III
That afternoon Mary went to call on Mr. Verney. Mr. Verney was an artist who lived at the forge cottage. He and Mary were great friends. She used to sit by him while he painted, and he played cricket with her and Harry and was very useful with a pocket-knife.
“No one,” she said to herself, “can help me so well as Mr. Verney, and if I decide myself on how the money is to be spent, it will be all right to get some help in spending it.”
Mr. Verney liked the scheme immensely. “But I don’t see that you want any help,” he said. “You have done it so far as well as possible.”
“Well,” said Mary, “there’s one great difficulty: Thomas Barnes would never take anything from our house. You see, we once had his son for a gardener, and father had to send him away because of something he did; but though it was altogether his son’s fault, Thomas Barnes has never spoken to father since, or even looked at him. But he’s very old and poorly, and very lonely, and it’s most important he should have a new hand-truck, because all his living depends on it; but it’s frightfully important that he shouldn’t know who gave it to him.”
“Wouldn’t he guess?” Mr. Verney said.
“Not if nobody knew.”
“Oh, I see: no one is to know. That makes it much more fun.”
“But how are we to do it?” Mary asked. “That’s why I want you to help. Of course, we can post most of the money, but we can’t post a truck. If Thomas Barnes knew, he’d send it back directly.”
“Well,” said Mr. Verney, after thinking for some time, “there’s only one way: we shall have to be anti-burglars.”
“Anti-burglars!” cried Mary. “What’s that?”
“Well, a burglar is some one who breaks into a house and takes things away; an anti-burglar is some one who breaks into a house and leaves things there. Just the opposite, you see.”
“But suppose we are caught?”
“That would be funny. I don’t know what the punishment for anti-burgling is. I think perhaps the owner of the house ought to be punished for being so foolish as to interrupt. But tell me more about Thomas Barnes.”
“Thomas Barnes,” said Mary, “lives in a cottage by the cross-roads all alone.”
“What does he do?”
“He fetches things from the station for people; he carries the washing home from Mrs. Carter’s; he runs errands—at least, he doesn’t run them: people wish he would; he sometimes does a day’s work in a garden. But he really must have a new barrow, and his illness took all his money away, because he wouldn’t belong to a club. He’s quite the most obstinate man in this part of the country. But he’s so lonely, you know.”
“Then,” said Mr. Verney, “we must wait till he goes away on an errand.”
“But he locks his shed.”
“Then we must break in.”
“But if people saw us taking the barrow there?”
“Then we must go in the night. I’ll send him to Westerfield suddenly for something quite late—some medicine, and then he’ll think I’m ill—on a Thursday, when there’s the midnight train, and we’ll pop down to his place at about eleven with a screw-driver and things.”
After arranging to go to Westerfield as soon as possible to spend their money, Mary ran home.
Being an almoner was becoming much more interesting.