There was a dead silence! Crawley returned to their old relation, and was cowed by the natural ascendency of the greater spirit.
“You need not look like a girl at me,” said Meadows, “most likely it won't come to that. It is not easy to beat me, and I shall try every move man's wit can devise—this last,” said he, in a voice of iron, touching the pistol as it lay on the table.
There was another pause. Then Meadows rose and said calmly: “You look tired, you shall have a bottle of my old port; and my own heart is staggered, but it is only for a moment.” He struck his hand upon his breast, and walked slowly from the room. And Crawley heard his step descend to the hall, and then to the cellar; and the indomitable character of the man rang in his solid tread.
Crawley was uneasy. “Mr. Meadows is getting wildish; it frightens me to see such a man as him burst out like that. He is not to be trusted with a loaded pistol. Ah! and I am in his secrets, deep in his secrets; great men sweep away little folk that know too much. I never saw him with a pistol before.” All this passing rapidly through his head, Crawley pounced on the pistol, took off the caps, whipped out a little bottle, and poured some strong stuff into the caps that loosened the detonating powder directly; then with a steel pen he picked it all out and replaced the caps, their virtue gone, before Mr. Meadows returned with two bottles; and the confederates sat in close conclave till the gray of morning broke into the room.
The great man gave but few orders to his subordinate, for this simple reason, that the game had fallen into his own hands.
Still there was something for Crawley to do. He was to have an officer watching to arrest Will Fielding on the old judgment should he, which was hardly to be expected, come to kick up a row and interrupt the wedding. And to-morrow he was to take out a writ against his “father-in-law.” Mr. Meadows played a close game. He knew that things are not to be got when they are wanted. His plan was to have everything ready that might be wanted long before it was wanted.
But most of the night passed in relation of what had already taken place, and Crawley was the chief speaker, and magnified his services. He related from his own point of view all that I have told, and Meadows listened with all his soul and intelligence.
At the attack on Mr. Levi, Meadows chuckled. “The old heathen,” said he, contemptuously, “I have beat him anyway.”
“By the way, sir, have you seen anything of him?” asked Crawley.
“No.”
“He is not come home, then.”
“Not that I know of; have you any reason to think he has?”
“No, only he left the mine directly after they pelted him; but he would not leave the country any the more for that, and money to be made in it by handfuls.”
“Now, Crawley, go and get some sleep. A cold bath for me and then on horseback. I must breakfast at Grassmere.”
“Great man, sir! great man! You will beat them yet, sir. You have beat Mr. Levi. Here we are in his house; and he driven away to lay his sly old bones at the Antipodes. Ha! ha! ha!”
The sun came in at the window, and the long conference broke up, and, strange to say, it broke into three. Crawley home to sleep. Meadows to Grassmere. Isaac Levi to smoke an Eastern pipe, and so meditate with more tranquil pulse how to strike with deadliest effect these two, his insolent enemies.
Siste viator—and guess that riddle.
CHAPTER LXXXI.
ISAAC LEVI, rescued by George Fielding, reached his tent smarting with pain and bitter insult; he sat on the floor pale and dusty, and anathematized his adversaries in the Hebrew tongue. Wrath still boiling in his heart, he drew out his letters and read them. Then grief mingled with his anger. Old Cohen, his friend and agent and coeval, was dead. Another self dead.
Besides the hint that this gave him to set his house in order, a distinct consideration drew Isaac now to England. He had trusted much larger interests to old Cohen than he was at all disposed to leave in the hands of Cohen's successors, men of another generation, “progeniem vitiosiorem,” he sincerely believed.
Another letter gave him some information about Meadows that added another uneasiness to those he already felt on George's account. Hence his bitter disappointment when he found George gone from the mine, the date of his return uncertain. Hence, too, the purchase of Moore's horses, and the imploring letter to George—measures that proved invaluable to that young man, whose primitive simplicity and wise humility led him not to question the advice of his elder, but obey it.
And so it was that, although the old Jew sailed home upon his own interests, yet during the voyage George Fielding's assumed a great importance, direct and incidental. Direct, because the old man was warm with gratitude to him; indirect, because he boiled over with hate of George's most dangerous enemy. And, as he neared the English coast, the thought that though he was coming to Farnborough he could not come home, grew bitterer and bitterer, and then that he should find his enemy and his insulter in the very house sacred by the shadows of the beloved and dead!!
Finding in Nathan a youth of no common fidelity and shrewdness, Isaac confided in him; and Nathan, proud beyond description of the confidence bestowed on him by one so honored in his tribe, enlisted in his cause with all the ardor of youth tempered by Jewish address.
Often they sat together on the deck, and the young Jewish brain and the old Jewish brain mingled and digested a course of conduct to meet every imaginable contingency; for the facts they at present possessed were only general and vague.
The first result of all this was that these two crept into the town of Farnborough at three o'clock one morning; that Isaac took out a key and unlocked the house that stood next to Meadows' on the left hand; that Isaac took secret possession of the first floor, and Nathan open but not ostentatious possession of the ground-floor, with a tale skillfully concocted to excite no suspicion whatever that Isaac was in any way connected with his presence in the town. Nathan, it is to be observed, had never been in Farnborough before.
The next morning they worked. Nathan went out, locking the door after him, to execute two commissions. He was to find out what the young Cohens were doing, and how far they were likely to prove worthy of the trust reposed in their father; and what Susan Merton was doing, and whether Meadows was courting her or not. The latter part of Nathan's task was terribly easy.
The young man came home late at night, locked the door, made a concerted signal, and was admitted to the senior presence. He found him smoking his Eastern pipe. Nathan with dejected air told him that he had good news; that the Cohens not only thought themselves wiser than their father, which was permissible, but openly declared it, which he, though young, had observed to be a trait confined to very great fools.
“It is well said, my son,” quoth Isaac, smoking calmly, “and the other business?”
“Oh, master!” said Nathan, “I bring still worse tidings of her. She is a true Nazarite, a creature without faith. She is betrothed to the man you hate, and whom I, for your sake, hate even to death.”
They spoke in an Eastern dialect, which I am paraphrasing here and translating there, according to the measure of my humble abilities. Isaac sucked his pipe very fast; this news was a double blow to his feelings. “If she be indeed a Nazarite without faith, let her go; but judge not the simple hastily. First, let me know how far woman's frailty is to blame; how far man's guile—for not for nothing was Crawley sent out to the mine by Meadows. Let me consider;” and he smoked calmly again.
After a long silence, which Nathan was too respectful to break, the old man gave him his commission for to-morrow. He was to try and discover why Susan Merton had written no letters for many months to George; and why she had betrothed herself to the foe. “But reveal nothing in return,” said Isaac, “neither ask more than three questions of any one person, lest they say, 'Who is this that being a Jew asks many questions about a Nazarite maiden, and why asks he them?'”
At night Nathan returned full of intelligence. She loved the young man Fielding. She wrote letters to him and received letters from him, until gold was found in Australia. But after this he wrote to her no more letters, wherefore her heart was troubled.
“Ah! and did she write to him?”
“Yes! but received no answer, nor any letter for many months.”
“Ah!” (puff!) (puff!)
“Then came a rumor that he was dead, and she mourned for him after the manner of her people many days. Verily, master, I am vexed for the Nazarite maiden, for her tale is sad. Then came a letter from Australia, that said he is not dead, but married to a stranger. Then the maiden said: 'Behold now this twelve months he writes not to me, this then is true'; and she bowed her head, and the color left her cheek. Then this Meadows visited her, and consoled her day by day. And there are those who confidently affirm that her father said often to her, 'Behold now I am a man stricken in years, and the man Meadows is rich'; so the maiden gave her hand to the man, but whether to please the old man her father, or out of the folly and weakness of females, thou, O Isaac, son of Shadrach, shalt determine; seeing that I am young, and little versed in the ways of women, knowing this only by universal report, that they are fair to the eye but often bitter to the taste.”
“Aha!” cried Isaac, “but I am old, O Nathan, son of Eli, and with the thorns of old age comes one good fruit, 'experience.' No letters came to him, yet she wrote many. None came to her, yet he wrote many. All this is transparent as glass—here has been fraud as well as guile.”
Nathan's eye sparkled. “What is the fraud, master?”
“Nay, that I know not, but I will know!”
“But how, master?”
“By help of thine ears, or my own!”
Nathan looked puzzled. So long as Mr. Levi shut himself up a close prisoner on the first floor what could he hear for himself?
Isaac read the look and smiled. He then rose, and, putting his finger to his lips, led the way to his own apartments. At the staircase-door, which even Nathan had not yet passed, he bade the young man take off his shoes; he himself was in slippers. He took Nathan into a room, the floor of which was entirely covered with mattresses. A staircase, the steps of which were covered with horsehair, went by a tolerably easy slope and spiral movement nearly up to the cornice. Of this cornice a portion about a foot square swung back on a well-oiled hinge, and Isaac drew out from the wall with the utmost caution a piece of gutta-percha piping, to this he screwed on another piece open at the end, and applied it to his ear.
Nathan comprehended it all in a moment. His master could overhear every word uttered in Meadows' study. Levi explained to him that ere he left his old house he had put a new cornice in the room he thought Meadows would sit in, a cornice so deeply ornamented that no one could see the ear he left in it, and had taken out bricks in the wall of the adjoining house and made the other arrangements they were inspecting together. Mr. Levi further explained that his object was simply to overhear and counteract every scheme Meadows should form. He added that he never intended to leave Farnborough for long. His intention had been to establish certain relations in that country, buy some land, and return immediately; but the gold discovery had detained him.
“But, master,” said Nathan, “suppose the man had taken his business to the other side of his house?”
“Foolish youth,” replied Isaac, “am I not on both sides of him!!”
“Ah! What, is there another on the other?” Isaac nodded.
Thus, while Nathan was collecting facts, Isaac had been watching, “patient as a cat, keen as a lynx,” at his ear-hole, and heard—nothing.
Now the next day Nathan came in hastily long before the usual hour. “Master, another enemy is come—the man Crawley! I saw him from the window; he saw not me. What shall I do?”
“Keep the house all day. I would not have him see you. He would say, 'Aha! the old Jew is here, too.'” Nathan's countenance fell. He was a prisoner now as well as his master.
The next morning, rising early to prepare their food, he was surprised to find the old man smoking his pipe down below.
“All is well, my son. My turn has come. I have had great patience, and great is the reward.” He then told him with natural exultation the long conference he had been secretly present at between Crawley and Meadows—a conference in which the enemy had laid bare, not his guilt only, but the secret crevice in his coat of mail. “She loves him not!” cried Levi, with exultation. “She is his dupe! With a word I can separate them and confound him utterly.”
“Oh, master!” cried the youth eagerly, “speak that word to-day, and let me be there and hear it spoken if I have favor in your eyes.”
“Speak it to-day!” cried Levi, with a look of intense surprise at Nathan's simplicity. “Go to, foolish youth!” said he; “what, after I have waited months and months for vengeance, would you have me fritter it away for want of waiting a day or two longer? No, I will strike, not the empty cup from his hand, but the full cup from his lips. Aha! you have seen the Jew insulted and despised in many lands; have patience now and you shall see how he can give blow for blow; ay! old, and feeble, and without a weapon, can strike his adversary to the heart.”
Nathan's black eye flashed. “You are the master, I the scholar,” said he. “All I ask is to be permitted to share the watching for your enemy's words, since I may not go abroad while it is day.”
Thus the old and young lynx lay in ambush all day. And at night the young lynx prowled, but warily, lest Crawley should see him; and every night brought home some scrap of intelligence.
To change the metaphor, it was as though while the Western spider wove his artful web round the innocent fly, the Oriental spider wove another web round him, the threads of which were so subtle as to be altogether invisible. Both East and West leaned with sublime faith on their respective gossamers, nor remembered that “Dieu dispose.”
CHAPTER LXXXII.
MEADOWS rode to Grassmere, to try and prevail with Susan to be married on Thursday next, instead of Monday. As he rode he revolved every argument he could think of to gain her compliance. He felt sure she was more inclined to postpone the day than to advance it, but something told him his fate hung on this: “These two men will come home on Monday. I am sure of it. Ay, Monday morning, before we can wed. I will not throw a chance away; the game is too close.” Then he remembered with dismay that Susan had been irritable and snappish just before parting yester eve—a trait she had never exhibited to him before. When he arrived, his heart almost failed him, but after some little circumlocution and excuse he revealed the favor, the great favor, he was come to ask. He asked it. She granted it without the shade of a demur. He was no less surprised than delighted, but the truth is that very irritation and snappishness of yesterday was the cause of her consenting; her conscience told her she had been unkind, and he had been too wise to snap in return. So now he benefited by the reaction and little bit of self-reproach. For do but abstain from reproaching a good girl who has been unjust or unkind to you, and ten to one if she does not make you the amemde by word or deed—most likely the latter, for so she can soothe her tender conscience without grazing her equally sensitive pride. Poor Susan little knew the importance of the concession she made so easily.
Meadows galloped home triumphant. But two whole days now between him and his bliss! And that day passed and Tuesday passed. The man lived three days and nights in a state of tension that would have killed some of us or driven us mad; but his intrepid spirit rode the billows of hope and fear like a petrel. And the day before the wedding it did seem as if his adverse fate got suddenly alarmed and made a desperate effort and hurled against him every assailant that could be found. In the morning came his mother, and implored him ere it was too late to give up this marriage. “I have kept silence, yea even from good words,” said the aged woman; “but at last I must speak. John, she does not love you. I am a woman and can read a woman's heart; and you fancied her long before George Fielding was false to her, if false he ever was, John.”
The old woman said the whole of this last sentence with so much meaning that her son was stung to rage, and interrupted her fiercely: “I looked to find all the world against me, but not my own mother. No matter, so be it; the whole world shan't turn me, and those I don't care to fight I'll fly.”
And he turned savagely on his heel and left the old woman there shocked and terrified by his vehemence. She did not stay there long. Soon the scarlet cloak and black bonnet might have been seen wending their way slowly back to the little cottage, the poor old tidy bonnet drooping lower than it was wont. Meadows came back to dinner; he had a mutton-chop in his study, for it was a busy day. While thus employed there came almost bursting into the room a man struck with remorse—Jefferies, the recreant postmaster.
“Mr. Meadows, I can carry on this game no longer, and I won't for any man living!” He then in a wild, loud, and excited way went on to say how the poor girl had come a hundred times for a letter, and looked in his face so wistfully, and once she had said: “Oh, Mr. Jefferies, do have a letter for me!” and how he saw her pale face in his dreams, and little he thought when he became Meadows' tool the length the game was to be carried.
Meadows heard him out; then simply reminded him of his theft, and assured him with an oath that if he dared to confess his villainy—
“My villainy?” shrieked the astonished postmaster.
“Whose else? You have intercepted letters—not I. You have abused the public confidence—not I. So if you are such a fool and sneak as to cut your throat by peaching on yourself, I'll cry louder than you, and I'll show you have emptied letters as well as stopped them. Go home to your wife, and keep quiet, or I'll smash both you and her.”
“Oh, I know you are without mercy, and I dare not open my heart while I live; but I will beat you yet, you cruel monster. I will leave a note for Miss Merton, confessing all, and blow out my brains to-night in the office.”
The man's manner was wild and despairing. Meadows eyed him sternly. He said with affected coolness: “Jefferies, you are not game to take your own life.”
“Ain't I?” was the reply.
“At least I think not.”
“To-night will show.”
“I must know that before night,” cried Meadows, and with the word he sprang on Jefferies and seized him in a grasp of iron, and put a pistol to his head.
“Ah! no! Mr. Meadows. Mercy! mercy!” shrieked the man, in an agony of fear.
“All right,” said Meadows, coolly putting up the pistol. “You half imposed on me, and that is something for you to brag of. You won't kill yourself, Jefferies; you are not the stuff. Give over shaking like an aspen, and look and listen. You are in debt. I've bought up two drafts of yours—here they are. Come to me to-morrow, after the wedding, and I will give you them to light your pipe with.”
“Oh, Mr. Meadows, that would be one load off my mind.”
“You are short of cash, too; come to me—after the wedding, and I'll give you fifty pounds cash.”
“You are very liberal, sir. I wish it was in a better cause.”
“Now go home, and don't be a sneak and a fool—till after the wedding, or I will sell the bed from under your wife's back, and send you to the stone-jug. Be off.”
Jefferies crept away, paralyzed in heart, and Meadows, standing up, called out in a rage: “Are there any more of you that hope to turn John Meadows? then come on, come a thousand strong, with the devil at your back—and then I'll beat you!” And for a moment the respectable man was almost grand; a man-rock standing braving earth and heaven.
“Hist! Mr. Meadows.” He turned, and there was Crawley. “A word, sir. Will Fielding is in the town, in such a passion.”
“Come to stop the wedding?”
“He was taking a glass of ale at the 'Toad and Pickax,' and you might hear him all over the yard.”
“What is he going to do?”
“Sir, he has bought an uncommon heavy whip; he was showing it in the yard. 'This is for John Meadows' back,' said he, 'and I will give it him before the girl he has stolen from my brother. If she takes a dog instead of a man, it shall be a beaten dog,' says he.”
Meadows rang the bell. “Harness the mare to the four-wheeled chaise. You know what to do, Crawley.”
“Well, I can guess.”
“But first get him told that I am always at Grassmere at six o'clock.”
“But you won't go there this evening, of course.”
“Why not?”
“Aren't you afraid he—”
“Afraid of Will Fielding? Why, you have never looked at me. I do notice your eyes are always on the ground. Crawley, when I was eighteen, one evening (it was harvest home, and all the folk had drunk their wit and manners out) I found a farmer's wife in a lane, hemmed in by three great ignorant brutes that were for kissing her, or some nonsense, and she crying help and murder and ready to faint with fright. It was a decent woman, and a neighbor, so I interfered as thus: I knocked the first fellow senseless on his back with a blow before they knew of me, and then the three were two. I fought the two, giving and taking for full ten minutes, and then I got a chance and one went down. I put my foot on his neck and kept him down for all he could do, and over his body I fought the best man of the lot, and thrashed him so that his whole mug was like a ball of beetroot. When he was quite sick he ran one way, and t'other got up roaring and ran another, and they had to send a hurdle for No. 1. Dame Fielding gave me of her own accord what all the row was about, and more than one, and hearty ones, too, I assure you, and had me in to supper, and told her man, and he shook my hand a good one.”
“Why, sir, you don't mean to say the woman you fought for was Mrs. Fielding.”
“But I tell you it was, and I had those two boys on my knee, two chubby toads, pulling at my curly hair—! why do I talk of these things? Oh, I remember, it was to show you I am not a man that can be bullied. I am a much better man than I was at eighteen. I won't be married in a black eye if I can help it. But, when I am once married, here I stand against all comers, and if you hear them grumble or threaten you, tell them that any Sunday afternoon, when there is nothing better to be done, I'll throw my cap into the ring and fight all the Fieldings that ever were pupped, one down another come on.” Then turning quite cool and contemptuous all in a moment, he said, “These are words, and we have work on hand;” and, even as he spoke, he strode from the room pattered after by Crawley.
At six o'clock Meadows and Susan were walking arm in arm in the garden. Presently they saw a man advancing toward them, with his right hand behind him. “Why, it is Will Fielding,” cried Susan, “come to thank you.”
“I think not, by the look of him,” replied Meadows, coolly.
“Susan, will you be so good as to take your hand from that man's arm. I have got a word to say to him.”
Susan did more than requested, seeing at once that mischief was coming. She clung to William's right arm, and while he ground his teeth with ineffectual rage, for she was strong, as her sex are strong, for half a minute, and to throw her off he must have been much rougher with her than he chose to be, three men came behind unobserved by all but Meadows, and captured him on the old judgment. And, Crawley having represented him as a violent man, they literally laid the grasp of the law on him.
“But I have got the money to pay it,” remonstrated William.
“Pay it, then.”
“But my money is at home, give me two days. I'll write to my wife and she will send it me.” The officers, with a coarse laugh, told him he must come with them meantime.
Meadows whispered Susan: “I'll pay it for him to-morrow.”
They took off William Fielding in Meadows' four-wheeled chaise.
“Where are they taking him, John?”
“To the county jail.”
“Oh, don't let them take him there. Can you not trust him?”
“Yes.”
“Then why not pay for him?”
“But I don't carry money in my pocket, and the bank is closed.”
“How unfortunate!”
“Very! but I'll send it over to-morrow early, and we will have him out.”
“Oh, yes, poor fellow! the very first thing in the morning.”
“Yes! the first thing—after we are married.”
Soon after this Meadows bade Susan affectionately farewell, and rode off to Newborough to buy his gloves and some presents for his bride. On the road he overtook William Fielding going to jail, leaned over his saddle as he cantered by, and said, “Mrs. Meadows will send the money in to free you in the morning,” then on again as cool as a cucumber and cantered into the town before sunset, put up black Rachel at the King's Head, made his purchases, and back to the inn. As he sat in the bar-parlor drinking a glass of ale and chatting with the landlady, two travelers came into the passage. They did not stop in it long, for one of them knew the house and led his companion into the coffee-room. But in that moment, by a flash of recognition, spite of their bronzed color and long beards, Meadows had seen who they were—George Fielding and Thomas Robinson.
Words could not paint in many pages what Meadows passed through in a few seconds. His very body was one moment cold as ice, the next burning.
The coffee-room door was open—he dragged himself into the passage, though each foot in turn seemed glued to the ground, and listened. He came back and sat down in the bar.
“Are they going to stay?” said the mistress to the waiter.
“Yes, to be called at five o'clock.”
The bell rang. The waiter went and immediately returned. “Hot with,” demanded the waiter, in a sharp, mechanical tone.
“Here, take my keys for the lump sugar,” said the landlady, and she poured first the brandy and then the hot water into a tumbler, then went upstairs to see about the travelers' beds.
Meadows was left alone a few moments with the liquor. A sudden flash came to Meadows' eye, he put his hand hastily to his waistcoat-pocket, and then his eye brightened still more. Yes, it was there, he thought he had had the curiosity to keep it by him. He drew out the white lump Crawley had left on his table that night, and flung it into the glass just as the waiter returned with the sugar.
The waiter took the brandy and water into the coffee-room. Meadows sat still as a mouse, his brain boiling and bubbling—awestruck at what he had done, yet meditating worse.
The next time the waiter came in, “Waiter,” said he, “one glass among two, that is short allowance.”
“Oh! the big one is teetotal,” replied the waiter.
“Mrs. White,” said Meadows, “if you have got a bed for me I'll sleep here, for my nag is tired and the night is darkish.”
“Always a bed for you, Mr. Meadows,” was the gracious reply.
Soon the two friends rang for bed-candles. Robinson staggered with drowsiness. Meadows eyed them from behind a newspaper.
Half an hour later Mr. Meadows went to bed, too—but not to sleep.
CHAPTER LXXXIII.
AT seven o'clock in the morning Crawley was at Meadows' house by appointment. To his great surprise the servant told him master had not slept at home. While he was talking to her Meadows galloped up to the door, jumped off, and almost pulled Crawley upstairs with him. “Lock the door, Crawley.” Crawley obeyed, but with some reluctance, for Meadows, the iron Meadows, was ghastly and shaken as he had never been shaken before. He sank into a chair. “Perdition seize the hour I first saw her!” As for Crawley, he was paralyzed by the terrible agitation of a spirit so much greater than his own.
“Crawley,” said Meadows, with a sudden unnatural calm, “when the devil buys a soul for money how much does he give? a good lump, I hear. He values our souls high—we don't, some of us.”
“Mr. Meadows, sir!”
“Now count those,” yelled Meadows, bursting out again, and he flung a roll of notes furiously on the ground at Crawley's feet, “count and tell me what my soul has gone for. Oh! oh!”
Crawley seized them and counted them as fast as his trembling fingers would let him. So now an eye all remorse, and another eye all greed, were bent upon the same thing.
“Why, they are all hundred-pound notes, bright as silver from the Bank of England. Oh, dear! how new and crimp they are—where do they come from, sir?”
“From Australia.”
“Ah! Oh, impossible! No! nothing is impossible to such a man as you. Twenty.”
“They are at Newborough—slept at 'King's Head,'” whispered Meadows.
“Good Heavens! think of that. Thirty—”
“So did I.”
“Ah! forty—four thousand pounds.”
“The lump of stuff you left here hocussed one—it was a toss-up—luck was on my side—that one carried them—slept like death—long while hunting—found them under his pillow at last.”
“Well done! and we fools were always beat at it. Sixty—one—two—five—seven. Seven thousand pounds.”
“Seven thousand pounds! Who would have thought it? This is a dear job to me.”
“Say a dear job to them and a glorious haul to you; but you deserve it all, ah!”
“Why, you fool,” cried Meadows, “do you think I am going to keep the men's money?”
“Keep it? why, of course!”
“What! am I a thief? I, John Meadows, that never wronged a man of a penny? I take his sweetheart, I can't live without her; but I can live without his money. I have crimes enough on my head, but not theft, there I say halt.”
“Then why in the name of Heaven did you take them at such a risk?” Crawley put this question roughly, for he was losing his respect for his idol.
“You are as blind as a mole, Crawley,” was the disdainful answer. “Don't you see that I have made George Fielding penniless, and that now old Merton won't let him have his daughter? Why should he? He said, 'If you come back with one thousand pounds.' And don't you see that, when the writ is served on old Merton, he will be as strong as fire for me and against him. He can't marry her at all now. I shall soon or late, and the day I marry Susan that same afternoon seven thousand pounds will be put in George Fielding's hand, he won't know by whom, but you and I shall know. I am a sinner, but not a villain.”
Crawley gave a dissatisfied grunt. Meadows struck a lucifer match and lighted a candle. He placed the candle in the grate—it was warm weather. “Come, now,” said he coolly, “burn them; then they will tell no tales.”
Crawley gave a shriek like a mother whose child is falling out of window, and threw himself on his knees, with the notes in his hand behind his back. “No! no! sir! Oh, don't think of it. Talk of crime, what are all the sins we have done together compared with this? You would not burn a wheat-rick, no, not your greatest enemy's; I know you would not, you, are too good a man. This is as bad; the good money that the bountiful Heaven has given us for—for the good of man.”
“Come,” said Meadows sternly, “no more of this folly,” and he laid his iron grasp on Crawley.
“Mercy! mercy! think of me—of your faithful servant, who has risked his life and stuck at nothing for you. How ungrateful great men are!”
“Ungrateful! Crawley! Can you look me in the face and say that?”
“Never till now, but now I can;” and Crawley rose to his feet and faced the great man. The prize he was fighting for gave him supernatural courage. “To whom do you owe them? To me. You could never have had them but for my drug. And yet you would burn them before my eyes. A fortune to poor me.”
“To you?”
“Yes! What does it matter to you what becomes of them so that he never sees them again? but it matters all to me. Give them to me and in twelve hours I will be in France with them. You won't miss me, sir. I have done my work. And it will be more prudent, for since I have left you I can't help drinking, and I might talk, you know, sir, I might, and let out what we should both be sorry for. Send me away to foreign countries where I can keep traveling, and make it always summer. I hate the long nights when it is dark. I see such cu-u-rious things. Pray! pray let me go and take these with me, and never trouble you again.”
The words, though half nonsense, were the other half cunning, and the tones and looks were piteous. Meadows hesitated. Crawley knew too much; to get rid of him was a bait; and after all to annihilate the thing he had been all his life accumulating went against his heart. He rang the bell. “Hide the notes, Crawley. Bring me two shirts, a razor, and a comb. Crawley, these are the terms. That you don't go near that woman—” Crawley, with a brutal phrase, expressed his delight at the idea of getting rid of her forever. “That you go at once to the railway. Station opens to-day. First train starts in an hour. Up to London, over to France this evening.”
“I will, sir. Hurrah! hurrah!” Then Crawley burst into protestations of gratitude which Meadows cut short. He rang for breakfast, fed his accomplice, gave him a great-coat for his journey, and took the precaution of going with him to the station. There he shook hands with him and returned to the principal street and entered the bank.
Crawley kept faith, he hugged his treasure to his bosom and sat down waiting for the train. “Luck is on our side,” thought he; “if this had been open yesterday those two would have come on from Newborough.”
He watched the preparations, they were decorating the locomotive with bouquets and branches. They did not start punctually, some soi-disant great people had not arrived. “I will have a dram,” thought Crawley; he went and had three. Then he came back and as he was standing inspecting the carriages a hand was laid on his shoulder. He looked round, it was Mr. Wood, a functionary with whom he had often done business.
“Ah, Wood! how d'ye do? Going to make the first trip?”
“No, sir! I have business detains me in town.”
“What! a capias, eh?” chuckled Crawley.
“Something of the sort. There is a friend of yours hard by wants to speak a word to you.”
“Come along, then. Where is he?”
“This way, sir.”
Crawley followed Wood to the waiting-room, and there on a bench sat Isaac Levi. Crawley stopped dead short and would have drawn back, but Levi beckoned to a seat near him. Crawley came walking like an automaton from whose joints the oil had suddenly dried. With infinite repugnance he took the seat, not liking to refuse before several persons who saw the invitation. Mr. Wood sat on the other side of him. “What does it all mean?” thought Crawley, but his cue was to seem indifferent or flattered.
“You have shaved your beard, Mr. Crawley,” said Isaac, in a low tone.
“My beard! I never had one,” replied Crawley, in the same key.
“Yes, you had when last I saw you—in the gold mine; you set ruffians to abuse me, sir.”
“Don't you believe that, Mr. Levi.”
“I saw it and felt it.”
The peculiarity of this situation was, that, the room being full of people, both parties wished, each for his own reason, not to excite general attention, and therefore delivered scarce above a whisper the sort of matter that is generally uttered very loud and excitedly.
“It is my turn now,” whispered Levi; “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
“You must look sharp then,” whispered Crawley; “to-morrow perhaps you may not have the chance.”
“I never postpone vengeance—when it is ripe.”
“Don't you, sir? dear me.”
“You have seven thousand pounds about you, Mr. Crawley.”
Crawley started and trembled. “Stolen!” whispered Isaac in his very ear. “Give it up to the officer.”
Crawley rose instinctively. A firm hand was laid on each of his arms; he sat down again. “What—what—-ever money I have is trusted to me by the wealthiest and most respectable man in the cou—nty, and—”
“Stolen by him, received by you! Give it to Wood, unless you prefer a public search.”
“You can't search me without a warrant.”
“Here is a warrant from the mayor. Take the notes out of your left breast and give them to the officer, or we must do it by force and publicity.”
“I won't without Mr. Meadows' authority. Send for Mr. Meadows if you dare.” Isaac reflected. “Well! we will take you to Mr. Meadows. Keep the money till you see him, but we must secure you. Put his coat over his hands first.” The great-coat was put over his hands, and the next moment under the coat was heard a little sharp click.
“Let us go to the carriage,” said Levi, in a brisk, cheerful tone.
Those present heard the friendly invitation and saw a little string of acquaintances, three in number, break up a conversation and go and get into a fly; one carried a great-coat and bundle before him with both hands.