An Isle of Surrey: A Novel. Dowling Richard
that tow-path lead to Camberwell?" asked Crawford.
"Yes," answered the girl, making a gesture to the left.
"Is it much frequented?" asked he in a voice he tried to make commonplace, but from which he could not banish the hint of anxiety.
"O, no, very few people go along it."
"But now, I suppose, people sometimes come from that direction," waving his left hand, "for a walk?"
"Well," said the girl demurely, "the scenery isn't very attractive; but there is nothing to prevent people coming, if they pay the toll."
"O, there is a toll?" he said in a tone of relief, as if the knowledge of such a barrier between him and Camberwell were a source of satisfaction to him.
"Yes; a halfpenny on weekdays and a penny on Sundays."
He leaned further out. The frame of the window shook slightly. "We must have this woodwork fixed," he said a little peevishly. "What building is this here on your left? – a store of some kind with the gates off."
"That's the empty ice-house. It belongs to you, I believe."
"Ah! the empty ice-house. So it is. I never saw an ice-house before."
"It is full of water," said the girl, again drawing on the charwoman's store of local information. "It makes me quite uncomfortable to think of it."
The man, bending out of the window, shuddered, and shook the window-frame sharply. "There seems to be a great deal of water about here, and it doesn't look very ornamental."
"No," said Hetty; "but it's very useful."
Crawford's eyes were still directed to the left, but not at so sharp an angle as to command a view of the vacant icehouse. He was gazing across the head of the island at the tow-path.
Suddenly he drew in with a muttered imprecation; the window-frame shook violently, and a large piece of mortar fell and struck him on the nape of the neck. He sprang back with a second half-uttered malediction, and stood bolt upright a pace from the window, but did not cease to gaze across the head of the island.
Along the tow-path a tall man was advancing rapidly, swinging his arms in a remarkable manner as he walked.
"No, no, not hurt to speak of," he answered, with a hollow laugh, in reply to a question of Layard's, still keeping his eyes fixed on the tow-path visible beyond Boland's Ait. "The mortar has gone down my back. I shall change my coat and get rid of the mortar. My portmanteau has come, I perceive. Thank you, I am not hurt. Good evening for the present," he added, as brother and sister moved towards the door.
Although he did not stir further from the window, they saw he was in haste they should be gone, so they hurried away, shutting the door behind them.
When they had disappeared he went back to the window, and muttered in a hoarse voice: "I could have sworn it was Philip Ray-Philip Ray, her brother, who registered an oath he would shoot me whenever or wherever he met me, and he is the man to keep his word. He lives at Camberwell. It must have been he. If it was he, in a few minutes he will come out on the tow-path at the other end of the island; in two minutes-in three minutes at the very outside-he must come round the tail of the island, and then I can make sure whether it is Philip Ray or not. He will be only half the distance from me that he was before, and there will be light enough to make sure."
He waited two, three, four, five minutes-quarter of an hour, but from behind neither end of the island did the man emerge on the tow-path. There could be no doubt of this, for from where he stood a long stretch of the path was visible north and south beyond the island, and William Crawford's eyes swung from one end of the line to the other as frequently as the pendulum of a clock.
At length, when half-an-hour had passed, and it was almost dark, he became restless, excited, and in the end went down-stairs. In the front room he found Layard on the top of a step-ladder. He said:
"I was looking out of my window, and a man, coming from the northern end of the tow-path, disappeared behind the island, behind Boland's Ait. He has not come back and he has not come out at the other end. Where can he have gone? Is there some way of getting off the tow-path between the two points?" The speaker's manner was forced into a form of pleasant wonder; but there were strange white lines, like lines of fear, about his mouth and the corners of his eyes, "Is there a gate or way off the tow-path?"
"No. The man must have come off the tow path or gone into the water and been drowned," said Layard, not noticing anything peculiar in the other, and answering half-playfully.
"That would be too good," cried Crawford with a start, apparently taken off his guard.
"Eh?" cried Layard, facing round suddenly. He was in the act of driving in a brass-headed nail. The fervour in Crawford's tone caught his ear and made him suspend the blow he was about to deliver.
"Oh, nothing," said the other, with one of his short laughs. "A bad-natured joke. I meant it would be too much of a joke to think a man could be drowned in such a simple way. But this man hid himself behind the island and did not come forth at either end for half-an-hour, and I thought I'd ask you what you thought, as the circumstance piqued me. Good-night."
When he found himself in his own room he closed the window, pulled down the blind, hasped the shutters, and drew the curtains. He looked round on the simple unpretending furniture suspiciously, and muttered:
"He here-if it were he, and I think it was, appearing and disappearing in such a way! He cannot have found me out? Curse him, curse her; ay, curse her! Is not that all over now? She was to blame, too."
He walked up and down the room for an hour.
"If that was Philip Ray, where did he go to? He seems to have vanished. Layard knows every foot of this place. It was Philip Ray, and he did vanish! Could he have seen me and recognised me? or could he have tracked me, and is he now out on that little quay or wharf under my window, waiting for me? Ugh!"
CHAPTER III.
THE PINE GROVES OF LEEHAM
Below London Bridge, and just at the end of the Pool, the Thames makes a sharp bend north, and keeps this course for close on a mile. Then it sweeps in a gentle curve eastward for half a mile; after this it suddenly turns south, and keeps on in a straight line for upwards of a mile. The part of London bounded on three sides by these sections of the river is not very densely populated if the acreage is considered. Much of it is taken up with the vast system of the Mercantile Docks; large spaces are wholly unbuilt on; the South London Canal, its tow-path, and double row of wharves and yards, cover a large area; and one of the most extensive gasworks in the metropolis and a convergence of railway lines take up space to the exclusion of people. There are stretches of this district as lonely by night as the top of Snowdon.
Little life stirs by day on the canal; after dark the waters and the tow-path are as deserted as a village graveyard. Along the railroad by day no human foot travels but the milesman's, and at night the traffic falls off to a mere echo of its incessant mighty roar by day. The gasworks are busy, and glowing and flaming and throbbing all through the hours of gloom and darkness, but people cannot get near them. They are enclosed by high walls on all sides except one, and on that side lies the South London Canal, which crawls and crawls unhastened and unrefreshed by the waters of any lock. The solitude of the tow-path after dark is enhanced at the point where it passes opposite the gasworks by the appearance of life across the water, and the impossibility of reaching that life, touching the human hands that labour there, receiving aid from kindly men if aid were needed. The tow-path at this point is narrow and full of fathomless shadows, in which outcasts, thieves, and murderers might lurk; deep doorways, pilasters, and ruined warehouses, where misery or crime could hide or crouch.
But of all the loneliness by night in this region which is vaguely styled the Mercantile Docks, the deepest, the most affecting, the most chilling is that which dwells in the tortuous uninhabited approaches leading from the docks to the river north and south, and east and west from Deptford to Rotherhithe.
Out of the same spirit of mocking humour which gave the name of Boland's Ait to the little island in the canal, these solitary ways