The Camera Fiend by E. W. Hornung (the first e reader TXT) 📕

She asked if he had no more cartridges, and he said he had a few loose in his waistcoat pocket; he had thrown away the box. “Then my uncle might have put in a fresh one while you were asleep.”

“Why should he?”

“I don't know, but it sounds quite as possible as the other.”

“I'll soon tell you if he did!” cried Pocket. “There were fourteen in the box to start with, because I counted them, and we only shot away one at the Knaggses' before we were cobbed. That left thirteen—six in the revolver and seven in my pocket. There are your six, and here's one, two, three, four—and three's seven!”

He swept them over the cloth like crumbs, for her to count them for herself, while he looked on with flaming cheeks and wagging tongue. He was beginning to see what it all meant now, but still only what it meant to him and his. He could look his people in the face again; that was the burden of his loud thanksgiving. He was as sure of his [pg 236] innocence as though the dead man had risen to prove it.

“Very well,” said Phillida, briskly; “then it's all the more reason you should go this minute, and catch the very first train home.”

And in her sudden anxiety to see him safely off, she was for helping him on with the overcoat he had brought down again with his bag; but he followed her out slowly, and he would not turn his back.

“I can't leave you now,” he said; and she knew that he saw it from her side at last.

“Why not?”

“Because the whole thing's altered! I'm not going to leave you with a man like that!”

So Pocket, without a moment's thought either for her immediate feelings or the ultimate consequences to himself; and yet with an unconscious air of sacrifice more wounding than his actual words. She would have flung open the door, and ordered him out, but he got his back to it first. So her big eyes blazed at him instead.

“You're very kind!” she cried. “But suppose I don't believe a word you say against my uncle behind his back?”

“I shall wait and say it to his face. That's another reason for waiting.”

“Do you think you're the person to judge him—a boy like you?”

“I don't say I am. I only say that print——”

“How do you know he took the negative?”

“I don't, but——”

“But you jump to conclusions like a baby!” cried the girl, too quick for him in following up a confusing advantage. “I never heard anybody like you for flying from one wild notion to another; first you say he must have made you fire, though you own you were walking in your sleep with a loaded revolver, and then you're sure you never fired at all, simply because you find the revolver fully loaded after days and days! Then you find a photograph that needn't necessarily be what we thought it, that my uncle needn't have taken even if it was; but you jump to another conclusion about him, and you dare to speak of him to me as though you knew every horrid thing you chose to think! As if you knew him and I didn't! As if he hasn't been kind and good to me for years and years—and kind to you—far too kind——”

The strained voice broke, tears were running down her face, and in it and them there was more sincerity. Grief, and not anger, was the well of those bitter tears. And it was in simple supplication, not imperiously any more, that she pointed to the door when speech failed her. The boy's answer was to go close up to her [pg 238] instead. “Will you come with me?” he asked hoarsely.

She shook her head; she was past surprise as well as indignation; she could only shake her head.

“My people would be as good to you as ever he was,” urged Pocket extravagantly. “They'd understand, and you'd stay with us, Phillida! You might live with us altogether!”

She smiled very faintly at that.

“Oh, Phillida, can't you see that they'd do anything for you after all we've been through together? And I, oh! there's nothing I wouldn't do if only you'd come with me now this minute! I know there's a train about ten, and I know where we could borrow the money on the way. Come, Phillida, get on your things and come away from all this horror!”

He had gone on, even into details, encouraged by the tolerance or apathy which had allowed him to go on at all. He took it for indecision; but, whatever it was, she shook it off and declared once for all that she would never leave Dr. Baumgartner, even if everything was true about him, and he as mad as that would make him out.

“But he is!” cried Pocket, with most eager conviction. “That's the only possible explanation, and you'd believe it fast enough if you'd heard all he said to me that first night, and been with [pg 239] me in the dark-room when he developed his negative of the man he said I shot! You'd see how it all fits in, and how this other negative this morning simply shows he was at the bottom of that other affair as well! Of course he's mad; but that's the very reason why I can't go and leave you with him.”

“He would be as he's always been to me.”

“I believe he would,” said honest Pocket.

“Then why don't you go away and leave us?”

“Because I can't.”

“Because you won't!”

“Very well, because I won't and never will! But, mind you, it'll be your fault if anything happens to either of us after this!”

He only meant it as a last argument, though he did resent her fatal obstinacy, and all the obligations which it imposed upon himself. He stood chained in fetters of her forging, as it were to the stake, but he was prepared to stand there like a man, and he did not deserve the things she said to him in a fresh paroxysm of unreasonable wrath. He might be a baby, but he was not a complete coward, or simply trying to make her miserable, as she declared; neither, on this occasion, was he thinking only of himself. But Phillida seemed suddenly to realise that, for she broke off with a despairing little cry, and ran sobbing up the stairs.