The Little Nugget/Part Two/Chapter 4

I
I owed it to my colleague Glossop that I was in the centre of the surprising things that occurred that night. By sheer weight of boredom, Glossop drove me from the house, so that it came about that, at half past nine, the time at which the affair began, I was patrolling the gravel in front of the porch.

It was the practice of the staff of Sanstead House School to assemble after dinner in Mr Abney's study for coffee. The room was called the study, but it was really more of a master's common room. Mr Abney had a smaller sanctum of his own, reserved exclusively for himself.

On this particular night he went there early, leaving me alone with Glossop. It is one of the drawbacks of the desert-island atmosphere of a private school that everybody is always meeting everybody else. To avoid a man for long is impossible. I had been avoiding Glossop as long as I could, for I knew that he wanted to corner me with a view to a heart-to-heart talk on Life Insurance.

These amateur Life Insurance agents are a curious band. The world is full of them. I have met them at country-houses, at seaside hotels, on ships, everywhere; and it has always amazed me that they should find the game worth the candle. What they add to their incomes I do not know, but it cannot be very much, and the trouble they have to take is colossal. Nobody loves them, and they must see it; yet they persevere. Glossop, for instance, had been trying to buttonhole me every time there was a five minutes' break in the day's work.

He had his chance now, and he did not mean to waste it. Mr Abney had scarcely left the room when he began to exude pamphlets and booklets at every pocket.

I eyed him sourly, as he droned on about 'reactionable endowment', 'surrender-value', and 'interest accumulating on the tontine policy', and tried, as I did so, to analyse the loathing I felt for him. I came to the conclusion that it was partly due to his pose of doing the whole thing from purely altruistic motives, entirely for my good, and partly because he forced me to face the fact that I was not always going to be young. In an abstract fashion I had already realized that I should in time cease to be thirty, but the way in which Glossop spoke of my sixty-fifth birthday made me feel as if it was due tomorrow. He was a man with a manner suggestive of a funeral mute suffering from suppressed jaundice, and I had never before been so weighed down with a sense of the inevitability of decay and the remorseless passage of time. I could feel my hair whitening.

A need for solitude became imperative; and, murmuring something about thinking it over, I escaped from the room.

Except for my bedroom, whither he was quite capable of following me, I had no refuge but the grounds. I unbolted the front door and went out.

It was still freezing, and, though the stars shone, the trees grew so closely about the house that it was too dark for me to see more than a few feet in front of me.

I began to stroll up and down. The night was wonderfully still. I could hear somebody walking up the drive—one of the maids, I supposed, returning from her evening out. I could even hear a bird rustling in the ivy on the walls of the stables.

I fell into a train of thought. I think my mind must still have been under Glossop's gloom-breeding spell, for I was filled with a sense of the infinite pathos of Life. What was the good of it all? Why was a man given chances of happiness without the sense to realize and use them? If Nature had made me so self-satisfied that I had lost Audrey because of my self-satisfaction why had she not made me so self-satisfied that I could lose her without a pang? Audrey! It annoyed me that, whenever I was free for a moment from active work, my thoughts should keep turning to her. It frightened me, too. Engaged to Cynthia, I had no right to have such thoughts.

Perhaps it was the mystery which hung about her that kept her in my mind. I did not know where she was. I did not know how she fared. I did not know what sort of a man it was whom she had preferred to me. That, it struck me, was the crux of the matter. She had vanished absolutely with another man whom I had never seen and whose very name I did not know. I had been beaten by an unseen foe.

I was deep in a very slough of despond when suddenly things began to happen. I might have known that Sanstead House would never permit solitary brooding on Life for long. It was a place of incident, not of abstract speculation.

I had reached the end of my 'beat', and had stopped to relight my pipe, when drama broke loose with the swift unexpectedness which was characteristic of the place. The stillness of the night was split by a sound which I could have heard in a gale and recognized among a hundred conflicting noises. It was a scream, a shrill, piercing squeal that did not rise to a crescendo, but started at its maximum and held the note; a squeal which could only proceed from one throat: the deafening war-cry of the Little Nugget.

I had grown accustomed, since my arrival at Sanstead House, to a certain quickening of the pace of life, but tonight events succeeded one another with a rapidity which surprised me. A whole cinematograph-drama was enacted during the space of time it takes for a wooden match to burn.

At the moment when the Little Nugget gave tongue, I had just struck one, and I stood, startled into rigidity, holding it in the air as if I had decided to constitute myself a sort of limelight man to the performance.

It cannot have been more than a few seconds later before some person unknown nearly destroyed me.

I was standing, holding my match and listening to the sounds of confusion indoors, when this person, rounding the angle of the house in a desperate hurry, emerged from the bushes and rammed me squarely.

He was a short man, or he must have crouched as he ran, for his shoulder—a hard, bony shoulder—was precisely the same distance from the ground as my solar plexus. In the brief impact which ensued between the two, the shoulder had the advantage of being in motion, while the solar plexus was stationary, and there was no room for any shadow of doubt as to which had the worst of it.

That the mysterious unknown was not unshaken by the encounter was made clear by a sharp yelp of surprise and pain. He staggered. What happened to him after that was not a matter of interest to me. I gather that he escaped into the night. But I was too occupied with my own affairs to follow his movements.

Of all cures for melancholy introspection a violent blow in the solar plexus is the most immediate. If Mr Corbett had any abstract worries that day at Carson City, I fancy they ceased to occupy his mind from the moment when Mr Fitzsimmons administered that historic left jab. In my case the cure was instantaneous. I can remember reeling across the gravel and falling in a heap and trying to breathe and knowing that I should never again be able to, and then for some minutes all interest in the affairs of this world left me.

How long it was before my breath returned, hesitatingly, like some timid Prodigal Son trying to muster up courage to enter the old home, I do not know; but it cannot have been many minutes, for the house was only just beginning to disgorge its occupants as I sat up. Disconnected cries and questions filled the air. Dim forms moved about in the darkness.

I had started to struggle to my feet, feeling very sick and boneless, when it was borne in upon me that the sensations of this remarkable night were not yet over. As I reached a sitting position, and paused before adventuring further, to allow a wave of nausea to pass, a hand was placed on my shoulder and a voice behind me said, 'Don't move!'

II
I was not in a condition to argue. Beyond a fleeting feeling that a liberty was being taken with me and that I was being treated unjustly, I do not remember resenting the command. I had no notion who the speaker might be, and no curiosity. Breathing just then had all the glamour of a difficult feat cleverly performed. I concentrated my whole attention upon it. I was pleased, and surprised, to find myself getting on so well. I remember having much the same sensation when I first learned to ride a bicycle—a kind of dazed feeling that I seemed to be doing it, but Heaven alone knew how.

A minute or so later, when I had leisure to observe outside matters, I perceived that among the other actors in the drama confusion still reigned. There was much scuttering about and much meaningless shouting. Mr Abney's reedy tenor voice was issuing directions, each of which reached a dizzier height of futility than the last. Glossop was repeating over and over again the words, 'Shall I telephone for the police?' to which nobody appeared to pay the least attention. One or two boys were darting about like rabbits and squealing unintelligibly. A female voice—I think Mrs Attwell's—was saying, 'Can you see him?'

Up to this point, my match, long since extinguished, had been the only illumination the affair had received; but now somebody, who proved to be White, the butler, came from the direction of the stable-yard with a carriage-lamp. Every one seemed calmer and happier for it. The boys stopped squealing, Mrs Attwell and Glossop subsided, and Mr Abney said 'Ah!' in a self-satisfied voice, as if he had directed this move and was congratulating himself on the success with which it had been carried out.

The whole strength of the company gathered round the light.

'Thank you, White,' said Mr Abney. 'Excellent. I fear the scoundrel has escaped.'

'I suspect so, sir.'

'This is a very remarkable occurrence, White.'

'Yes, sir.'

'The man was actually in Master Ford's bedroom.'

'Indeed, sir?'

A shrill voice spoke. I recognized it as that of Augustus Beckford, always to be counted upon to be in the centre of things gathering information.

'Sir, please, sir, what was up? Who was it, sir? Sir, was it a burglar, sir? Have you ever met a burglar, sir? My father took me to see Raffles in the holidays, sir. Do you think this chap was like Raffles, sir? Sir—'

'It was undoubtedly—' Mr Abney was beginning, when the identity of the questioner dawned upon him, and for the first time he realized that the drive was full of boys actively engaged in catching their deaths of cold. His all-friends-here-let-us- discuss-this-interesting-episode-fully manner changed. He became the outraged schoolmaster. Never before had I heard him speak so sharply to boys, many of whom, though breaking rules, were still titled.

'What are you boys doing out of bed? Go back to bed instantly. I shall punish you most severely. I—'

'Shall I telephone for the police?' asked Glossop. Disregarded.

'I will not have this conduct. You will catch cold. This is disgraceful. Ten bad marks! I shall punish you most severely if you do not instantly—'

A calm voice interrupted him.

'Say!'

The Little Nugget strolled easily into the circle of light. He was wearing a dressing-gown, and in his hand was a smouldering cigarette, from which he proceeded, before continuing his remarks, to blow a cloud of smoke.

'Say, I guess you're wrong. That wasn't any ordinary porch-climber.'

The spectacle of his bete noire wreathed in smoke, coming on top of the emotions of the night, was almost too much for Mr Abney. He gesticulated for a moment in impassioned silence, his arms throwing grotesque shadows on the gravel.

'How dare you smoke, boy! How dare you smoke that cigarette!'

'It's the only one I've got,' responded the Little Nugget amiably.

'I have spoken to you—I have warned you—Ten bad marks!—I will not have—Fifteen bad marks!'

The Little Nugget ignored the painful scene. He was smiling quietly.

'If you ask me,' he said, 'that guy was after something better than plated spoons. Yes, sir! If you want my opinion, it was Buck MacGinnis, or Chicago Ed., or one of those guys, and what he was trailing was me. They're always at it. Buck had a try for me in the fall of '07, and Ed.—'

'Do you hear me? Will you return instantly—'

'If you don't believe me I can show you the piece there was about it in the papers. I've got a press-clipping album in my box. Whenever there's a piece about me in the papers, I cut it out and paste it into my album. If you'll come right along, I'll show you the story about Buck now. It happened in Chicago, and he'd have got away with me if it hadn't been—'

'Twenty bad marks!'

'Mr Abney!'

It was the person standing behind me who spoke. Till now he or she had remained a silent spectator, waiting, I suppose, for a lull in the conversation.

They jumped, all together, like a well-trained chorus.

'Who is that?' cried Mr Abney. I could tell by the sound of his voice that his nerves were on wires. 'Who was that who spoke?'

'Shall I telephone for the police?' asked Glossop. Ignored.

'I am Mrs Sheridan, Mr Abney. You were expecting me to-night.'

'Mrs Sheridan? Mrs Sher—I expected you in a cab. I expected you in—ah—in fact, a cab.'

'I walked.'

I had a curious sensation of having heard the voice before. When she had told me not to move, she had spoken in a whisper—or, to me, in my dazed state, it had sounded like a whisper—but now she was raising her voice, and there was a note in it that seemed familiar. It stirred some chord in my memory, and I waited to hear it again.

When it came it brought the same sensation, but nothing more definite. It left me groping for the clue.

'Here is one of the men, Mr Abney.'

There was a profound sensation. Boys who had ceased to squeal, squealed with fresh vigour. Glossop made his suggestion about the telephone with a new ring of hope in his voice. Mrs Attwell shrieked. They made for us in a body, boys and all, White leading with the lantern. I was almost sorry for being compelled to provide an anticlimax.

Augustus Beckford was the first to recognize me, and I expect he was about to ask me if I liked sitting on the gravel on a frosty night, or what gravel was made of, when Mr Abney spoke.

'Mr Burns! What—dear me!—what are you doing there?'

'Perhaps Mr Burns can give us some information as to where the man went, sir,' suggested White.

'On everything except that,' I said, 'I'm a mine of information. I haven't the least idea where he went. All I know about him is that he has a shoulder like the ram of a battleship, and that he charged me with it.'

As I was speaking, I thought I heard a little gasp behind me. I turned. I wanted to see this woman who stirred my memory with her voice. But the rays of the lantern did not fall on her, and she was a shapeless blur in the darkness. Somehow I felt that she was looking intently at me.

I resumed my narrative.

'I was lighting my pipe when I heard a scream—' A chuckle came from the group behind the lantern.

'I screamed,' said the Little Nugget. 'You bet I screamed! What would you do if you woke up in the dark and found a strong-armed roughneck prising you out of bed as if you were a clam? He tried to get his hand over my mouth, but he only connected with my forehead, and I'd got going before he could switch. I guess I threw a scare into that gink!'

He chuckled again, reminiscently, and drew at his cigarette.

'How dare you smoke! Throw away that cigarette!' cried Mr Abney, roused afresh by the red glow.

'Forget it!' advised the Little Nugget tersely.

'And then,' I said, 'somebody whizzed out from nowhere and hit me. And after that I didn't seem to care much about him or anything else.' I spoke in the direction of my captor. She was still standing outside the circle of light. 'I expect you can tell us what happened, Mrs Sheridan?'

I did not think that her information was likely to be of any practical use, but I wanted to make her speak again.

Her first words were enough. I wondered how I could ever have been in doubt. I knew the voice now. It was one which I had not heard for five years, but one which I could never forget if I lived for ever.

'Somebody ran past me.' I hardly heard her. My heart was pounding, and a curious dizziness had come over me. I was grappling with the incredible. 'I think he went into the bushes.'

I heard Glossop speak, and gathered from Mr Abney's reply; that he had made his suggestion about the telephone once more.

'I think that will be—ah—unnecessary, Mr Glossop. The man has undoubtedly—ah—made good his escape. I think we had all better return to the house.' He turned to the dim figure beside me. 'Ah, Mrs Sheridan, you must be tired after your journey and the—ah unusual excitement. Mrs Attwell will show you where you—in fact, your room.'

In the general movement White must have raised the lamp or stepped forward, for the rays shifted. The figure beside me was no longer dim, but stood out sharp and clear in the yellow light.

I was aware of two large eyes looking into mine as, in the grey London morning two weeks before, they had looked from a faded photograph.