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.