He twitched himself away, quite petulantly, like a child, and said:
“I’m off to the country for the day; that will do me more good than doctors’ stuff. I shall take train from Baker Street and get down to the valley of the Chess.”
I was out late that night. When I came home I noticed a light in Orchard’s window. So he was back! I decided not to go up to him. I was half undressed when I heard his oak slam violently, heard heavy, hurried feet coming downstairs. They seemed to come, those feet, half a flight at a time. I knew at once that something was up. My doors were open in a moment. Orchard came toppling into my passage, shutting the oak behind him.
“I’ve murdered him,” he said. “My God! Murdered him. Hopkins!”
“Keep cool. It’s all a delusion. There isn’t any Hopkins. Your nerves are unstrung——”
“No Hopkins!” the poor fellow interrupted, with a derisive laugh. “You shall hear all about it. No Hopkins! Haven’t I lived with him? Hasn’t he been tempting me to every devilry? It was Hopkins who made me steal the picture, the book, the bicycle money; he gave me the bad sovereign for Mackary, he’s got a bag full. The man was bothering me. I made a mistake at first to pay him anything on account—you lose their respect directly you make a cash payment. Hopkins! And he was egging me on to—what do you think? To murder you, old man. To murder you, because you’ve got Rogers’ “Italy,” with plates after Turner, and he wanted it. The very word Italy is enough for him.”
This was startling. I had reason to be grateful that I had pricked the Hopkins bubble in time. Orchard continued, dropping his voice and looking up now and then at the ceiling, and putting his head aside in a listening attitude:
“I dodged him this morning. I went off to Chesham alone, meaning to think the thing out quietly. I’d made up my mind to emigrate, if I could raise the passage money without his suspecting it. And then—well, I might have known—there were steps behind me; his face over my shoulder. He said,—he knows my very thoughts,—
“‘Emigration would be the worst thing in the world for us, dear boy. They want muscles, not art, in a new country.’
“It was more than I could stand. I shoved him into the Chess when he was off his guard. It gave me positive honest enjoyment to see the water eddying over him.”