The movement was but a quiver, dying away as soon as it came. I expected him, at the very least, to turn and open his eyes. But he did nothing of the kind. My impatience returned.
"Twickenham!" I thought it safer to address him by that name. Walls have ears; especially, I fancy, in hotels. "Twickenham! Confound it, man, are you playing the fool with me again?"
No response. Concluding that this was a game which the gentleman before me intended to play in his own fashion, I awaited the issue of events. If he thought it necessary to keep up his character of dying man, and practise the lights and shadows of the role with me as audience, it was out of my power to prevent him. Yet as I watched how, bit by bit, he seemed to return to life; how long the process lasted; and how small the amount of vitality which he returned to seemed to be; I found myself in the curious position of being unable to decide where the sham began and the reality ended. Turning on to his back, apparently with difficulty, he gazed up with what was an astonishingly good imitation of an unseeing gaze.
"Well? As the street boys have it, I hope you"ll know me when you see me again. You do it uncommonly well. The only comment I have to make, if you"ll excuse my making it, is that you do it too well."
What seemed a glimmer of consciousness stole over his skeleton countenance. It lighted up.
"Doug!" he said.
Mr. Babbacombe had not struck me as being corpulent, but it mystified me to think what he had done with the balance of his flesh within the twenty-four hours since I had seen him last. He looked as if he had lost stones; suggesting the possession of a secret for which certain jockeys of my acquaintance would give him all they possess. The voice was excellent: cracked and broken, like that of a man whose physical force is nearly spent.
"Would you mind calling me Mr. Howarth when we are alone?"
"Call you--what? See you----. Might as well ask you--call me--Marquis of Twickenham."
"I am quite willing, when we are in private, to call you Mr.
Babbacombe."
"Call me--what? Mr.--Doug, you"re drunk."
"As usual, you credit me with a condition of mental imbecility for which no degree of drunkenness of which I ever heard could adequately account."
"What--you talking about? Doug, I"m pretty bad."
"You seem to be. I"ve brought the five hundred pounds which you stipulated I should bring if you were not to recover."
"Five hundred pounds? Doug, I haven"t seen that amount of money--Lord knows when."
"No? Then you shall see it now. Here it is--fifty tens. I thought you would prefer to have the notes all small."
I placed them between the wasted fingers, which still remained outside the coverlet. They just closed on them, but that was all. His eyes closed too.
"Too late."
"Too late? What do you mean?"
"What"s the use--money to me now."
"You can have it buried with you."
"Yes--I can. Doug, why do you speak like that?"
"Mr. Babbacombe, might I ask you not to be so thorough?"
An expression of surprise lighted up his features.
"He"s wandering."
"I did not gather, from our conversation yesterday, that it was part of your scheme to pretend to be dying even when we were alone."
The expression of surprise had grown in intensity.
"Doug!"
"My good man, please don"t look at me like that. And do not call me "Doug." Even if you were the person, and in the condition, you pretend to be, I should resent hearing the word come from your lips each second."
"He"s mad!"
It was said with a little gasp, in the most natural way in the world. Reclosing his eyes, if I could believe the evidence of my senses--which, in his case, I doubted if I was ent.i.tled to--he dozed.
I began to understand that Mr. Montagu Babbacombe was even more of an artist than I had given him credit for. As I stood watching, with curious interest, the perfection with which he simulated a sick man"s slumber, I asked myself if, after all, he might not be right, and I wrong. If he chose to continue the performance even when the necessity for acting was removed, why should he not? It might tend to simplify the situation. At least, it would do no harm. If he declined to allow even me to see the mask slipped a little from his face, I had certainly no reason to complain. Later on I could say, with perfect truth, that, so far as I was able to see, he never rallied from the moment I saw him first. Situated as I was likely to be, it would be a comfort to be able to say something that was true.
The misfortune was, that I was not, myself, by any means such an artist as Mr. Babbacombe. I might be able, when in the public eye, to deceive with an air of pa.s.sable candour, but in private I fell short.
I had heard of men who lied with such consistency that, in the end, they deceived themselves. I had not got so far as that. Mr.
Babbacombe, it seemed, could play a part so well that he actually was, for the time, the character he feigned to be. With me it was otherwise. I had not yet grown to love deception for deception"s sake, as the man in front of me--whether he was Babbacombe or Twickenham--seemed to do. It filled me with an illogical sense of rage to perceive how, in this matter, he took it for granted that his point of view would--or should--necessarily be mine. He liked to keep on stealing all the time; I preferred, in private, to pretend that I was an honest man.
However, it certainly was true that the strain of the impersonation lay on him. If he did not choose to allow himself a moment"s relaxation, I had no cause to grumble. I had agreed with him that he should carry out a certain piece of deception. I could hardly complain if he carried out his part of the bargain so well that he was actually in danger of deceiving me.
Only I did wish that he would own up, for a moment, what a rogue he was. Such was my state of nervous tension that, to me, such an admission would have come as a positive relief. I was willing to admit that I was a humbug--between ourselves. Why should he not be willing to do the same? It would have come as a sort of salve to my sense of self-esteem.
Instead, he persisted in that doze--which I was convinced was make-believe. As one might watch a conjuror perform his tricks in the privacy of one"s own apartment, with a feeling of resentment that he should allow no hint to escape him as to how they"re done, so I observed the man in the bed pretend--even to me!--to do the things which I had the best of reasons for knowing he was not really doing. I should like to have constrained him to confession, to have taken him by the shoulders and treated him to a good shaking, so that both the sleep and sickness might have been shaken clean out of him, and he would have had to admit his mummery.
I believe that if I had remained alone with him much longer I should have done it. My fingers itched to handle him. Just, however, as I was about to take him in my grip, the door opened and some one else came in. It was perhaps just as well, if the game was to be played out, that I was not detected in the act of committing an apparently brutal and unprovoked a.s.sault upon the seeming sufferer. Some sort of explanation would have had to be made: I should have had to compel the patient to admit his fraud to save my character. Otherwise my action might have been construed as an attempt to murder at the very least.
The new comer was Reggie. His appearance on the scene I had not expected so soon: nor desired. It had been my intention to coach the patient in certain details of his family history--supposing such coaching to be necessary. It would hardly do for him to be visited by relatives of whom he had never heard. This he had prevented my doing by his determination to act the role of dying man up to the hilt.
Reggie explained what had brought him. He held out the note which had brought me; which I now remembered I had left with Violet.
"Vi has sent me this? what does it mean?"
I moved towards him, glancing towards the sick man, who still feigned slumber. I had hoped to give him a warning look; but the persistence with which he kept his eyes closed rendered my effort futile.
"It means what it says." I spoke in a tolerably loud tone of voice, hoping that the sleeper would have sense enough to pick up such cues as I might give him. "Your brother, my dear Reggie, is here--ill in bed."
"Good gracious!" Reggie"s face expressed a variety of emotions. He glanced from me to the bed; from the bed to me. He dropped his voice.
"Is he--is he really bad?"
"About as bad as he can be. The doctor is of opinion that he may expire at any moment."
The tone in which I said this--for Mr. Babbacombe"s instruction--seemed to strike Reggie as peculiar.
"Is he--asleep?"
"He seems to have just dropped off." Reggie moved closer to the bed. I went with him. He regarded the sleeper with looks of curiosity.
"He looks frightfully queer."