He took out a white handkerchief and dried her cheeks gently for her, and gave her a parting kiss. But the Archbold's patience was exhausted: a door opened nearly opposite, and there she stood yellow with jealousy and sombre as night with her ebon brows. At sight of this lowering figure Hannah uttered a squawk, and fled with cheeks red as fire. Alfred, not aware of Mrs. Archbold's smouldering passion, and little dreaming that jealous anguish and rage stood incarnate before him, burst out laughing like a mischievous boy! On this she swept upon him, and took him by both shoulders, and awed him with her lowering brows close to his. “You ungrateful wretch,” she said violently, and panted.
His colour rose. “Ungrateful? That I am not madam. Why do you call me so?”
“You are—you are. What have I done to you that you run from me to the very servants? However, she shall be packed off this very night, and you to thank for it.”
This was the way to wound the generous youth. “Now it is you that are ungenerous,” he said. “What harm has the poor girl done? She had a virtuous movement and pitied me for the heartless fraud I suffer by; that is all. Pray, do you never pity me?”
“Was it this virtuous movement set her kissing you?” said the Archbold, clenching her teeth as if the word stung her, like the sight.
“She didn't, now,” said Alfred; “it was I kissed her.”
“And yet you pretend to love your Julia so truly?”
“This is no place for that sacred name, madam. But be sure I have no secrets from her, and kiss nobody she would not kiss herself.”
“She must be a very accommodating young lady.”
At this insult Alfred rose pale with anger, and was about to defy his monitor mortally; but the quick-witted woman saw and disarmed him. In one moment, before ever he could speak, she was a transformed creature, a penitent; she put her hands together supplicatingly, and murmured—
“I didn't mean it; I respect her; and your love for her; forgive me, Alfred: I am so unhappy, oh forgive me.”
And behold she held his hand between her soft, burning palms, and her proud head sank languidly on his shoulder, and the inevitable tears ran gently.
Morals apart, it was glorious love-making.
“Bother the woman,” thought Alfred.
“Promise me not to do it again,” she murmured, “and the girl shall stay.”
“Oh, lord, yes, I promise; though I can't see what it matters to you.”
“Not much, cruel boy, alas! but it matters to her; for——” She kissed Alfred's hand gently, and rose to her feet and moved away; but at the second step turned her head sudden as a bird and finished her sentence—“if you kiss her before me, I shall kill her before you.”
Here was a fresh complication! The men had left off blistering, torturing, and bullying him; but his guardian angels, the women, were turning up their sleeves to pull caps over him, and plenty of the random scratches would fall on him. If anything could have made him pine more to be out of the horrid place, this voluptuous prospect would. He hunted everywhere for Brown. But he was away the day with a patient. At night he lay awake for a long time, thinking how he should open the negotiation. He shrank from it. He felt a delicacy about bribing Beelzebub's servant to betray him.
As Hannah had originated the idea, he thought he might very well ask her to do the dirty work of bribing Brown, and he would pay her for it; only in money, not kisses. With this resolution he sank to sleep, and his spirit broke prison: he stood with Julia before the altar, and the priest made them one. Then the church and the company and daylight disappeared, and her own sweet low moving voice came thrilling, “My own, own, own,” she murmured. “I love you ten times more for all you have endured for me;” and with this her sweet lips settled on his like the dew.
Impartial sleep flies at the steps of the scaffold and the gate of Elysium: so Alfred awoke at the above; but doubted whether he was quite awake; for two velvet lips seemed to be still touching his. He stirred, and somebody was gone like the wind, with a rustle of flying petticoats, and his door shut in a moment. It closed with a catch-lock; this dastardly vision had opened it with her key, and left it open to make good her retreat if he should awake. Alfred sat up in bed indignant, and somewhat fluttered. “Confound her impudence,” said he. But there was no help for it; he grinned and bore it, as he had the blisters, and boluses, &c., rolled the clothes round his shoulders, and off to the sleep of the just again. Not so the passionate hypocrite, who, maddened by a paroxysm of jealousy, had taken this cowardly advantage of a prisoner. She had sucked fresh poison from those honest lips, and filled her veins with molten fire. She tossed and turned the livelong night in a high fever of passion, nor were the cold chills wanting of shame and fear at what she had done.
In the morning, Alfred remembered this substantial vision, and determined to find out which of those two it was. “I shall know by her looks,” said he; “she won't be able to meet my eye.” Well, the first he saw was Mrs. Archbold. She met his eye full with a mild and pensive dignity. “Come, it is not you,” thought Alfred. Presently he fell in with Hannah. She wore a serene, infantine face, the picture of unobtrusive modesty. Alfred was dumbfoundered. “It's not this one, either,” said he. “But then, it must. Confound her impudence for looking so modest.” However, he did not speak to her; he was looking out for a face that interested him far more: the weather-beaten countenance of Giles Brown. He saw him once or twice, but could not get him alone till the afternoon. He invited him into his room: and when he got him there, lost no time. “Just look me in the face, Brown,” said he quietly. Brown looked him in the face.
“Now, sir, am I mad or sane?”
Brown turned his head away. Alfred laughed. “No, no, none of your tricks, old fellow: look me in the face while you answer.”
The man coloured. “I can't look a gentleman like you in the face, and tell him he is mad.”
“I should think not. Well, now; what shall I give you to help me escape?”
“Hush! don't mention that, sir; it's as much as my place is worth even to listen to you.”
“Well! then I must give you as much as your place is worth. Please to calculate that, and name the figure.”
“My place! I wouldn't lose it for a hundred pounds.”
“Exactly. Then I'll give you a hundred guineas.”
“And how am I to get my money, sir?”
“The first time you are out, come to Albion Villa, in Barkington, and I'll have it all ready for you.”
“And suppose you were to say, 'No: you didn't ought ever to have been confined'?”
“I must trouble you to look in my face again, Mr. Brown. Now, do you see treason, bad faith, avarice, ingratitude, rascality in it?”
“Not a grain of 'em,” said Brown, with an accent of conviction. “Well, now, I'll tell you the truth; I can read a gent by this time: and I'm no more afeared for the money than if I had it in my hand. But ye see, my stomach won't let me do it.”
This was a sad disappointment; so sudden, too. “Your stomach?” said Alfred ruefully. “'What do you mean?”
“Ay, my stomach. Wouldn't your stomach rise against serving a man that had done you the worst turn one man can do another—been and robbed you of your sweetheart?”
Alfred stared with amazement.
Brown continued, and now with some emotion: “Hannah Blake and I were very good friends till you came, and I was thinking of asking her to name the day; but now she won't look at me. 'Don't come teasing me,' says she, 'I am meat for your master.' It's you that have turned the girl's head, sir.”
“Bother the women!” said Alfred cordially. “Oh, what plagues they are! And how unjust you are, to spite me for the fault of another. Can I help the fools from spooning upon me?” He reflected a moment then burst out: “Brown, you are a duffer, a regular duffer. What, don't you see your game is to get me out of the place? If you do, in forty-eight hours I shall be married to my Julia, and that dumpling-faced girl will be cured. But if you keep me here, by Gee, sir, I'll make hot love to your Hannah, boiling hot, hotter than ever was—out of the isles of Greece. Oh do help me out, and I'll give you the hundred pounds, and I'll give Hannah another hundred pounds, on condition she marries you: and, if she won't marry you, she shan't have a farthing, only a good hiding.”
Brown was overpowered by his maniac's logic. “You have a head,” said he; “there's my hand; I'll go in, if I die for it.”
They now put their heads together over the means. Brown's plan was to wait, and wait, for an opportunity. Alfred's was to make one this very night.
“But how can I?” said Brown. “I shan't have the key of your room. I am not on watch in your part to-night.”
“Borrow Hannah's.”
“Hannah's? She has got no key of the male patients rooms.”
“Oh yes, she has; of mine, at all events.”
“What makes you think that, sir?” said Brown suspiciously.
Alfred didn't know what to say: he could not tell him why he felt sure she had a key.
“Just go quietly and ask her for it” said he: “don't tell her I sent you, now.”
Brown obeyed, and returned in half-an-hour with the key of the vacant bedroom, where the hobbles and chains were hidden on the arrival of the justices.
She tells me this is the only key she has of any room in this corridor. “But dear heart,” said Brown, “how quicksighted the women are. She said, says she, 'If it is to bring sorrowful true lovers together again, Giles, or the like of that I'll try and get the key you want off Mrs. Archbold's bunch, though I get the sack for it,' says she. 'I know she heaves them in the parlour at night' says Hannah. She is a trump, you must allow.”
Alfred coloured up. He suspected he had been unjust.
“She is a good, kind, single-hearted girl,” said he; “and neither of you shall find me ungrateful.”
It was evident by the alacrity Brown now showed, that he had got his orders from Hannah.
It was agreed that Alfred should be down at night in his clothes, ready to seize the right moment; that Hannah should get the key, and watch the coast clear, and let him out into the corridor; and Brown get him down by a back stairs, and out on the lawn, There he would find a ladder close by the wall, and his own arms and legs must do the rest.
And now Alfred was a changed creature: his eye sparkled; he walked on air, and already sniffed the air of liberty.
After tea Brown brought in some newspapers, and made Alfred a signal, previously agreed on, that the ladder was under the east wall. He went to bed early, put on his tweed shooting-jacket and trousers, and lay listening to the clock with beating heart.
At first, feet passed to and fro from time to time. These became less frequent as the night wore on.
Presently a light foot passed, stopped at the door, and made a sharp scratch on it with some metal instrument.
It was the key. The time was not ripe to use it, but good Hannah had taken this way to let him know she had got it.
This little scratch outside his door, oh it made his heart leap and thrill. One great difficulty was overcome. He waited, and waited, but with glowing, hopeful heart; and at last a foot came swiftly, the key turned, and Hannah opened the door. She had a bull's-eye lantern.
“Take your shoes in your hand,” she whispered, “and follow me.”
He followed her. She led him in and out, to the door of the public room belonging to the second-class patients. Then she drew her whistle, and breathed very softly. Brown answered as softly from the other end. He was waiting at the opposite door.
“All right,” said she; “the dangerous part is over.” She put a key into the door, and said very softly, “Good-bye.”
“God bless you, Hannah,” said Alfred, with deep emotion. “God in heaven bless you for this!”
“He will, He does,” said the single-hearted girl, and put her other hand to her breast with a great gulp. She opened the door slowly. “Good-bye, dear. I shall never see you again.”
And so these two parted; for Hannah could not bear the sight of Giles at that moment. He was welcome to Alfred, though, most welcome, and conducted him by devious ways to the kitchen, lantern in hand.
He opened the kitchen door softly, and saw two burly strangers seated at the table, eating with all their souls, and Mrs. Archbold standing before the fire, but looking towards him: for she had heard his footsteps ever so far off.
The men looked up, and saw Alfred. They rose to their feet, and said, “This will be the gentleman, madam?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Archbold.
“Your servant, sir,” said the man very civilly. “If you are ready we are.”
CHAPTER XXXIV
SAMPSON'S placard was on Barkington walls, and inside the asylum Alfred was softening hearts and buying consciences, as related; so, in fact, he had two strings to his bow.
But mark how strangely things turn; these two strings got entangled. His father, alarmed by the placard, had called at the pawnbroker's shop, and told him he must move Alfred directly to a London asylum. Baker raised objections; Mr. Hardie crushed them with his purse, i.e., with his son's and victim's sweetheart's father's money. So then, as Baker after all could not resist the project, but only postpone it for a day or two, he preferred to take a handsome present, and cooperate. He even connived at Mr. Hardie's signing the requisite name to the new order. This the giddy world calls forgery; but, in these calm retreats, far from the public's inquisitive eye, it goes for nothing. Why, Mrs. Archbold had signed Baker's name and Dr. Bailey's more than a hundred several times to orders, statements, and certificates; depriving Englishmen of their liberty and their property with a gesture of her taper fingers; and venting the conventional terms, “Aberration,” “Exaltation,” “Depression,” “Debility,” “Paralysis,” “Excitable,” “Abnormal,” as boldly and blindly as any male starling in the flock.
On the very night, then, of Alfred's projected escape, two keepers came down from Dr. Wycherley's asylum to Silverton station: Baker met them and drove them to Silverton House in his dog-cart. They were to take Alfred up by the night train; and, when he came into the kitchen with Brown, they suspected nothing, nor did Baker or Cooper, who presently emerged from the back kitchen. Brown saw, and recovered his wits partially. “Shall I go for his portmanteau, sir?” stammered he, making a shrewd and fortunate guess at what was up. Baker assented; and soon after went out to get the horse harnessed. On this Mrs. Archbold, pale, sorrowful, and silent hitherto, beckoned Alfred into the back kitchen, and there gave him his watch and his loose money. “I took care of them for you,” said she; “for the like have often been stolen in this place. Put the money in your shoes; it may be useful to you.”
He thanked her somewhat sullenly; for his disappointment was so deep and bitter that small kindnesses almost irritated him.
She sighed. “It is cruel to be angry with me,” she said: “I am not the cause of this; it is a heavier blow to me than to you. Sooner or later you will be free—and then you will not waste a thought on me, I fear—but I must remain in this odious prison without your eyes and your smile to lighten me, yet unable to forget you. Oh, Alfred, for mercy's sake, whisper me one kind word at parting; give me one kind look to remember and dote upon.”
She put out both hands as eloquently as she spoke, and overpowered his prudence so far that he took her offered hands—they were as cold now as they were burning hot the last time—and pressed them, and said—
“I shall be grateful to you while I live.”
The passionate woman snatched her hands away. “Gratitude is too cold for me,” she cried; “I scorn even yours. Love me or hate me.”
He made no reply. And so they parted.
“Will you pledge your honour to make no attempt at escape on the road?” asked the pawnbroker on his return.
“I'll see you d——d first,” replied the prisoner.
On this he was handcuffed, and helped into the dog-cart.
They went up to town by the midnight train; but, to Alfred's astonishment and delight did not take a carriage to themselves.
However, station after station was passed, and nobody came into their carriage. At last they stopped at a larger station, and a good many people were on the platform: Alfred took this opportunity and appealed in gentle but moving terms to the first good and intelligent face he saw. “Sir,” said he, “I implore your assistance.”
The gentleman turned courteously to him. The keepers, to Alfred's surprise, did not interrupt.
“I am the victim of a conspiracy, sir; they pretend I am mad: and are taking me by force to a madhouse, a living tomb.”
“You certainly don't appear to be mad,” said the gentleman.
The head keeper instantly showed him the order and a copy of the certificates.
“Don't look at them, sir,” cried Alfred; “they are signed by men who were bribed to sign them. For pity's sake, sir, judge for yourself. Test my memory, my judgment, by any question you please. Use your own good sense; don't let those venal rogues judge for you.”
The gentleman turned cold directly.
“I could not take on me to interfere,” said he. The unsworn affidavits had overpowered his senses. He retired with a frigid inclination. Alfred wrung his handcuffed hands, and the connecting chain rattled.
The men never complained: his conduct was natural; and they knew their strength. At the next station he tested a snob's humanity instead of a gentleman's. He had heard they were more tender-hearted. The answer was a broad grin, repeated at intervals.
Being called mad was pretty much the same thing as being mad to a mind of this class: and Alfred had admitted he was called mad.
At the next station he implored a silvery-haired old gentleman. Old age, he had heard, has known griefs, and learned pity.
The keeper showed the certificates.
“Ah!” said Senex; “poor young man. Now don't agitate yourself. It is all for your good. Pray go quietly. Very painful, very painful.” And he hobbled away as fast as he could. It is by shirking the painful some live to be silvery old.
Next he tried a policeman. Bobby listened to him erect as a dart.
The certificates were shown him.
He eyed them and said sharply, “All right.” Nor could Alfred's entreaties and appeals to common sense attract a word or even a look from him. Alfred cried “Help! murder! If you are Englishmen, if you are Christians, help me.”
This soon drew a crowd round him, listening to his fiery tale of wrong, and crying “Shame, shame! Let him go.” The keepers touched their heads, winked, and got out and showed the certificates; the crowd melted away like wax before those two suns of evidence (unsworn). The train moved on.
It was appalling. How could he ever get free? Between his mind and that of his fellows there lay a spiritual barrier more impassible than the walls of fortified cities.
Yet, at the very next station, with characteristic tenacity of purpose, he tried again; for he saw a woman standing near, a buxom country woman of forty. Then he remembered that the Naked Eye was not yet an extinct institution among her sex. He told her his tale, and implored her to use her own eyes. She seemed struck, and did eye him far more closely than the men had: and told the keepers they ought to be ashamed of themselves; he was no madman, for she had seen madmen. They showed her the certificates.
“Oh, I am no scholar!” said she contemptuously; “ye can't write my two eyes out of my head.”
The keeper whipped off Alfred's cap and showed his shaven crown.
“La! so he is,” said she, lowering her tone; “dear heart, what a pity. And such a pretty young gentleman.” And after that all he could say only drew the dew of patient pity to her eyes.
The train went on, and left her standing there, a statue of negative clemency. Alfred lost heart. He felt how impotent he was. “I shall die in a madhouse,” he said. He shivered in a corner, hating man, and doubting God.
They reached Dr. Wycherley's early in the morning. Alfred was shown into a nice clean bedroom, and asked whether he would like to bathe or sleep. “Oh, a bath,” he said; and was allowed to bathe himself. He had not been long in the water when Dr. Wycherley's medical assistant tapped at the door, and then entered without further ceremony—a young gentleman with a longish down on his chin, which, initiated early in the secrets of physiology, he was too knowing to shave off and so go to meet his trouble. He came in looking like a machine, with a note-book in his hand, and stood by the bath side dictating notes to himself and jotting them down.
“Six contusions: two on the thorax, one on the abdomen, two on the thighs, one near the patella; turn, please.” Alfred turned in the water. “A slight dorsal abrasion; also of the wrists; a severe excoriation of the ankle. Leg-lock, eh?”
“Yes.”
“Iron leg-lock. Head shaved. Large blister. Good! Any other injuries external or internal under old system?”
“Yes, sir, confined as a madman though sane, as you, I am sure, have the sense to see.”
“Oh, never mind that; we are all sane here—except the governor and I.”
He whipped out, and entered the condition of the new patient's body with jealous minuteness in the case-book. As for his mind, he made no inquiry into that: indeed he was little qualified for researches of the kind.
At breakfast Alfred sat with a number of mad ladies and gentlemen, who by firmness, kindness, and routine, had been led into excellent habits: the linen was clean and the food good. He made an excellent meal, and set about escaping: with this view he explored the place. Nobody interfered with him; but plenty of eyes watched him. The house was on the non-restraint system. He soon found this system was as bad for him as it was good for the insane. Non-restraint implied a great many attendants, and constant vigilance. Moreover, the doors were strong, the windows opened only eight inches, and that from the top: their framework was iron, painted like wood, &c. It was next to impossible to get into the yard at night: and then it looked quite impossible to get any further, for the house was encompassed by high walls.
He resigned all hope of escape without connivance. He sounded a keeper; the man fired at the first word. “Come, none of that, sir; you should know better than tempt a poor man.”
Alfred coloured to the eyes and sighed deeply. To have honour thrown in his face, and made the reason for not aiding him to baffle a dishonourable conspiracy! But he took the reproof so sweetly, the man was touched, and by-and-bye, seeing him deeply dejected, said good-naturedly, “Don't be down on your luck, sir. If you are really better, which you don't look to have much the matter now, why not write to the Commissioners and ask to be let out?”
“Because my letters will be intercepted.”
“Ay, to your friends; but not to the Commissioners of Lunacy. Not in this house, any way.”
“God bless you!” cried Alfred impetuously. “You are my benefactor; you are an honest fellow; give me your hand.”
“Well, why not? Only you mustn't excite yourself. Take it easy.” (Formula.)
“Oh, no cant among friends!” said Alfred: “wouldn't you be excited at the hope of getting out of prison?”
“Well, I don't know but I might. Bound I am as sick of it as you are.”
Alfred got paper and sketched the letter on which so much depended. It took him six hours. He tore up two; he cooled down the third, and condensed it severely: by this means, after much thought, he produced a close and telling composition. He also weeded it of every trait and every term he had observed in mad people's talk, or the letters they had shown him. So there was no incoherency, no heat, no prolixity, no “spies,” no “conspiracy,” no italics. A simple, honest, earnest story, with bitter truth stamped on every line; a sober, strong appeal from a sore heart but hard head to the arbiters of his fate.
To the best of my belief no madman, however slightly touched, or however cunning, ever wrote a letter so gentle yet strong, so earnest yet calm, so short yet full, and withal so lucid and cleanly jointed as this was. And I am no contemptible judge; for I have accumulated during the last few years a large collection of letters from persons deranged in various degrees, and studied them minutely, more minutely than most Psychologicals study anything but Pounds, Shillings, and Verbiage.
The letter went, and he hoped but scarcely expected an answer by return of post. It did not come. He said to his heart, “Be still;” and waited. Another day went by; and another: he gnawed his heart and waited: he pined, and waited on. The Secret Tribunal, which was all a shallow legislature had left him, “took it easy.” Secret Tribunals always do.
But, while the victim-suitor longed and pined and languished for one sound from the voice of Justice and Humanity, and while the Secret Tribunal, not being in prison itself all this time, “took it easy,” events occurred at Barkington that bade fair to throw open the prison doors and bring father and son, bride and bridegroom, together again under one roof.
But at what a price.
CHAPTER XXXV
AT sight of Sampson's placard Mr. Hardie was seized with a tremor that suspended the razor in mid air: he opened the window, and glared at the doctor's notice.
At this moment he himself was a picture: not unlike those half cleaned portraits the picture restorers hang out as specimens of their art.
“Insolent interfering fool,” he muttered, and began to walk the room in agitation. After a while he made a strong effort, shaved the other half, and dressed slowly, thinking hard all the time. The result was, he went out before breakfast (which he had not done for years), and visited Mr. Baker—for what purpose has been already shown.
On his return, Jane was waiting breakfast. The first word to him was: “Papa, have you seen?”
“What, the Reward!” said he indifferently. “Yes, I noticed it at our door as I came home.”
Jane said it was a very improper and most indelicate interference in their affairs, and went on to say with heightened colour: “I have just told Peggy to take it down.
“Not for the world!” cried Mr. Hardie, losing all his calmness real or feigned; and he rang the bell hastily. On Peggy's appearing, he said anxiously, “I do not wish that Notice interfered with.”
“I shouldn't think of touching it without your order, sir,” said she quietly, and shot him a feline glance from under her pale lashes.
Jane coloured, and looked a little mortified: but on Peggy's retiring, Mr. Hardie explained that, whether judicious or not, it was a friendly act of Dr. Sampson's; and to pull down his notice would look like siding with the boy against those he had injured: “Besides,” said he, “why should you and I burk inquiry? Ill as he has used me, I am his father, and not altogether without anxiety. Suppose those doctors should be right about him, you know?”
Jane had for some time been longing to call at Albion Villa and sympathise with her friend; and now curiosity was superadded: she burned to know whether the Dodds knew of or approved this placard. She asked her father whether he thought she could go there with propriety. “Why not?” said he cheerfully, and with assumed carelessness.
In reality it was essential to him that Jane should visit the Dodds. Surrounded by pitfalls, threatened with a new and mysterious assailant in the eccentric, but keen and resolute Sampson, this artful man, who had now become a very Machiavel—constant danger and deceit had so sharpened and deepened his great natural abilities—was preparing amongst other defences a shield; and that shield was a sieve; and that sieve was his daughter. In fact, ever since his return, he had acted and spoken at the Dodds through Jane, but with a masterly appearance of simplicity and mere confidential intercourse. At least I think this is the true clue to all his recent remarks.
Jane, a truthful, unsuspicious girl, was all the fitter instrument of the cunning monster. She went and called at Albion Villa, and was received by Edward, Mrs. Dodd being upstairs with Julia, and in five minutes she had told him what her father, she owned, had said to her in confidence. “But,” said she, “the reason I repeat these things is to make peace, and that you may not fancy there is any one in our house so cruel, so unchristian, as to approve Alfred's perfidy. Oh, and papa said candidly he disliked the match, but then he disliked this way of ending it far more.”
Mrs. Dodd came down in due course, and kissed her; but told her Julia could not see even her at present. “I think, dear,” said she, “in a day or two she will see you; but no one else: and for her sake we shall now hurry our departure from this place, where she was once so happy.”
Mrs. Dodd did not like to begin about Alfred; but Jane had no such scruples; she inveighed warmly against his conduct, and ere she left the house, had quite done away with the faint suspicion Sampson had engendered, and brought both Mrs. Dodd and Edward back to their original opinion that the elder Hardie had nothing on earth to do with the perfidy of the younger.
Just before dinner a gentleman called on Edward, and proved to be a policeman in plain clothes. He had been sent from the office to sound the ostler at the “White Lion,” and, if necessary, to threaten him. The police knew, though nobody else in Barkington did, that this ostler had been in what rogues call trouble, twice, and, as the police can starve a man of the kind by blowing on him, and can reward him by keeping dark, he knows better than withhold information from them.
However, on looking for this ostler, he had left his place that very morning; had decamped with mysterious suddenness.
Here was a puzzle.
Had the man gone without noticing the reward? Had somebody outbid the reward? Or was it a strange coincidence, and did he after all know nothing?
The police thought it was no coincidence, and he did know something; so they had telegraphed to the London office to mark him down.
Edward thanked his visitor; but, on his retiring, told his mother he could make neither head nor tail of it; and she only said, “We seem surrounded by mystery.”
Meantime, unknown to these bewildered ones, Greek was meeting Greek only a few yards off.
Mr. Hardie was being undermined by a man of his own calibre, one too cautious to communicate with the Dodds, or any one else, till his work looked ripe.
The game began thus: a decent mechanic, who lodged hard by, lounging with his pipe near the gate of Musgrove Cottage, offered to converse with old Betty. She gave him a rough answer; but with a touch of ineradicable vanity must ask Peggy if she wanted a sweetheart, because there was a hungry one at the gate: “Why: he wanted to begin on an old woman like me.” Peggy inquired what he had said to her.
“Oh, he begun where most of them ends—if they get so far at all: axed me was I comfortable here; if not, he knew a young man wanted a nice tidy body to keep house for him.”
Peggy pricked up her ears; and, in less than a quarter of an hour, went for a box of lucifers in a new bonnet and clean collar. She tripped past the able mechanic very accidentally, and he bestowed an admiring smile on her, but said nothing—only smoked. However, on her return, he contrived to detain her, and paid her a good many compliments, which she took laughingly and with no great appearance of believing them. However, there is no going by that: compliments sink: and within forty-eight hours the able mechanic had become a hot wooer of Peggy Black, always on the look-out for her day and night, and telling her all about the lump of money he had saved, and how he could double his income, if he had but a counter, and tidy wife behind it. Peggy gossiped in turn, and let out amongst the rest that she had been turned off once, just for answering a little sharply; and now it was the other way; her master was a trifle too civil at times.
“Who could help it?” said the able mechanic rapturously; and offered a pressing civility, which Peggy fought off.
“Not so free, young man,” said she. “Kissing is the prologue to sin.”
“How do you know that?” inquired the able mechanic, with the sly humour of his class.
“It is a saying,” replied Peggy demurely.
At last, one night, Mr. Green the detective, for he it was, put his arm round his new sweetheart's waist, and approached the subject nearest his heart. He told her he had just found out there was money enough to be made in one day to set them up for life in a nice little shop; and she could help in it.
After this inviting preamble, he crept towards the L. 14,000 by artful questions; and soon elicited that there had been high words between Master and Mr. Alfred about that very sum: she had listened at the door and heard. Taking care to combine close courtship with cunning interrogatories, he was soon enabled to write to Dr. Sampson, and say that a servant of Mr. Hardie's was down on him, and reported that he carried a large pocket-book in his breast-pocket by day; and she had found the dent of it under his pillow at night—a stroke of observation very creditable in an unprofessional female: on this he had made it his business to meet Mr. Hardie in broad day, and sure enough the pocket-book was always there. He added, that the said Hardie's face wore an expression which he had seen more than once when respectable parties went in for felony: and altogether thought they might now take out a warrant and proceed in the regular way.
Sampson received this news with great satisfaction: but was crippled by the interwoven relations of the parties.
To arrest Mr. Hardie on a warrant would entail a prosecution for felony, and separate Jane and Edward for ever.
He telegraphed Green to meet him at the station; and reached Barkington at eight that very evening. Green and he proceeded to Albion Villa, and there they held a long and earnest consultation with Edward; and at last, on certain conditions, Mr. Green and Edward consented to act on Sampson's plan. Green, by this time, knew all Mr. Hardie's out-of-door habits; and assured them that at ten o'clock he would walk up and down the road for at least half an hour, the night being dry. It wanted about a quarter to ten, when Mrs. Dodd came down, and proposed supper to the travellers. Sampson declined it for the present; and said they had work to do at eleven. Then, making the others a signal not to disclose anything at present he drew her aside and asked after Julia.
Mrs. Dodd sighed—“She goes from one thing to another, but always returns to one idea; that he is a victim, not a traitor.”
“Well, tell her in one hour the money shall be in the house.”
“The money! What does she care?”
“Well, say we shall know all about Alfred by eleven o'clock.”
“My dear friend, be prudent,” said Mrs. Dodd. “I feel alarmed: you were speaking almost in a whisper when I came in.”
“Y' are very obsairvant: but dawnt be uneasy; we are three to one. Just go and comfort Miss Julee with my message.”
“Ah, that I will,” she said.
She was no sooner gone than they all stole out into the night, and a pitch dark night it was; but Green had a powerful dark lantern to use if necessary.
They waited, Green at the gate of Musgrove Cottage, the other two a little way up the road.
Ten o'clock struck. Some minutes passed without the expected signal from Green; and Edward and Sampson began to shiver. For it was very cold and dark, and in the next place they were honest men going to take the law into their own hands and the law sometimes calls that breaking the law. “Confound him!” muttered Sampson; “if he does not soon come I shall run away. It is bitterly cold.”
Presently footsteps were heard approaching; but no signal: it proved to be only a fellow in a smock-frock rolling home from the public-house.
Just as his footsteps died away a low hoot like a plaintive owl was heard, and they knew their game was afoot.
Presently, tramp, tramp, came the slow and stately march of him they had hunted down.
He came very slowly, like one lost in meditation: and these amateur policemen's hearts beat louder and louder, as he drew nearer and nearer.
At last in the blackness of the night a shadowy outline was visible; another tramp or two, it was upon them.
Now the cautious Mr. Green had stipulated that the pocketbook should first be felt for, and, if not there, the matter should go no farther. So Edward made a stumble and fell against Mr. Hardie and felt his left breast: the pocket-book was there:—“Yes,” he whispered: and Mr. Hardie, in the act of remonstrating at his clumsiness, was pinned behind, and his arms strapped with wonderful rapidity and dexterity. Then first he seemed to awake to his hunger, and uttered a stentorian cry of terror, that rang through the night and made two of his three captors tremble.
“Cut that” said Green sternly, “or you'll get into trouble.”
Mr. Hardie lowered his voice directly: “Do not kill me, do not hurt me,” he murmured; “I am but a poor man now. Take my little money; it is in my waistcoat pocket; but spare my life. You see I don't resist.”
“Come, stash your gab, my lad,” said Green contemptuously, addressing him just as he would any other of the birds he was accustomed to capture. “It's not your stiff that is wanted, but Captain Dodd's.”
“Captain Dodd's?” cried the prisoner with a wonderful assumption of innocence.
“Ay, the pocket-book,” said Green; “here, this! this!” He tapped on the pocket-book, and instantly the prisoner uttered a cry of agony, and sprang into the road with an agility no one would have thought possible but Edward and Green soon caught him, and, the Doctor joining, they held him, and Green tore his coat open.
The pocket-book was not there. He tore open his waistcoat; it was not in the waistcoat: but it was sewed to his very shirt on the outside.
Green wrenched it away, and bidding the other two go behind the prisoner and look over his shoulder, unseen themselves, slipped the shade of his lantern.
Mr. Hardie had now ceased to struggle and to exclaim; he stood sullen, mute, desperate; while an agitated face peered eagerly over each of his shoulders at the open pocket-book in Green's hands, on which the lantern now poured a narrow but vivid stream of light.