“So he thought of the ship you wouldn’t let him go out in—and the whole thing fitted in! Of course he had told the old ruffian—saving his presence elsewhere—all about the forbidden voyage; and that gentleman of genius had it ready for immediate use. I’m bound to say he used it on me with excellent effect.”
“Same here,” said the ironmaster—“though I’d no idea what you suspected. I thought it a conceivable way out of any bad scrape, for that particular boy.”
“It imposed upon us all,” said Thrush, “but one. I was prepared to believe it if you did, and you believed it because you didn’t know your boy as well as you do now. But Miss Upton, who seems to know him better than anybody else—do you remember how she wouldn’t hear of it for a moment?”
“I do so, God bless her!”
“That shook me, or rather it prevented me from accepting what I never had quite accepted in my heart. That’s another story, and you’re only in the mood for one at present; but after seeing Baumgartner on Saturday, I thought I’d like to know a little more about him, not from outsiders but from the inside of his own skull. So I went to the British Museum to have a look at his books. It was after hours for getting books, but I made such representations that they cut their red tape for once; and I soon read enough to wonder whether my grave and reverend seignior was quite all there. Spiritualism one knows, but here was spiritualism with a difference; psychic photography one had heard about, but here was a psychical photographer gone mad or bad! When a gifted creature puts into admirable English his longing to snap-shoot the souls of murderers coming up through the drop, like the clown at Drury Lane, you begin to want him elected to a fauteuil in Broadmoor. Will you believe me when I tell you that I stumbled mentally on the very thing I shall presently prove to have been the truth, and that I dismissed it from my mind as the wildest impossibility?”
“I don’t see how you’re going to prove it now,” remarked Mr. Upton, who hoped there would be no such proof, for the sake of the girl who had been good to his boy; but that was a private consideration which there was no necessity to express.
“I shall want another chat with your lad when he’s had his sleep out,” replied Thrush, significantly; “he’s told me quite enough to make me eager for more. But you haven’t told me anything about your own adventures?”
And he got another drink to help him listen; for as a rule the ironmaster was only succinct when thoroughly irate. But now for once he was both brief and amiable.
“What have I to tell compared with you?” he asked. “Those damned old wooden walls only cleared the Thames on Sunday morning, and they weren’t near Plymouth when I left last night; but my little aluminium lot broke all her records before I broke one of her wheels. What I want to know is what you did from the time I left on Sunday night to that great moment this morning.”
“I sat down to watch Baumgartner, his house,” replied Thrush. “The merit of those quiet little streets is that there are always apartments of sorts, though not always the most admirable sort, to be had in half the houses. There was quite a choice bang opposite Baumgartner’s, and I’d taken a front room before you were through Hammersmith. Of course I explained that I had lost a last train, and the landlady’s son embarrassed me with pyjamas of inadequate dimensions. Well, I sat at the front window all night, for no better reasons than my strong feeling about the doctor’s writings, and your daughter’s disbelief in his yarn about her brother. Soon after five in the morning the old bird came out, and I was after him like knife. I tracked him to Knightsbridge without much difficulty, excepting the one of avoiding being spotted, but there that happened by the merest accident. He was passing under the scaffolding outside the church they’re pulling down there, and he’s so tall he knocked his hat off. I admit I was too close. He saw, and must have recognised me; but I shouldn’t have recognised him if I hadn’t seen him start out. He was wearing a false beard and spectacles!”