The Royal East London Volunteers made a brilliant sight that day: formed
into lines, squares, circles, triangles, and what not, to the beating
of drums, and the streaming of flags; and performed a vast number of
complex evolutions, in all of which Serjeant Varden bore a conspicuous
share. Having displayed their military prowess to the utmost in these
warlike shows, they marched in glittering order to the Chelsea Bun
House, and regaled in the adjacent taverns until dark. Then at sound
of drum they fell in again, and returned amidst the shouting of His
Majesty’s lieges to the place from whence they came.
The homeward march being somewhat tardy,--owing to the un-soldierlike
behaviour of certain corporals, who, being gentlemen of sedentary
pursuits in private life and excitable out of doors, broke several
windows with their bayonets, and rendered it imperative on the
commanding officer to deliver them over to a strong guard, with whom
they fought at intervals as they came along,--it was nine o’clock when
the locksmith reached home. A hackney-coach was waiting near his door;
and as he passed it, Mr Haredale looked from the window and called him
by his name.
‘The sight of you is good for sore eyes, sir,’ said the locksmith,
stepping up to him. ‘I wish you had walked in though, rather than waited
here.’
‘There is nobody at home, I find,’ Mr Haredale answered; ‘besides, I
desired to be as private as I could.’
‘Humph!’ muttered the locksmith, looking round at his house. ‘Gone with
Simon Tappertit to that precious Branch, no doubt.’
Mr Haredale invited him to come into the coach, and, if he were not
tired or anxious to go home, to ride with him a little way that they
might have some talk together. Gabriel cheerfully complied, and the
coachman mounting his box drove off.
‘Varden,’ said Mr Haredale, after a minute’s pause, ‘you will be amazed
to hear what errand I am on; it will seem a very strange one.’
‘I have no doubt it’s a reasonable one, sir, and has a meaning in it,’
replied the locksmith; ‘or it would not be yours at all. Have you just
come back to town, sir?’
‘But half an hour ago.’
‘Bringing no news of Barnaby, or his mother?’ said the locksmith
dubiously. ‘Ah! you needn’t shake your head, sir. It was a wild-goose
chase. I feared that, from the first. You exhausted all reasonable means
of discovery when they went away. To begin again after so long a time
has passed is hopeless, sir--quite hopeless.’
‘Why, where are they?’ he returned impatiently. ‘Where can they be?
Above ground?’
‘God knows,’ rejoined the locksmith, ‘many that I knew above it five
years ago, have their beds under the grass now. And the world is a
wide place. It’s a hopeless attempt, sir, believe me. We must leave the
discovery of this mystery, like all others, to time, and accident, and
Heaven’s pleasure.’
‘Varden, my good fellow,’ said Mr Haredale, ‘I have a deeper meaning in
my present anxiety to find them out, than you can fathom. It is not a
mere whim; it is not the casual revival of my old wishes and desires;
but an earnest, solemn purpose. My thoughts and dreams all tend to it,
and fix it in my mind. I have no rest by day or night; I have no peace
or quiet; I am haunted.’
His voice was so altered from its usual tones, and his manner bespoke
so much emotion, that Gabriel, in his wonder, could only sit and look
towards him in the darkness, and fancy the expression of his face.
‘Do not ask me,’ continued Mr Haredale, ‘to explain myself. If I were to
do so, you would think me the victim of some hideous fancy. It is enough
that this is so, and that I cannot--no, I can not--lie quietly in my
bed, without doing what will seem to you incomprehensible.’
‘Since when, sir,’ said the locksmith after a pause, ‘has this uneasy
feeling been upon you?’
Mr Haredale hesitated for some moments, and then replied: ‘Since the
night of the storm. In short, since the last nineteenth of March.’
As though he feared that Varden might express surprise, or reason with
him, he hastily went on:
‘You will think, I know, I labour under some delusion. Perhaps I do. But
it is not a morbid one; it is a wholesome action of the mind, reasoning
on actual occurrences. You know the furniture remains in Mrs Rudge’s
house, and that it has been shut up, by my orders, since she went away,
save once a-week or so, when an old neighbour visits it to scare away
the rats. I am on my way there now.’
‘For what purpose?’ asked the locksmith.
‘To pass the night there,’ he replied; ‘and not to-night alone, but many
nights. This is a secret which I trust to you in case of any unexpected
emergency. You will not come, unless in case of strong necessity, to me;
from dusk to broad day I shall be there. Emma, your daughter, and the
rest, suppose me out of London, as I have been until within this hour.
Do not undeceive them. This is the errand I am bound upon. I know I may
confide it to you, and I rely upon your questioning me no more at this
time.’
With that, as if to change the theme, he led the astounded locksmith
back to the night of the Maypole highwayman, to the robbery of Edward
Chester, to the reappearance of the man at Mrs Rudge’s house, and to all
the strange circumstances which afterwards occurred. He even asked him
carelessly about the man’s height, his face, his figure, whether he was
like any one he had ever seen--like Hugh, for instance, or any man he
had known at any time--and put many questions of that sort, which the
locksmith, considering them as mere devices to engage his attention and
prevent his expressing the astonishment he felt, answered pretty much at
random.
At length, they arrived at the corner of the street in which the house
stood, where Mr Haredale, alighting, dismissed the coach. ‘If you desire
to see me safely lodged,’ he said, turning to the locksmith with a
gloomy smile, ‘you can.’
Gabriel, to whom all former marvels had been nothing in comparison
with this, followed him along the narrow pavement in silence. When they
reached the door, Mr Haredale softly opened it with a key he had about
him, and closing it when Varden entered, they were left in thorough
darkness.
They groped their way into the ground-floor room. Here Mr Haredale
struck a light, and kindled a pocket taper he had brought with him for
the purpose. It was then, when the flame was full upon him, that the
locksmith saw for the first time how haggard, pale, and changed he
looked; how worn and thin he was; how perfectly his whole appearance
coincided with all that he had said so strangely as they rode along.
It was not an unnatural impulse in Gabriel, after what he had heard, to
note curiously the expression of his eyes. It was perfectly collected
and rational;--so much so, indeed, that he felt ashamed of his momentary
suspicion, and drooped his own when Mr Haredale looked towards him, as
if he feared they would betray his thoughts.
‘Will you walk through the house?’ said Mr Haredale, with a glance
towards the window, the crazy shutters of which were closed and
fastened. ‘Speak low.’
There was a kind of awe about the place, which would have rendered it
difficult to speak in any other manner. Gabriel whispered ‘Yes,’ and
followed him upstairs.
Everything was just as they had seen it last. There was a sense of
closeness from the exclusion of fresh air, and a gloom and heaviness
around, as though long imprisonment had made the very silence sad. The
homely hangings of the beds and windows had begun to droop; the dust lay
thick upon their dwindling folds; and damps had made their way through
ceiling, wall, and floor. The boards creaked beneath their tread, as if
resenting the unaccustomed intrusion; nimble spiders, paralysed by the
taper’s glare, checked the motion of their hundred legs upon the wall,
or dropped like lifeless things upon the ground; the death-watch ticked;
and the scampering feet of rats and mice rattled behind the wainscot.
As they looked about them on the decaying furniture, it was strange to
find how vividly it presented those to whom it had belonged, and
with whom it was once familiar. Grip seemed to perch again upon his
high-backed chair; Barnaby to crouch in his old favourite corner by the
fire; the mother to resume her usual seat, and watch him as of old. Even
when they could separate these objects from the phantoms of the mind
which they invoked, the latter only glided out of sight, but lingered
near them still; for then they seemed to lurk in closets and behind the
doors, ready to start out and suddenly accost them in well-remembered
tones.
They went downstairs, and again into the room they had just now left.
Mr Haredale unbuckled his sword and laid it on the table, with a pair of
pocket pistols; then told the locksmith he would light him to the door.
‘But this is a dull place, sir,’ said Gabriel lingering; ‘may no one
share your watch?’
He shook his head, and so plainly evinced his wish to be alone, that
Gabriel could say no more. In another moment the locksmith was standing
in the street, whence he could see that the light once more travelled
upstairs, and soon returning to the room below, shone brightly through
the chinks of the shutters.
If ever man were sorely puzzled and perplexed, the locksmith was, that
night. Even when snugly seated by his own fireside, with Mrs Varden
opposite in a nightcap and night-jacket, and Dolly beside him (in a
most distracting dishabille) curling her hair, and smiling as if she had
never cried in all her life and never could--even then, with Toby at
his elbow and his pipe in his mouth, and Miggs (but that perhaps was not
much) falling asleep in the background, he could not quite discard his
wonder and uneasiness. So in his dreams--still there was Mr Haredale,
haggard and careworn, listening in the solitary house to every sound
that stirred, with the taper shining through the chinks until the day
should turn it pale and end his lonely watching.