Elk 01 The Fellowship of the Frog (37 page)

John Bennett turned.

“He is my son,” he said, and with a quick pull loosed the strap.

“You must go on with this, Bennett.” The Governor’s voice was stern and terrible.

“Go on with it?” repeated John Bennett mechanically. “Go on with this? Kill my own son? Are you mad? Do you think I am mad?” He took the boy in his arms, his cheek against the hairy face. “My boy! Oh, my boy!” he said, and smoothed his hair as he had done in the days when Ray was a child. Then, recovering himself instantly, he thrust the boy through the open door into the death chamber, followed him and slammed the door, bolting it.

There was no other doorway except that, to which he had the key, and this he thrust into the lock that it might not be opened from the other side. Ray looked at the bare chamber, the dangling yellow rope, the marks of the trap, and fell back against the wall, his eyes shut, shivering. Then, standing in the middle of the trap, John Bennett hacked the rope until it was severed, hacked it in pieces as it lay on the floor. Then:

Crack, crash!

The two traps dropped, and into the yawning gap he flung the cut rope.

“Father!”

Ray was staring at him; oblivious to the thunderous blows which were being rained on the door, the old man came towards him, took the boy’s face between his hands and kissed him.

“Will you forgive me, Ray?” he asked brokenly. “I had to do this. I was forced to do it. I starved before I did it. I came once…out of curiosity to help the executioner—a broken-down doctor, who had taken on the work. And he was ill…I hanged the murderer. I had just come from the medical school. It didn’t seem so dreadful to me then. I tried to find some other way of making money, and lived in dread all my life that somebody would point his finger at me, and say: ‘There goes Benn, the executioner.’”

“Benn, the executioner!” said Ray wonderingly. “Are you Benn?”

The old man nodded.

“Benn, come out! I give you my word of honour that I will postpone the execution until to-morrow. You can’t stay there.”

John Bennett looked round at the grating, then up to the cut rope. The execution could not proceed. Such was the routine of death that the rope must he expressly issued from the headquarter gaol. No other rope would serve. All the paraphernalia of execution, down to the piece of chalk that marks the “T” on the trap where a man must put his feet, must be punctiliously forwarded from prison headquarters, and as punctiliously returned.

John shot back the bolts, opened the door and stepped out.

The faces of the men in the condemned cell were ghastly. The Governor’s was white and drawn, the prison doctor seemed to have shrunk, and the Sheriff sat on the bed, his face hidden in his hands.

“I will telegraph to London and tell them the circumstances,” said the Governor. “I’m not condemning you for what you’re doing, Benn. It would be monstrous to expect you to have done—this thing.”

A warder came along the corridor and through the door of the cell. And behind him, entering the prison by virtue of his authority, a dishevelled, dust-stained, limping figure, his face scratched, streaks of dried blood on his face, his eyes red with weariness. For a second John Bennett did not recognize him, and then:

“A reprieve, by the King’s own hand,” said Dick Gordon unsteadily, and handed the stained envelope to the Governor.

Throughout the night Ella Bennett lay, half waking, half sleeping. She remembered the doctor coming; she remembered Elk’s urgent request that she should drink the draught he had prepared; and though she had suspected its nature and at first had fought against drinking that milky-white potion, she had at last succumbed, and had lain down on the sofa, determined that she would not sleep until she knew the worst or the best. She was exhausted with the mental fight she had put up to preserve her sanity, and then she had dozed.

She was dimly conscious, as she came back to understanding, that she was lying on a bed, and that somebody had taken off her shoes and loosened her hair. With a tremendous effort she opened her eyes and saw a woman, sitting by a window, reading. The room was intensely masculine; it smelt faintly of smoke.

“Dick’s bed,” she muttered, and the woman put down her book and got up.

Ella looked at her, puzzled. Why did she wear those white bands about her hair, and that butcher-blue wrapper and the white cuffs? She was a nurse, of course. Satisfied with having solved that problem, Ella closed her eyes and went back again into the land of dreams.

She woke again. The woman was still there, but this time the girl’s mind was in order.

“What time is it?” she asked.

The nurse came over with a glass of water, and Ella drank greedily.

“It is seven o’clock,” she said.

“Seven!” The girl shivered, and then, with a cry, tried to rise. “It is evening!” she gasped. “Oh, what happened?”

“Your father is downstairs, miss,” said the nurse. “I’ll call him.”

“Father—here?” She frowned. “Is there any other news?”

“Mr. Gordon is downstairs too, miss, and Mr. Johnson.” The woman was faithfully carrying out the instructions which had been given to her.

“Nobody—else?” asked Ella in a whisper.

“No, miss, the other gentleman is coming to-morrow or the next day—your brother, I mean.”

With a sob the girl buried her face in the pillow. “You are not telling the truth!”

“Oh yes, I am,” said the woman, and there was something in her laugh which made Ella look up.

The nurse went out of the room and was gone a little while. Presently the door opened, and John Bennett came in. Instantly she was in his arms, sobbing her joy.

“It is true, it is true, daddy!”

“Yes, my love, it is true,” said Bennett. “Ray will be here to-morrow. There are some formalities to be gone through; they can’t secure a release immediately, as they do in story-books. We are discussing his future. Oh, my girl, my poor girl!”

“When did you know, daddy?”

“I knew this morning,” said her father quietly.

“Were you—were you dreadfully hurt?” she asked. He nodded.

“Johnson wants to give Ray the management of Maitlands Consolidated,” he said. “It would be a splendid thing for Ray. Ella, our boy has changed.”

“Have you seen him?” she asked in surprise.

“Yes, I saw him this morning.”

She thought it was natural that her father should have seen him, and did not question him as to how he managed to get behind the jealously guarded doors of the prison.

“I don’t think Ray will accept Johnson’s offer,” he said. “If I know him as he is now, I am sure he will not accept. He will not take any ready-made position; he wants to work for himself. He is coming back to us, Ella.”

She wanted to ask him something, but feared to hurt him.

“Daddy, when Ray comes back,” she said after a long silence, “will it be possible for you to leave this—this work you hate so much?”

“I have left it, dear,” he replied quietly. “Never again—never again—never again, thank God!”

She did not see his face, but she felt the tremor that passed through the frame of the man who held her.

Downstairs, the study was blue with smoke. Dick Gordon, conspicuously bandaged about the head, something of his good looks spoiled by three latitudinal scratches which ran down his face, sat in his dressing-gown and slippers, a rig pipe clenched between his teeth, the picture of battered contentment.

“Very good of you, Johnson,” he said. “I wonder whether Bennett will take your offer. Honestly, do you think he’s competent to act as the manager of this enormous business?”

Johnson looked dubious.

“He was a clerk at Maitlands. You can have no knowledge of his administrative qualities. Aren’t you being just a little too generous?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps I am,” said Johnson quietly. “I naturally want to help. There may be other positions less important, and perhaps, as you say, Ray might not care to take any quite as responsible.”

“I’m sure he won’t,” said Dick decidedly.

“It seems to me,” said Elk, “that the biggest job of all is to get young Bennett out of the clutches of the Frogs. Once a Frog, always a Frog, and this old man is not going to sit down and take his beating like a little gentleman. We had a proof of that yesterday morning. They shot at Johnson in this very street.”

Dick took out his pipe, sent a cloud of blue smoke toward the haze that lay on the room.

“The Frog is finished,” he said. “The only question now is, what is the best and most effective way to make an end? Balder is caught; Hagn is in gaol; Lew Brady, who was one of their most helpful agents, though he did not hold any executive position—Lew is dead; Lola—”

“Lola is through.” It was the American who spoke. “She left this morning for the United States, and I took the liberty of facilitating her passage—there remains Frog himself, and the organization which Frog controls. Catch him, and you’ve finished with the gang.”

John Bennett came back at that moment, and the conversation took another turn; soon after, Joshua Broad and Johnson went away together.

“You have not told Ella anything, Mr. Bennett?”

“About myself?—no. Is it necessary?”

“I hope you will not think so,” said Dick quietly. “Let that remain your own secret, and Ray’s secret. It has been known to me for a very long time. The day Elk told me he had seen you coming from King’s Cross station, and that a burglary had been committed, I saw in the newspapers that a man had been executed in York Prison. And then I took the trouble to look up the files of the newspapers, and I found that your absences had certainly coincided with burglaries—and there are so many burglaries in England in the course of a year that it would have been remarkable if they had not coincided—there were also other coincidences. On the day the murder was committed at Ibbley Copse, you were in Gloucester, and on that day Waldsen, the Hereford murderer, was executed.”

John Bennett hung his head.

“You knew, and yet…” he hesitated.

Dick nodded.

“I knew none of the circumstances which drove you to this dreadful business, Mr. Bennett,” he said gently. “To me you are an officer of the law—no more and no less terrible than I, who have helped send many men to the scaffold. No more unclean than the judge who sentences them and signs the warrant for their death. We are instruments of Order.”

Ella and her father stayed that night at Harley Terrace, and in the morning drove down to Paddington Station to meet the boy. Neither Dick nor Elk accompanied them.

“There are two things which strike me as remarkable—” said Elk. “One is, that neither you nor I recognized Bennett.”

“Why should we?” asked Dick. “Neither you nor I attend executions, and the identity of the hangman has always been more or less unknown except to a very few people. If he cares to advertise himself, he is known. Bennett shrank from publicity, avoided even the stations of the towns where the executions took place, and usually alighted at some wayside village and tramped into the town on foot. The chief warder at Gloucester told me that he never arrived at the gaol until midnight before an execution. Nobody saw him come or go.”

“Old man Maitland must have recognized him.”

“He did,” nodded Dick. “At some period Maitland was in gaol, and it is possible for prisoners, especially privileged prisoners, to catch a glimpse of the hangman. By ‘privileged prisoners’ I mean men who, by reason of their good conduct, were allowed to move about the gaol freely. Maitland told Miss Bennett that he had been in ‘quod,’ and I am certain that that is the true explanation. All Bennett’s official letters came to him at Dorking, where he rented a room for years. His mysterious journeys to town were not mysterious to the people of Dorking, who did not know him by sight or name.”

To Elk’s surprise, when he came back to Harley Terrace, Dick was not there. His servant said that his master had had a short sleep, had dressed and gone out, and had left no message as to where he was going. Dick did not, as a rule, go out on these solitary expeditions, and Elk’s first thought was that he had gone to Horsham. He ate his dinner, and thought longingly of his comfortable bed. He did not wish to retire for the night until he had seen his chief.

He made himself comfortable in the study, and was fast asleep, when somebody shook him gently by the shoulder. He looked up and saw Dick.

“Hullo!” he said sleepily. “Are you staying up all night?”

“I’ve got the car at the door,” said Dick. “Get your topcoat. We’re going to Horsham.”

Elk yawned at the clock.

“She’ll be thinking of bed,” he protested.

“I hope so,” said Dick, “but I have my fears. Frog was seen on the Horsham Road at nine o’clock to-night.”

“How do you know?” asked Elk, now wide awake. “I’ve been shadowing him all the evening,” said Dick, “but he slipped me.”

“You’ve been watching Frog?” repeated Elk slowly.

“Do you know him?”

“I’ve known him for the greater part of a month,” said Dick Gordon. “Get your gun!”

There is a happiness which has no parallel in life—the happiness which comes when a dear one is restored.

Ray Bennett sat by his father’s chair, and was content to absorb the love and tenderness which made the room radiant. It seemed like a dream to be back in this cosy sitting-room with its cretonnes, its faint odour of lavender, the wide chimney-place, the leaded windows, and Ella, most glorious vision of all. The rainstorm that lashed the window-panes gave the comfort and peace of his home a new and a more beautiful value. From time to time he fingered his shaven face absently. It was the only sure evidence to him that he was awake and that this experience belonged to the word of reality.