the horrors of that night! Who can say at what angles I did not incline? Now, as we swooped up a wave I stood on my head, next moment I shivered and shuddered in mid-air. Then with a wild plunge I found myself feet downward, and as I sunk my heart and all that appertained to it seemed to remain where they had been. Now I was rolling obliquely down the cabin on to the top of wretches as miserable as myself. Now I was rolling back, and they pouring on to the top of me. The one thought in my mind was—which way are we going next? and mixed up with it occasionally came the aspiration—would it were to the bottom! Above it all was the incessant thunder of the waves on the decks above and the wild wheezing of the engines as they met the shrieking wind.
But I will not dwell on the scene. Once during the night I thought of Michael McCrane, and hoped he was even as I was at that moment. If he was, no dog was ever in such a plight!
At last the early dawn struggled through the deadlights.
“At last,” I groaned, “we shall soon be in the Lough!”
“Where are we?” said a plaintive voice from the midst of the heap which for the last few hours had regularly rolled on the top of me whenever we lurched to larboard.
“Off the Isle of Man,” was the reply. “Shouldn’t wonder if we get a bit of a sea going past, too.”
Off the Isle of Man! Only half way, and a bit of a sea expected as we went past!
I closed my eyes, and wished our bank might break before morning! Whether the “bit of sea” came up to expectations or not I know not. I was in no condition to criticise even my own movements. I believe that as time went on I became gradually amalgamated with the larger roiling heap of fellow-sufferers on the floor, and during the last hour or so of our misery rolled in concert with them. But I should be sorry to state positively that it was so.
All I know is that about a hundred years after we had passed the Isle of Man I became suddenly awake to the consciousness that something tremendous had happened. Had we struck in mid-ocean? had the masts above us gone by the board? were we sinking? or what?
On careful reflection I decided we were doing neither, and that the cause of my agitation was that the last wave but one had gone past the ship without breaking over her. And out of the next dozen waves we scrambled over I counted at least five which let us off in a similar manner!
Oh, the rapture of the discovery! I closed my eyes again lest by any chance it should turn out to be a dream.
The next thing I was conscious of was a rough hand on my shoulder and a voice shouting, “Now then, mister, wake up; all ashore except you. Can’t stay on board all day!”
I rubbed my eyes and bounded to my feet.
The Royal Duke was at a standstill in calm water, and the luggage-crane was busy at work overhead.
“Are we there?” I gasped.
“All except you,” said the sailor.
“How long have we been in?”
“Best part of an hour. Got any luggage, mister?”
An hour! Then I had missed my man once more! Was ever luck like mine?
I gathered up my crumpled hat and umbrella, and staggered out of that awful cabin.
“Look here,” said I to the sailor, “did you see the passengers go ashore?”
“I saw the steerage passengers go,” said he; “and a nice-looking lot they was.”
“There was one of the steerage passengers I wanted particularly to see. Did you see one with a portmanteau and hat-box?”
“Plenty of ’em,” was the reply.
“Yes; but his was quite a new hat-box; you couldn’t mistake it,” said I.
“Maybe I saw him. There was one young fellow—”
“Dark?”
“Yes; dark.”
“And tall?”
“Yes; tall enough.”
“Dismal-looking?”
“They were all that.”
“Did you see which way he went?”
“No; but I heard him ask the mate the way to the Northern Counties Railway; so I guess he’s for the Derry line.”
It was a sorry clue; but the only one. I was scarcely awake; and, after my night of tragedy, was hardly in a position to resume the hue and cry. Yet anything was preferable to going back to sea.
So I took a car for the Northern Counties station. For a wonder I was in time for the train, which, I was told, was due to start in an hour’s time.
I spent that hour first of all in washing, then in breakfasting, finally in telegraphing to my manager—
“Fancy tracked him here rough crossing—will wire again shortly.”
Then having satisfied myself that none of the steamer passengers could possibly have caught an earlier train, and determined not to lose the train this time, I took a ticket for Londonderry, and ensconced myself a good quarter of an hour before the appointed hour in a corner of a carriage commanding a good view of the booking-office door.
As the minutes sped by, and no sign of my man, I began to grow nervous. After all he might be staying in Belfast, or, having got wind of my pursuit, might be escaping in some other direction. It was not a comfortable reflection, not did it add to my comfort that among the passengers who crowded into my carriage, and helped to keep out my view of the booking-office door, was the gloomy, detective-looking individual whose demeanour had so disconcerted me during the first stage of this disastrous journey.
He eyed me as suspiciously as ever from behind his everlasting newspaper, and under his scrutiny I hardly dared persevere in my own look-out. I made a pretext of buying a newspaper in order to keep near the door. To my dismay the whistle suddenly sounded as I was counting my change, and the train began to move off. At the same moment a figure, carrying in one hand a portmanteau and in the other a hat-box, rushed frantically into the station, and made a blind clash at the very door where I stood. I shrunk back in a panic to my distant corner, with my heart literally in my mouth. There was a brief struggle on the doorstep; the hat-box flew in, and the door was actually opened to admit the owner, when a couple of porters laid violent hands upon him and dragged him off the train.
It was not I who had been left behind this time, but Michael McCrane; and while he and his portmanteau remained disconsolate in Belfast, I and his hat-box were being whirled in the direction of Londonderry in the company of a person who, whatever he may have thought of McCrane, without doubt considered me a fugitive!
It was a trying position, and I was as much at sea as I had been during the agitated hours of the terrible night, I tried to appear calm, and took refuge behind my newspaper in order to collect my ideas and interpose a screen between myself and the critical stare of my fellow-passenger. Alas! it was avoiding Scylla only to fall into Charybdis. The first words which met my eyes were:—
“Bank Robbery in London.—
“A robbery was perpetrated in —’s bank on Wednesday night, under circumstances which point to one of the cashiers as the culprit. The manager’s box, containing a considerable amount of loose cash, was found broken open, and it is supposed the thief has also made away with a considerable sum in notes and securities. The cashier in question has disappeared and is supposed to have absconded to the north. He is dark complexioned, pale, mysterious in his manners, and aged 26. When last seen wore a tall hat, gloves, and a grey office suit.”
Instinctively I pulled off my gloves and deposited my hat in the rack overhead, and tried to appear engrossed in another portion of the paper. But I could not refrain from darting a look at my fellow-traveller. To my horror I perceived that the paper he was reading was the same as the one I had; and that the page between which and myself his eyes were uncomfortably oscillating was the very page on which the fatal paragraph appeared.
I was dark, I was pale (after my voyage), and who should say my manners were not mysterious?
In imagination I stood already in the box of the Old Bailey and heard myself sentenced to the treadmill, and was unable to offer the slightest explanation in palliation of my mysterious conduct.
In such agreeable reveries I passed the first hour of the journey; when, to my unfeigned relief, on reaching Antrim my fellow-traveller quitted the carriage. No doubt his object was a sinister one, and when I saw him speak to the constable at the station, I had no doubt in my own mind that my liberty was not worth five minutes’ purchase. But even so, anything seemed better than his basilisk eye in the corner of the carriage.
I hastily prepared my defence and resolved on a dignified refusal to criminate myself under any provocation. What were they doing? To my horror, the “detective,” the constable, the guard, and the station-master all advanced on my carriage.
“In there?” said the official.
My late fellow-traveller nodded. The station-master opened the door and entered the carriage. I was in the act of opening my lips to say—
“I surrender myself—there is no occasion for violence,” when the station-master laid his hand on the hat-box.
“It’s labelled to C—,” he said; “take it along, guard, and put it out there. He’s sure to come on by the next train. Right away there!”
Next moment we were off. What did it all mean? I was not under arrest! Nobody had noticed me; but McCrane’s hat-box had engaged the attention of four public officials.
“Free and easy way of doing things on this line,” said an Englishman in the carriage; “quite the regular thing for a man and his luggage to go by different trains. Always turns up right in the end. Are you going to Derry, sir?” he added addressing me.
“No,” said I, hastily. “I’m getting out at the next station.”
“What—at —” and he pronounced the name something like “Tobacco.”
“Yes,” I said, pining for liberty, no matter the name it was called by.
At the next station I got out. It was a little wayside place without even a village that I could see to justify its claim to a station at all. Nobody else got out; and as soon as the train had gone, I was left to explain my presence to what appeared to be the entire population of the district, to wit, a station-master, a porter, and a constable who carried a carbine. I invented some frivolous excuse; asked if there wasn’t a famous waterfall somewhere near; and on being told that the locality boasted of no such attraction, feigned to be dismayed; and was forced to resign myself to wait three hours for the next train.
It was at least a good thing to be in solitude for a short time to collect my scattered wits. McCrane was bound for C—, and would probably come in the next train, which, by the way, was the last. That was all I had a clear idea about. There was a telegraph office at the station, and I thought I might as well report progress to my manager.
“On the trail. Expect news from C—. Wire me there, post-office, if necessary.”
The station-master (who, as usual, was postmaster too) received this message from my hands, and the remainder of the population—I mean the porter and the constable—who were with him at the time read it over his shoulder. They all three looked hard at me, and the station-master said “Tenpence!” in a tone which made my blood curdle. I was doomed to be suspected wherever I went! What did they take me for now?
I decided to take a walk and inspect the country round. It annoyed me to find that the constable with his carbine thought well to take a walk too, and keep me well in view.
I tried to dodge him, but he was too smart for me; and when finally to avoid him I took shelter in a wayside inn, he seated himself on the bench outside and smoked till I was ready to come out.
I discovered a few more inhabitants, but it added nothing to my comfort. They, too, stared at me and followed me about, until finally I ran back to the station and cried out in my heart for the four o’clock train.
About five o’clock it strolled up. I got in anywhere, without even troubling to look for Michael McCrane. If he should appear at C—, well and good, I would arrest him; if not, I would go home. For the present, at least, I would dismiss him from my mind and try to sleep.
I did try, but that was all. We passed station after station. Some we halted at, as it appeared, by accident; some we went past, and then, on second thoughts, pulled up and backed into. At last, as we ran through one of these places I fancied I detected in the gloaming the name C— painted up.
“Is that C—?” I asked of a fellow-traveller.
“It is so! You should have gone in the back of the train if you wanted to stop there.”
Missed again! I grew desperate. The train was crawling along at a foot’s pace; my fellow-traveller was not a formidable one. I opened the door and jumped out on to the line.
I was uninjured, and C— was not a mile away. If I ran I might still be there to meet the back of the train and Michael McCrane.
But as I began to run a grating sound behind me warned me that the train had suddenly pulled up, and a shout proclaimed that I was being pursued.
Half a dozen passengers and the guard—none of them pressed for time—joined in the hue and cry.
What it was all about I cannot imagine; all I know is that that evening, in the meadows near C—, a wretched Cockney, in a battered chimney-pot hat, and carrying an umbrella, was wantonly run to earth by a handful of natives, and that an hour later the same unhappy person was clapped in the village lock-up for the night as a suspicious character! It had all been tending to this. Fate had marked me for her own, and run me down at last. Perhaps I was a criminal after all, and did not know it. At any rate, I was too fatigued to care much what happened. I “reserved my defence,” as they say in the police courts, and resigned myself to spend the night as comfortably as possible in the comparative seclusion of a small apartment which, whatever may have been its defects, compared most favourably with the cabin in which I had lain the night before.
It was about ten o’clock next morning before I had an opportunity of talking my case over with the inspector, and suggesting to him he had better let me go. He, good fellow, at once fell in with my wishes, after hearing my statement, and in his anxiety to efface any unpleasant impressions, I suppose, proposed an adjournment to the “Hotel” to drink “siccess to the ould counthree.”
The proposed toast was not sufficiently relevant to the business I had on hand to allure me, so I made my excuses and hastened to the telegraph office to ascertain whether they had any message for me there.
They had. It was from my manager, as I expected; but the contents were astounding—
“Return at once. Robber captured here. Keep down expenses.”
It would be hard to say which of these three important sentences struck me as the most cruel. I think the last.
I was standing in the street, staring blankly at the missive, when I was startled beyond measure by feeling a hand on my shoulder, and a voice pronouncing my name—
“Samuels!”
It was Michael McCrane. But not the Michael McCrane I knew in the City, or the one I had seen going below on board the steamer. He wore a frock-coat and light trousers, lavender gloves, and a hat—glorious product of that identical box—in which you might see your own face. A rose was in his button-hole, his hair was brushed, his collar was white, and his chin was absolutely smooth.
“Whatever are you doing here?” he asked.
“Oh,” faltered I, for I was fairly overcome, both by my own misfortunes and his magnificent appearance, “nothing; only a—a little business run, you know, for the manager.”
“I didn’t know we had any customers in these parts.”
“Well no. But, I say, what are you doing here?”
“Business too,” said he—“grave business. By the way, Samuels, have you got any better clothes than these?”
Here was a question. And from Michael McCrane!
“Because,” he went on—and here he became embarrassed himself—“if you had—in fact, you’d do as you are, because you won’t have to wear your hat. What I mean is, that now you are here—I’d be awfully obliged if you’d be my best man—I’m to be married this morning. I say, there’s the bell beginning to ring. Come on, Samuels.”