“I hope not indeed, Inez. I don’t ask or expect you. You might
multiply it to-night by a dozen, and only offend me less.”
Mrs. John laughed again, rather shrilly.
“O, fie!” she said. “Why, even you haven’t a high-necked dress, you
know.”
And then a very black and red man, in a jam-pot collar and with a
voice like a rook, came and claimed her.
“Haw, Mrs. Belmont! Aw—er, dance, I think.”
Miss Belmont, to save appearances, rigidly sat out the evening. When
at last she could endure no more, she had her fly called and prepared
to go home. She was about to get into it, when she observed a familiar
figure standing among the few midnight loafers who had gathered
without the shadow of the porch.
“Hurley!” she exclaimed.
The man, after a moment, slouched reluctantly forward, touching his
hat. He had once been her most favoured protégé—a rogue and
irreclaimable, whom she had persuaded, temporarily, from the devil’s
service to her own. He had returned to his master, but with a
reservation of respect for the practical Christian. Miss Belmont was
orthodox, but she had a way with sinners. She pitied and fed and
_trusted_ them. She was a member of the Prisoners’ First Aid Society,
with a reverence for the law and a weakness for the lawless. Her aim
was to reconcile the two, to interpret, in a yearning charity, between
the policeman and the criminal, who at least, in the result, made a
common cause of honouring _her_. Inez asserted that, living, as she
did, very nervously alone on the outskirts of the town, she had
adopted this double method of propitiation for the sake of her own
security. But, then, Inez had a forked tongue, which you would never
have guessed from seeing the little scarlet tip of it caressing her
lips.
Well, Miss Belmont had once coaxed Jim Hurley into being her handy
man, foreseeing his redemption in an innocent association with flowers
and the cult of the artless cabbage. He proved loyal to her, gained
her confidence, knew all about the button and other matters of family
moment. But the contiguity of the kitchen-garden with Squire
Thorneycroft’s pheasant-coops was too much for hereditary
proclivities. He stole eggs, sold them, was detected, prosecuted,
sentenced to a short term of imprisonment, and disappeared. Miss
Belmont herself met him on his discharge from the jail gates, but he
was not to be induced to return. The wild man was in his brain, and
off he had gone, with Parthian shots of affection, in quest of fun.
And for two years she had not seen him again until to-night, when his
scratch of red hair and beard—which always looked as if he had just
pulled his head out of a quickset—suddenly blew into flame before
her. And then there followed a shock of distress.
“Jim! Why, what’s happened? What’s the matter with you?”
There was no need to specify. The man was obviously going off his
tramp—nearing the turn of the dark road. He was ghastly, and
constantly gave little spasmodic wrenching coughs during the minute he
stood beside her.
“Well,” he gasped, “I dunno. The rot has got into my stummick. I be
all touchwood inside like an old ellum.”
“Will you come and see me?”
“’Es. By’m-by.”
“Why not now? Where are you going to sleep?”
He grinned, and coughed, half suffocated, as he backed.
“I’ve got my plans, Missis. You—leave me alone.”
It did not sound gracious. One would not have guessed by it his
design, which was nothing less than a jolly throw against the devil in
the teeth of death. Miss Belmont, a little hurt, but more sad, got
into her fly and was driven home. Arrived there, she sat up an hour
contemplative. She was just preparing to go to bed in the grey dawn,
when she heard the garden-gate click and footsteps rapidly traverse
the path to the front door. Her heart seemed to stop. She stole
trembling into the hall. “_Who’s there?_” she demanded in a quavering
voice. The answer came, with a clearness which made her start, through
the letter-box.
“Me, Missis—Jim Hurley.”
Amazed, and a little embarrassed, she opened. The man burst, almost
fell in, and, staggering, recovered himself.
“’Ere!” he said, with eager manipulation trying to force something
upon her. “I’ve done ’er! I’ve got it for yer! Take it—make
’aste—they’re arter me. It’s yourn as by rights, and she’s got to
crow on the wrong side of ’er woundy little mouth.”
But Miss Belmont, with instinctive repulsion, had put her hands behind
her back and retreated before him.
“Jim!” she said sickly. “_What_ have you got? What do you mean? I’ll
take nothing from you.”
“O, go along!” he insisted. His cough was gone. He seemed animated
with a new masterfulness. “Ain’t I in the know? It’s yourn, anyhow,
and”—his eye closed in an ineffable rapture—“I done the devil out of
his own when I heard I be booked to go to him. He’ll pay me, I reckon;
but I don’t care. You take it. It’s your dooty as a good woman.”
“No, no,” cried Miss Belmont, beating him away with her hands. “Don’t
let me even see it to know. How could you suppose such a thing? Take
it back while you’ve time.”
B’s 33 and 90 wore their list-footed boots; but Jim’s ear was a
practised one. Swiftly summoned, they had raced on his tracks from the
Assembly Rooms. He had known it, and had laboured merely to keep his
start of them by three minutes—two—one. Now, while their sole was
yet on the threshold, he darted into the dining-room and was under the
table at a dive. They had him out and handcuffed, of course, in a
jiffy; and then they stood to explain and expostulate.
“Well, you ain’t a cheeked one neither, Hurley! To run up here of all
places for cover! Don’t you mind him, Miss.” (She stood pale and
shivering. “The shock!” she had murmured confusedly.) “Why,” said 33,
“the man was heard by plenty proposing of hisself to visit you; and
looked to your hold kindness to him to take and shelter, is supposed.”
She found voice to ask: “What’s he done?”
“Done!” said 33. “Why, bless you, Miss! Treating of you as if you was
in collusion, ain’t I?” (She shivered.) “Why, he grabbed a jewel—a
gold button, as I understand—out o’ the buzzim o’ your own late
brother’s good lady as she was a-stepping into her broom, and bolted
with it. It’ll be on ’im now if we’re lucky.”
“You ain’t then, old cock,” said Jim, with a little hoarse laugh and
choke.
“Chuck it!” said 90, a saturnine man.
“That’s what I done, Kroojer,” said Jim. “You go and ’unt in the
bloomin’ ’edges if you don’t believe me.”
“It’s my duty to tell you,” said 33, “that whatever you says will be
took down in evidence agen you.”
“Not by you,” said Jim. “Why, you can’t spell.”
They carried him off dispassionately, with some rough, kindly
apologies to Miss Belmont for the trouble to which they had put her.
She locked and bolted the door when they were gone; mechanically saw
to the lamps, and went upstairs to bed in a sort of stunned dream. So
she committed herself to the sheets, and so, in a sort of waking
delirium, passed the remaining hours of slumber. She felt as if the
even tenor of her way, her stream of placid days, had been suddenly
dammed by a dead body, the self-destroyed corpse of her own character.
Sometimes she would start from a suffering negation to feel B 90’s
hand upon her shoulder. “What have I done—O! what have I done?” she
would moan in anguish; and B 90 would glower from under his helmet
like a passionless Rhadamanthus—
“What have you done? What but, like our second Henry, meanly, by
inference and innuendo, imposed upon your wretched tool the
responsibility for a deed which you dared not seek to compass by the
open processes of the law. Did you dispute the right ownership of the
button? Then why choose for your confidant an ex-thief and poacher? No
use to say you designed no harm. By the flower be known the seed. Come
along o’ me!”
She rose late, ate no breakfast, and sat awaiting, pinched and grey,
the inevitable ordeal. It opened, early enough, with the advent of
Mrs. John. The little widow came sailing in, with a face of floured
steel. When she saw, the edge of her tongue seemed to whet itself on
her lips. Miss Emma broke out at once in an unendurable cry—
“Inez! You can’t think I was a party to this!”
“Who said so, dear? Though the man was a protégé of yours, and was
known to have remained where he encountered me by your instructions.”
“It is not true.”
“Isn’t it? Well, at least, the plan miscarried. Now, give me the
button, and I promise, to the best of my power, to hush the matter
up.”
“I haven’t got it, indeed; O, you must believe me! He told the
policeman himself that he had thrown it away while escaping.”
“Yes, yes. I give him credit for his loyalty to you. But, Emma—you
know I never put much faith in your sanctimoniousness. Don’t be a
fool, and drive me to extremities.”
“You can’t mean it. I blame my covetous heart. I envied you—I admit
it—this dear fetish of our family. But to think me capable of such a
wickedness! O, Inez!”
Then Mrs. John Belmont exploded. I muffle the report. It left Miss
Belmont flaccid and invertebrate, weakly sobbing that she would see
Hurley; would try to get him to identify the exact spot where he had
parted with the bauble; would move heaven and earth to make her
guiltless restitution. Yet all the time, remembering the scene of last
night, she must have known her promise vain. Jim had sought to thrust
no shadow of a fact upon her. He had not thrown the button away. He
alone knew where it now was; but would he so far play into the hands
of her enemy as to tell? She felt faint in the horror of this doubt;
and Mrs. John perceived the horror.
As for her, she was utterly hateful and incredulous. She had friends,
she screamed—one in particular—who would act, and unmercifully, to
see her righted. She hardly refrained from striking her sister-in-law,
as she rushed out in a storm of hysterics.
And at this point I was called in—by Miss Belmont, that is to say.
I found her utterly prostrated—within step of the brink of the final
collapse.
I coaxed her back, foot by foot; won the whole truth from her; laughed
her terrors to scorn, and staked her my professional credit to have
the matter put right, or on the way to right, by our next meeting.
And I meant it, and was confident. For that very day—though of this
she did not know—I had officially ordered Jim Hurley’s removal from
the cell in which he had been lodged to the County Hospital. The man
was dying, that was the fact; and a fact which he had known perfectly
when he staked at one throw for an easy bed for himself, and a
repayment of his debt to his old benefactress.
He was ensconced in a little ward by himself, when I visited him and
sat down to my task. He cocked an eye at me from a red tangle, and
grinned.
“Now, Hurley,” I said, “I come straight from Miss Emma, by her
authority, to acquaint you with the results of your deed.”
“O!” he answered. “Hev the peelers been a-dirtyin’ of their pore knees
lookin’ for it in the ’edgerows? I ’opes as they found it.”
“You know they couldn’t. You’ve got it yourself.”
“S’elp me, I haven’t!”
Then I informed him, carefully and in detail, of the awful miscarriage
of his intentions. He was patently dumbfounded.
“Well, I’m blowed!” he whispered, quite amazed. “Well, I _am_ blowed!”
“You must undo this,” I said. “There’s only one way. Where _is_ the
button?”
He gauged me profoundly a moment.
“On a ledge under the table,” he said. Then he thrust out a claw.
“Don’t you go lettin’ ’_er_ ’ave it back,” he said, “or I’ll ’aunt
you!”