Dead Man's Love. Gallon Tom
the world than a baby of fourteen months, and what smattering of education I had had was pressed then into my uncle's service; I became his clerk.
He lived in a great house near Barnet, and from there he conducted his business. It was a paying business, and although I touched at first only the fringe of it, I came to understand that Zabdiel Blowfield was something of a human spider, gathering into his clutches any number of fools who had money to lose, together with others who wanted money, and were prepared to pay a price for it. He taught me his business, or just so much of it as should make me useful in the drudgery of it; and, as it happened, he taught me too much.
I had ten years of that slavery – ten years, during which I grew to manhood, and to strength and vigour. For while he thought he suppressed me, and while, as a matter of fact, he half-starved me, and dressed me in his own cast-off clothing, and kept my young nose to the grindstone of his business, I contrived, within the last year or so at least, to lead something of a double life. I was young, and that alone shall plead my excuse. If another excuse were wanted, it might be summed up in this: that the world called me – that world that was a glorious uncertainty, of which I knew nothing and longed to know a great deal.
Uncle Zabdiel regarded me as very much of a poor fool; it never entered into his head for a moment to suspect the machine he had taught to do certain mechanical things. But I, who never had a penny for my own, constantly had gold passing through my fingers, and gold spelt a way out into the great world. I was tempted, and I fell; it was quite easy to alter the books.
I had two years of it. They were two years during which I worked as hard as ever during the day, and escaped from that prison when darkness had fallen. I always contrived to get back before the dawn, or before my uncle had come into the place he called his office; and by that time I had changed back into the shabby, apparently broken, creature he knew for his slave. For the rest I did nothing very vicious; but I saw something of the world outside, and I spent what I could get of my uncle's money.
The blow fell, as I might have expected – and that, too, by the merest chance. I had grown reckless; there seemed no possibility of my being found out. But my Uncle Zabdiel happened to light upon a something that made him suspicious, and from that he went to something else. Without saying a word to me, he must have unwound the tangle slowly bit by bit, until it stood out before him clearly; and then he took to watching.
I shall never forget the morning when he caught me. I got into my accustomed window, in those gayer clothes I affected in my brief holidays, and I came face to face with the old man in my room. He was sitting on the side of the bed, with his black skull-cap thrust on the back of his head, and with his chin resting on his stick; and for a long time after I knew the game was up he neither spoke nor moved. As for me, I had had my good time, and I simply wondered in a dull fashion what he was going to do.
"You needn't say anything, Norton Hyde," said Uncle Zabdiel at last. "I know quite as much as you can tell me, and perhaps a little more. You're an ungrateful dog, and like other ungrateful dogs you shall be punished."
"I wanted to live like other men," I said sullenly.
"Haven't I fed you, lodged you, looked after you?" he snapped out. "Where would you have been, but for me?"
"I might have been a better man," I answered him. "I've slaved for you for ten long years, and you've done your best to starve me, body and soul. I've taken your money, but it isn't as much as you'd have had to pay me in those ten years, if I'd been some poor devil of a clerk independent of you!"
"We won't bandy words," said my uncle, getting up from my bed. "Go to bed; I'll decide what to do with you in the morning."
Now, wisely speaking, of course, I ought to have made good my escape that night. But there was a certain bravado in me – a certain feeling, however wrong, that I was justified to an extent in what I had done – for the labourer is worthy of his hire. So I went to bed, and awaited the morning with what confidence I could. Being young, I slept soundly.
I was the only living relative of Zabdiel Blowfield, and one would have thought – one, at least, who did not know him – that he would have shown some mercy. But mercy was not in his nature, and I had wounded the man in that tenderest part of him – the pocket. Incredible as it may seem, I was handed over to justice on a charge of forgery and falsification of books, and in due course I stood my trial, with my uncle as the chief witness against me.
Uncle Zabdiel made a very excellent witness, too, from the point of view of the prosecution. I – Norton Hyde – stood in the dock, I flatter myself, rather a fine figure of a young man, tall, and straight, and dark-haired; the prosecutor – and a reluctant one at that – stood bowed, and old, and trembling, and told the story of my ingratitude. He had brought me up, and he had educated me; he had fed, and clothed, and lodged me; but for him I must have died ignominiously long before. And I had robbed him, and had spent his money in riotous living. He wept while he told the tale, for the loss of the money was a greater thing than most men would suppose.
The limb of the law he had retained for the prosecution had a separate cut at me on his account. According to that gentleman I was a monster; I would have robbed a church; there was scarcely any crime in the calendar of which I would not have been capable. It was plainly suggested that the best thing that could happen to society would be to get me out of the way for as many years as possible.
The judge took up the case on something of the same lines. He preached a neat little sermon on the sin of ingratitude, and incidentally wondered what the youth of the country were coming to in these degenerate days; he left me with confidence to a jury of respectable citizens, who were, I was convinced, every man Jack of them, fathers of families. I was doomed from the beginning, and I refused to say anything in my own defence.
So they packed me off quietly out of the way for ten years; and Uncle Zabdiel, I have no doubt, went back to his old house, and thereafter engaged a clerk at a starvation wage, and kept a pretty close eye upon him. I only know that, so far as I was concerned, he sidled up to me as I was leaving the dock, and whispered, with a leer —
"You'll come out a better man, Norton – a very much better man."
Perhaps I had not realised the tragedy of the business at that time, for it must be understood that I had not in any sense of the word lived. Such small excursions as I had made into life had been but mere dippings into the great sea of it; of life itself I knew nothing. And now they were to shut me away for ten years – or a little less, if I behaved myself with decorum – and after that I was to be given an opportunity to make a real start, if the gods were kind to me.
However, it is fair to say that up to the actual moment of my escape from Penthouse Prison I had accepted my fate with some measure of resignation. I had enough to eat, and work for my hands, and I slept well; in that sense I was a young and healthy animal, with a past that had not been interesting, and a future about which I did not care to think. But as I lay in the wood all that long day better thoughts came to me; I had hopes and desires such as I had not had before. I saw in a mental vision sweet country places, and fair homes, and decent men and women; I was to meet and touch them all some day, when I had worked myself out of this present tangle. Alas! I did not then know how much I was to go through first!
I had lain so long, with but the smallest idea of where I actually was, and with a ravening hunger upon me, that I had actually seen men returning from their work to their homes in the late afternoon before I bestirred myself to think of what I was to do. More than once, as I lay there, I had seen, speeding along the great road above me, motor-cars that annihilated space, and were gone in a cloud of dust. I had a ridiculous feeling that if I were nimble enough I might manage to board one of those, and so get away beyond the reach of pursuit. For always the great prison menaced me, standing as it did within a mile or two of where I lay. I knew that the pursuit must already have started; I wondered that I had not yet seen a warder.
And then came deliverance. You may say it was miraculous, if you will; I can only set down here the fact as it happened. I saw in the distance, winding down a long hill, a grey monster scarcely darker than the road over which it swept, and I knew without the telling that the grey monster was a racing car. As it drew nearer I saw that it had a sharpened front like an inverted boat, and behind that sharpened front crouched a man, with his hands upon the