"Come now, let this pretence be ended," I said. "You"re as sane as I am--you have all your wits about you. Your brain is clear; you remember everything."
We were in a quiet lane near the house, and there was no one in sight.
He clasped his hands, and raised his face--a changed face, stern-set, grim and relentless--to the sky. "Dear G.o.d!" he exclaimed pa.s.sionately, "I do remember! I do remember!"
"What?" I asked.
He looked at me for a moment intently, as if debating within himself whether to trust me; then at last he laid a hand tremulously on my arm, and stared up into my face.
"I have shammed, sir," he said. "I have lied; I have plotted. I shall not fail now; I have come out of the darkness into the light. I have come to life!"
His excitement, now that he had once let himself go, was tremendous; he seemed a bigger and a stronger man than I had imagined. He stood there, shaking his clenched fists above his head, and crying out that he was alive, and almost weeping with excitement.
"What are you going to do?" I asked him, breathlessly.
"I am going to kill Bardolph Just, as he killed my young master, Mr.
Gregory Pennington! I have tried twice; the third time I shall succeed!"
he replied.
CHAPTER XV.
I BID THE DOCTOR FAREWELL.
I did my best to calm the man Capper. I feared that in his excitement he might betray his purpose to someone else, and someone not so well disposed towards him. I soothed him as well as I could, and presently got him by the arm and walked him away. For a long way we went in silence, until at last, having climbed to Hampstead Heath, I led him into a by-path there, and presently sat beside him on a seat, prepared to listen to his story. He was calmer by this time; the only evidence of the pa.s.sions, so long suppressed and now working in him, was shown when, every now and then, he ground his right fist into the palm of his other hand, as though in that action he ground the face of his enemy.
"I want you to tell me, if you will, sir," he said at last, "where the man has gone. I was a fool when I lost him; I have not done my work well."
"I will tell you presently, when I have heard your story," I said. "You have made a threat of murder. I don"t think it would be quite wise on my part to let you loose on anyone in your present frame of mind."
"Then hear me, and judge for yourself, sir," he answered solemnly.
"What I know is this," I said. "I know that Mr. Gregory Pennington went to the doctor"s house on one particular night, and that he hanged himself in a room there. I, who found him hanging, found you in the room, apparently dazed."
"I have to think back a long way," said Capper, leaning forward on the seat, and resting his elbows on his knees, and his head in his hands.
"It"s all so much like a dream, and yet all so clear. Let me try to tell you, sir, what happened that night."
He sat for a long time in that att.i.tude, as though striving to piece together all his recollections of that time; as though even yet he feared that his memory might play him false.
"I don"t need to say anything about myself, sir, except just this: that Mr. Pennington picked me out of the gutter, and made a man of me. If ever one man worshipped another on this earth, I worshipped him; I would have died for him. He made me his servant, and yet his friend. He knew that I had been something better in the days before he found me; he made me something better again. He was quite alone in the world, and his income was administered by a trustee, a lawyer. That"s all you need know about it. We wandered about all over the world. He thought nothing of starting off for the other side of the world, taking me with him always, at a moment"s notice--which, perhaps, accounts for the fact that no one has made any enquiries about him.""
I did not answer that; perhaps the time was coming when I should have to tell him the sequel to what he was now telling me.
"Then he met the young lady--Miss Debora Matchwick--and he used often to go and see her. One night he came home raging, and told me that Dr. Just had turned him out of the house, and had told him he was not to go there again. He was very much in love with the young lady, and the affair upset him a lot. But he told me that he had made up his mind to go there as often as he thought fit; he meant to defy the doctor."
He paused so long again that I was almost minded to speak to him; he seemed to be brooding. All at once he sat upright, and folded his arms, and went on again. His voice had taken on a new sternness.
"I took to going with him--or rather following him without his knowledge," he said slowly. "I didn"t like the look of the doctor; I knew that he meant mischief. Night after night, when Mr. Pennington went to the house, I hid myself in the grounds, and waited and watched; then I followed him home again. You see, sir, he was everything to me, all I had in the world; it drove me mad almost to think that anything might happen to him. So the time went on, until at last that night arrived when, as it seemed, I fell asleep and forgot everything. But I remember that night now perfectly."
In his rising excitement he got up, and began to pace about, stopping every now and then to clap his hands together softly, and to nod his head as some point in the story recurred to his memory. At last he came back to me, and sat down, and faced me.
"He had told me before he went out that he intended to see the doctor that night. "I"ll have a turn-up with him," he said to me, and laughed.
I dreaded that; I made up my mind that I would be very near to him, indeed, that night. It was difficult, because if once he had discovered that I was following him, and watching him like that, he might have been angry, and might have ordered me to remain at home. So, you see, I had to be discreet. I went ahead of him on that occasion, and I concealed myself in the grounds quite near to the house. There I waited, and waited so long that I came almost to think that he had changed his mind, and would not come at all."
"Did you see no one else in the grounds?" I asked, thinking of my own unceremonious coming on that wonderful night.
He stared at me, and shook his head. "No one," he said. "Presently Mr.
Pennington arrived, and the young lady crept out of the house to meet him; I saw them talking together for a long time. Then I saw Mr.
Pennington go towards the house, and enter it."
I remembered how I had lain in the gra.s.s that night, and had seen the same scene he now described, although from a different point of view. I knew that Capper must have been between them and the house, whilst I, for my part, had been on the other side of them, so that they were between me and this man.
"Now, I will tell you, as well as I can recollect, exactly what happened," he said, speaking slowly, and ticking off his points one by one on his fingers. "I was so nervous that night--nervous for him, I mean--that I thought, sir, I would go into the house, so as to see that all was well with him. Everything was very silent, except that I could hear the murmur of voices--of men talking. You will understand, sir, that I did not know what the house was like, nor my way about it; but I found a door unfastened at the back, and I went in. I went towards where the voices were sounding, and I recognised Mr. Pennington"s voice, and then the doctor"s. Both the voices were loud and angry; I guessed that they were quarrelling."
"And what did you do then?" I asked him quickly.
"G.o.d help me!" he cried, wringing his hands. "I could not find the room.
The place was in darkness, and I was afraid to make a noise, lest I should disturb some of the servants, and perhaps be turned out. I groped my way about among the pa.s.sages, opening first one door and then another, and hearing the voices now near to me, and now further away; it was as though I had been in a maze. And then the voices ceased suddenly, and I heard the sound of a blow."
"What sort of blow?" I asked him breathlessly.
"It was like the sound of a weapon striking a man"s head. It was followed by a sort of quick cry; and then there was silence. In my agitation I must have turned away from the spot; and I had now nothing to guide me, as the voices had guided me before. I could only stand there, waiting, and hoping to hear something. It was all so horrible, and I so helpless, that I wonder I did not go mad then. I was near to it when presently I heard a sound as though someone were dragging a heavy body across a room. I began again to move in the direction of that sound, and presently came to a door, and after listening to another sound I did not understand, opened it, and went in. I must be quick now to tell you what I saw, for it is at this point that the darkness falls upon me, and I seem to sink down and down into the depths that swallowed me up for so long a time."
I was really afraid that he might, indeed, forget before he could tell me; I watched him eagerly. After but a little pause he went on again, and now the horror was growing in his face, and stamping it, so that I could not take my eyes from him.
"As I opened the door of the room the doctor had his back to me, and he was hauling on something. I did not understand at first, until I saw that he was pulling on a rope that ran over a hook in the ceiling. That which he pulled was hidden from me by himself; I could not see what it was. It all happened in a second, because as I opened the door he swung away from me, still clinging to the rope--and then, dear G.o.d!--I saw what it was. Only for a flash did I see up there before me the dead face of my master--the master I loved, and for whom I would have given my life; then, as I put up my hand to hide the sight, everything went from me; and I seemed to fall, as I have said, into some great blackness, with all my life blotted out! That," he said, with a little, quick, helpless gesture of the hands--"that is all."
I felt my blood run cold at the horror of his tale; the whole scene seemed to be enacted before me, as though I had myself been present.
"And did you really forget everything until a little time ago?" I asked.
"Everything, sir," he a.s.sured me solemnly. "I was like one groping in the dark. People I had known I knew again--as with Miss Debora; but I could not remember anything else. I had a vague idea that I had lost my master somewhere about that house; that made me cling to it. The rest was a blank. And then one day, when I saw the doctor raise his stick to strike a man down, it was as though something had been pa.s.sed across my brain, and I remembered. If I can make myself clear, sir," went on Capper eagerly, "it was as though I had gone back to that night; that was why I sprang at the doctor, and wanted to kill him."
"And you tried again in the train," I reminded him. "But why on each occasion did you sham madness?--why did you pretend you were still the simple creature everyone supposed you to be?"
"Because I knew that if once Dr. Just guessed that I remembered the events of that night, he would take means to have me shut up; I might have been taken for a lunatic, and disposed of for the rest of my life.
I knew that if I could once deceive him into believing that my mind was gone, he would not be suspicious of me. Unfortunately for my plan, I gave the game away when I tried to throw him out of that train."
"How was that?" I asked.
"I had managed things very well up to that point," he said. "I knew pretty well how the trains ran, and I knew that if I could throw him out on the line at a certain spot between the stations it would look like an accident, and the train on the other line would cut him to pieces. I was so sure of success that I threw off that disguise I had worn so long, and I cried out to him that I remembered he had killed my master, and that I meant to kill him. I dare say you remember, sir, that you asked him what I had said, and he would not tell you."
I remembered it distinctly, and I remembered how the doctor had watched that little drooping figure in the corner of the railway carriage, and how he had refused to tell me what the man had said before attacking him.
"After that, you see, there was no more chance of doing the thing secretly," went on Capper, speaking of the appalling business in the most easy and natural fashion. "He shut me out of the house; he would not let me come near him. Twice I followed him, and the second time I lost him. Now, sir,"--he clasped his hands, and looked at me with an agony of entreaty in his eyes--"now, sir, will you let me know where I can find him?"
"Answer me one question first," I said, looking into his eager eyes. "If you kill this man, what will become of you?"