Clement had walked with the doctor to the door and had secured a last
word with Arthur outside, but he had not ventured to enter the house,
much less to ask for Josina. He knew how heavily the shock would fall
on her, and his heart was wrung for her. But he knew also, or he
guessed, that the poignancy of her grief would be sharpened by remorse,
and he felt that in the first outburst of self-reproach his presence
would be the last she would welcome.
It was not a pleasant thought for a lover; but then how much worse, he
reflected, would it have been for her, had she never made up her mind
to confession. And in his own person how much better he now stood. He
had saved the Squire’s life, and had saved it in circumstances that
must do him credit. He had run his risks, and been put to the test, and
he had come manfully out of it; and he still felt that elation of
spirit, that readiness to do and dare, to meet fresh ventures, which
attends on a crisis successfully encountered.
He was not in a mood to be dashed by trifles therefore, or Arthur, when
he came out to speak to him, would have dashed him, for Arthur was
rather short with him. “You can do nothing here,” he said. “We are
tumbling over one another. Get after that rascal. He has got away with
four hundred in gold and we must recover it. Watkins at the Griffin may
know where he’ll make for.”
“He’s in livery, isn’t he?”
“Begad, so he is! I’d not thought of that! I’ll have his place watched
in case he steals back to change. But do you see Watkins.”
Clement took his dismissal meekly and went to Watkins. He soon learned
all that the inn-keeper knew, which amounted to no more than a
conviction that Thomas would make for Manchester. Watkins shook his
head over the livery. The rascal was no fool; he’d have got rid of
that. “Oh, he’s a clever chap, sir, and a gallus bad one.” he
continued. “He’d talk here that daring that he’d lift the hair on my
head. But I never thought that he’d devil enough,” in a tone of
admiration, “to attack the Squire! Well, he’ll swing this time, if he’s
taken! You’re not in very good fettle yourself, sir. You know that your
cheek’s bleeding?”
“It’s nothing. And you think he’ll make for Manchester?”
“As sure as sure! He’s done that this time, sir, as he never can be
safe but in a crowd. And where’d he go but where he knows? He’ll be in
Manchester before tomorrow night, and it’ll take you all your time,
sir, finding him there! It’s a mortal big place, I understand, and
he’ll have got rid of his livery, depend on it!”
“I’ll find him,” Clement said. And he meant it. His blood was hot, he
had tasted of adventure and he found it more to his liking than
day-books and ledgers. And already he had made up his mind that it was
his business to pursue Thomas. He was angered by the rascal’s cowardly
attack upon an old man, and were it only for that he would take him.
But apart from that he saw that if he recovered the Squire’s money it
would be another point to his credit—if the Squire recovered. If the
old man did not, well, still he would have done something. As he rode
home, and passed the scene of the robbery, he laid his plans.
He would leave the search in that district to the Head Constable at
Aldersbury. But he expected little from this. In those days if a man
was robbed it was the man’s own business and that of his friends to
follow the thief and seize him if they could. In London the Bow Street
Runners saw to it, and in one or two of the big cities there were
police officers organized on similar lines. But in the country there
were only parish constables, elderly men, often chosen because they
were past work.
Clement knew, then, that he must rely on himself, and he tried to
imagine what Thomas would do, and what route he would take if he made
for Manchester. Not through Aldersbury, for there he would run the risk
of recognition. Nor would he venture into either of the direct roads
thence—through Congleton or by Tarporley; for it was along these roads
that he would be likely to be followed. How, then? Through Chester,
Clement fancied. The man was already on the Chester side of Aldersbury,
and he could make at once for that place, while in the full stream of
traffic between Chester and Manchester his traces would be lost.
Travelling on foot and by night, he might reach Chester about ten in
the morning, and probably, having money and being footsore, he would
take the first Manchester coach that left after ten.
At this point Clement found himself crossing the West Bridge, the faint
scattered lights of the town rising to a point before him. His first
business was to knock up the constable and tell his tale. This done, he
made for the bank, where he found the household awaiting his coming in
some alarm, for it was close on midnight. Here he had to tell his story
afresh, amid expressions of wonder and pity, while Betty fetched sponge
and water and bathed his cheek; nor, modestly as he related his doings,
could he quite conceal the part that he had played. The banker
listened, approved, and for once experienced a new sensation. He was
proud of his son. Moreover, as a dramatic sequel to the Squire’s
withdrawal of the money, the story touched him home.
Then Clement, as he ate his supper, came to his point. “I’m going after
him,” he said.
The banker objected. “It’s not your business, my lad,” he said. “You’ve
done enough, I’m sure.”
“But the point is—it’s bank money, sir.” Clement had grown cunning.
“It was—this morning.”
“And he was a client this morning—and may be tomorrow.”
The banker considered. There was something in that; and this sudden
interest in the bank was gratifying. Yet—yet he did not quite
understand it. “You seem to be confoundedly taken up with this,” he
said, “but I don’t see why you need mix yourself up with it farther.
The scoundrel’s neck is in a halter and he won’t be taken without a
struggle. Have you thought of that?”
“I’d take him if he were ten,” Clement said—and blushed at his own
enthusiasm. He muttered something about the man being a villain, and
the sooner he was laid by the heels the better.
“Yes, by someone. But I don’t see why you need be the one.”
“Anyway, I’m going to do it, sir,” Clement replied with unexpected
independence. “I shall go by the Nantwich coach at half-past five, drop
off at Altringham, and catch him as he goes through. True, if he goes
by Frodsham I may miss him, but I fancy that the morning coach by
Frodsham leaves Chester too early for him. And, after all, I can’t stop
every bolt-hole.”
Ovington wondered anew, seeing his son in a new light. This was not the
idler with his eyes on the ledger and his thoughts abroad, whom he had
known in the bank, but a young man with purpose in his glance and a cut
on his cheek-bone, who looked as if he could be ugly if it came to a
pinch. A quite new Clement—or new at any rate to him.
He reflected. The affair would be talked of, and certainly it would be
a feather in the bank’s cap if the money, which the Squire had
withdrawn, were recovered through the bank’s exertions. Viewed in that
light there was method in the lad’s madness, whatever had bitten him,
“Well, I think it is a dangerous business,” he said at last, “and it is
not your business. But go, if you will, only you must take Payne with
you.”
Payne was the bank man-of-all-work, but Clement would not hear of
Payne. If he could be called at five, he asked no more. Even if all the
seats on the Victory were booked, they would find room for him
somewhere.
“But your face?” Betty said. “Isn’t it painful? It’s turning black.”
“I’ll bet that villain’s is as black!” he retorted. “I know I got home
on him once. Only let me be called.”
But his father saw that, as he passed through the hall, he took one of
the bank pistols out of the case in which they were kept, and slipped
it into his pocket. The banker wondered anew, and felt perhaps more
anxiety than he showed. At any rate, it was he who called the lad at
five and saw that he drank the coffee that Betty had prepared, and that
he ate something. At the last, indeed, Clement feared that his father
might offer to accompany him, but he did not. Possibly he had decided
that if his son was bent on proving his mettle in this odd business, it
was wisest not to balk him.
The sun was rising as Clement’s coach rattled down the Foregate between
the old Norman towers that crown the Castle Hill, and the long austere
front of the school, with its wide low casements twinkling in the first
beams. Early milk-carts drew aside to give the coach passage,
white-eyed sweeps gazed enviously after it, mob-caps at windows dreamt
of holidays and sighed to be on it and away. Soon it burst merrily from
the crowded houses and met the morning freshness and the open country
and the rolling fields. The mists were rising from the valley behind,
as the horses breasted the ascent above the old battle-field, swept
down the farther slope, and at eight miles an hour climbed up Armour
Hill between meadows sparkling with dew and coverts flickering with
conies. Down the hill at a canter, which presently carried it rejoicing
into Wem. There the first relay was waiting, and away again they went,
bowling over the barren gorse-clad heath that brought them presently
through narrow twisting streets to the White Lion at Whitchurch. Again,
“Horses on!” and merrily they travelled down the gentle slope to the
Cheshire plain, where miles of green country spread themselves in the
sunshine, a land of fatness and plenty, of cheese and milk and
slow-running brooks. The clock on Nantwich church was showing a half
after eight, as with a long flourish from the bugle they passed below
it, and halted for breakfast at the Crown, in the stubborn old
Round-head town.
Half an hour to refresh, topping up with a glass of famous Nantwich
ale, and away again. But now the sun was high, the world abroad, the
roads were alive with traffic. Onwards from Nantwich, where they began
to run alongside the Ellesmere Canal, with its painted barges and gay
market boats, the road took on a new importance, and many a smiling
wayside house, Lion or Swan, cheered the travellers on their way.
Spanking four-in-hands, handled by lusty coachmen, the autocrats of the
road, chaises-and-four with postboys in green or yellow, white-coated
farmers and parsons on hackneys, commercials in gigs, and publicans in
tax-carts, pedlars, packmen, the one-legged sailor, and Punch and
Judy—all these met or passed them; and huge wains laden with Manchester
goods and driven by teamsters in smocks with long whips on their
shoulders. And the inns! The inns, with their swaying signs and open
windows, their benches crowded with loungers and their yards echoing
with the cry of “Next team!”—the inns, with their groaning tables and
huge joints and gleaming silver, these came so often, swaggered so
loudly, imposed themselves so royally, that half the life of the road
seemed to be in and about them.
And Clement saw it all and rejoiced in it all, though his eyes never
ceased to search for a dour-looking man with a bruised face. He
rejoiced in the cantering horses and the abounding life about him, in
the freedom of it and the joyousness of it, his pulses leaping in tune
with it; and not the less in tune, so splendid a thing is it to be
young and in love, because he had fought a fight and slept only three
hours. He watched it all pass before him, and if he had ever believed
in his father’s scheme of an iron way and iron horses he lost faith in
it now. For it was impossible to believe that any iron road running
across fields and waste places could vie with this splendid highway,
this orderly procession of coaches, travelling and stopping and meeting
with the regularity of a weaver’s shuttle, these long lines of laden
wagons, these swift chaises horsed at every stage! He saw stables that
sheltered a hundred roadsters and were not full; ostlers to whom a
handful of oats in every peck gave a gentleman’s income; teams that
were clothed and curried as tenderly as children; mighty caravanserais
full to the attics. A whole machinery of transport passed under his
wondering eyes, and the railway, the Valleys Railway—he smiled at it as
at the dream of a visionary.
They swept through Northwich before noon, and an hour later Clement
dropped off the coach in front of the Bowling Green Inn at Altringham,
and knew that his task lay before him. The little town had no church,
but it boasted for its size more bustle than he had expected, and as he
eyed its busy streets and its flow of traffic his spirits sank; it did
not call itself one of the gates of Manchester for nothing. However, he
had not come to stand idle, and the first step, to seek out a
constable, was easy. But to secure that worthy’s aid—he was but a
deputy, a pot-bellied, spectacled shoemaker—was another matter. The man
rolled up his leather apron and pushed his horn-rimmed glasses on to
his forehead, but he shook his head. “A very desperate villain,” he
said, “a very desperate villain! But lor’, master, a dark sullen chap
with a black eye and legs a little bandy? Why, I be dark and I be
bandy, and for black eyes—I’m afeared there’s more than one o’ that cut
on the road.”
“But not to-day,” Clement urged. “He’ll come through to-day or
to-night.”
“Ay, and more likely night than day. But how be I to see if he’s a
blackened peeper in the dark! I can’t haul a gentleman off a coach to
ask the color of his eyes.”
“Well, anyway, do your best.”
“We might bill him and cry him?”
“That’s it! Do that!” Clement saw that that was about the extent of the
help he would get in this quarter. “Send the crier to me at the Bowling
Green, and I’ll write a bill—Five pounds reward for information!”
The constable’s eyes twinkled. “Now you’re on a line, master,” he said.
“Now we’ll do summat, maybe!”
Clement took the hint and bettered the line with a crownpiece, and
hastening back to his inn he took seisin of a seat in the coffee room
which commanded the main street. Here he wrote out a bill, and bribed a
waiter to keep the place for him: and in it he sat patiently, scanning
every person who passed. But so many passed that an hour had not
elapsed before he held his task hopeless, though he continued to
perform it. The constable had undertaken to go round the inns and to
set a watch on a side street; and the bill might do something. But his
fancy pictured half a dozen by-ways through the town, or the man might
avoid the town, or he might go by another route. Altogether it began to
seem a hopeless task, his fancied sagacity a silly conceit. But he had
undertaken the task, and as he had told his father he could not close
all holes. He could only set his snare across the largest and hope for
the best.
Presently he heard the crier ring his bell and cry his man. “Oh yes! Oh
yes! Oh yes!” and the rest of it, ending with “God save the King!” And
that cheered him for a while. That was something. But as hour after
hour went by and coaches, carriages, and postchaises stopped and
started before the door, and pedestrians passed, and still no Thomas
appeared—though half a dozen times he ran out to take a nearer view of
some traveller, or to inspect a slumberer in a hay-cart—he began to
despair. There were so many chances against him. So many straws floated
by, half seen in the current.
But Clement was dogged. He persisted, though hope had almost abandoned
him, and it was long after midnight before, sinking with fatigue, he
left his post. Even so he was out again by six, but if there was
anything of which he was now certain, it was that the villain had gone
by in the night. Still he remained, his eyes roving ceaselessly over
the passers-by, who were now few, now many, as the current ran fast or
slow, as some coach high-laden drew up before the door with a noisy
fanfaronade, or some heavy wagon toiled slowly by.
It was in one of these slack intervals, when the street was tolerably
empty, that his eyes fell on a man who was loitering on the other side
of the way. The man had his hands in his pockets and a straw in his
mouth, and he seemed to be a mere idler; but as his eyes met Clement’s
he winked. Then, with an almost imperceptible gesture of the head, he
lounged away in the direction of the inn yard.
Clement doubted if anything was meant, but grasping at every chance he
hurried out and found the man standing in the yard, his hands in his
pockets, the straw in his mouth. He was staring at an object, which, to
judge from his aspect, could have no possible interest for him—a pump.
“Do you want me?” Clement asked.
“Mebbe, mister. Do you see that stable?”
“Well?”
“D’you go in there and I’ll—mebbe I’ll join you.”
But Clement was suspicious. “I am not going out of sight of the
street,” he said.
“Lord!” contemptuously. “Your man’s gone these six hours. He’s many a
mile on by now! You come into the stable.”
The fellow’s looks did not commend him. He was blear-eyed and
under-sized, wearing a mangy rabbit-skin waistcoat, and no coat. He had
the air of a postboy run to seed. Still, Clement thought it better to
go with him, and in the stable, “Be you the gent that offered five
pounds?” the man asked, turning upon him.
“I am.”
“Then fork out, squire. Open your purse, and I’ll open my mouth.”
“If you come with me to the constable——”
“Not I. I ben’t sharing with no constable. That is flat.”
“Well, what do you know?”
“What you want to know. Howsumdever, if you’ll give me your word you’ll
act the gentleman?”
“Who are you, my lad?”
“Ostler at the Barley Sheaf in Malthouse Lane. You’re on? Right. I see,
you’re a gentleman. Well, your chap come in ’bout eleven last night on
an empty dray from Chester. He had four sacks of corn with him.”
“Oh, but that can’t be the man!” Clement exclaimed, his face falling.
“You listen, mister. He had four sacks of corn with him, and wagoner,
he’d bargained to carry him to Manchester. But they had quarrelled, and
t’other chucked off his sacks in our yard, and there was pretty nigh a
fight. Wagoner he went off and left him cursing, and he offered me a
shilling to find him a lift to Manchester first thing i’ the morning.
’Bout daylight there come in a hay-cart, but driver’d only take the man
and not the forage. Howsumdever, he said at last he’d take one sack,
and your chap up and asked me would I take care of t’other three till
he sent for ’em. I see he was mighty keen to get on, and I sez, ‘No,’
sez I, ‘but I’ll buy ’em cheap.’ ‘Right,’ sez he, and surprising little
bones about it, and lets me have ’em cheap! So thinks I, who’s this as
chucks away money, and as he climbed up I managed to knock off his tile
and see his eye was painted, and he the very spot of your bill! I’d
half a mind to stop him, but he was over-weight for me—I’m a little
chap—and I let him go.’ He added some details which satisfied Clement
that the traveller was really Thomas.
“Did you hear where he was going to in Manchester?”
“Five pound, mister!” The man held out his grimy paw.
Clement did not like the cunning in the bleary eyes, but he had gone so
far that he could hardly draw back. He counted out four one-pound
notes. “Now then?” he said, showing the fifth, but keeping a firm hold
on it.
“The lad that took him is Jerry Stott—of the Apple-Tree Inn in Fennel
Street. You go to him, mister. One of these will do it.”
Clement gave him the other note. “He didn’t tell you where he was
going?”
“He very particlar did not. But I’m thinking you’ll net him at Jerry’s.
Do you take one of Nadin’s boys. He’s a desperate-looking chap. He gave
you that punch in the face, I guess?” with interest.
“He did.”
“Ah, well, you marked him. But you get one of Nadin’s boys. You’ll not
take him easy.”