Volume Two—Chapter Seventeen.
Mr Gemp is Curious.
“I know’d—I know’d it all along,” said Old Gemp to his friends, for the excitement of his loss seemed now to have acted in an opposite direction and to be giving him strength. “I know’d he couldn’t be living at that rate unless things was going wrong. What did the magistrates say?”
“Said it was a black case, and committed him for trial,” replied Gorringe the tailor. “Ah, I don’t say that clothes is everything, Mr Gemp; but a well-made suit makes a gentleman of a man, and you never heard of Mr Thickens doing aught amiss.”
“Nor me neither, eh, Gorringe? and you’ve made my clothes ever since you’ve been in business.”
The tailor looked with disgust at his neighbour’s shabby, well-worn garments, and remained silent.
“I’d have been in the court mysen, Gorringe, on’y old Luttrell said he wouldn’t be answerable for my life if I got excited again, and I don’t want to die yet, neighbour; there’s a deal for me to see to in this world.”
“Got your money, haven’t you?”
“Ye-es, I’ve got my money, and it’s put away safe; but I wanted my deeds—my writings. I’ve lost by that scoundrel, horribly.”
“Ah, well, it might have been worse,” said Gorringe, giving a snip with his scissors that made Gemp start as if it were his own well-frayed thread of life being cut through.
“Oh, of course it might have been worse; but a lot of us have lost, eh, neighbour?”
“Dixons’ and Sir Gordon have come down very handsome over it,” said Gorringe, who was designing a garment, as he called it, with a piece of French chalk.
“And the parson,” said Gemp; “only to think of it—a parson, a curate, with one-and-twenty thousand pound in his pocket.”
“Ay, it come in handy,” said Gorringe.
“Now, where did he get that money, eh? It’s a wonderful sight for a man like him,” said Gemp, with a suspicious look.
“London. I heerd tell that he said he had been to London to get it.”
“Ay, he said so,” cried Gemp, shaking his head, “but it looks suspicious, mun. Here was he hand and glove with the Hallams, always at their house and mixed up like. I want to know where he got that money. I say, sir, that a curate with twenty thousand pound of his own is a sort o’ monster as ought to be levelled down.”
The tailor pushed up his glasses to the roots of his hair, and left off his work to hold up his shears menacingly at his crony.
“Gemp, old man,” he said, “I would not be such a cantankerous, suspicious old magpie as you for a hundred pounds; and look here, if you’re going to pull buttons off the back o’ parson’s coat, go and do it somewhere else, and not in my shop.”
“Oh! you needn’t be so up,” said Gemp. “Look here,” he cried, pointing straight at his friend, “what did Thickens say about the writings?”
“Spoke fair as a man could speak,” said Gorringe, resuming his architectural designs in chalk and cloth, “said he felt uncomfortable about the matter first when he saw Hallam give a package to a man named Crellock—chap who often come down to see him; that he was suspicious like that for two years, but never had an opportunity of doing more than be doubtful till just lately.”
“Why didn’t he speak out to a friend—say to a man like me?”
“Because, I’m telling you, it was only suspicion. Hallam managed the thing very artfully, and threw dust in Thickens’s eyes; but last of all he see his way clear, and went and told parson. And just then Sir Gordon were suspicious, too, and had got something to go upon, and they nabbed my gentleman just as he was going away.”
“And do you believe all this?” cried Gemp.
“To be sure I do. Don’t you?”
“Tchah! I’m afraid they’re all in it.”
“Ah! well, I’m not; and, as we’ve nothing to lose, I don’t care.”
“How did Hallam look?”
“Very white; and, my word! he did give parson a look when he was called up to give his evidence. He looked black at Thickens and at Sir Gordon, but he seemed regularly savage with parson.”
“Ah, to be sure!” cried Gemp. “What did I say about being thick with parson? It’s my belief that if all had their deserts parson would be standing in the dock alongside o’ Hallam.”
“And it’s my belief, Gemp, that you’re about the silliest owd maulkin that ever stepped! There, I won’t quarrel with thee. Parson? Pshaw!”
“Well, thou’lt see, mun, thou’lt see! Committed for trial, eh? And how about the other fellow!”
“What, Crellock? Oh, they’ve got him too. He came smelling after Hallam, who was like a decoy bird to him. Wanted to see him in the cage; and they let him see Hallam, and—”
“Ah, I heard that Hallam told the constable Crellock was worse than he, and they took him too. Yes, I heard that. Hallo! here comes Hallam’s maid—doctor’s owd lass, Thisbe. Let’s get a word wi’ her.”
Gemp shuffled out of the tailor’s shop, and made for Thisbe, who was coming down the street, with her head up and her nose in the air.
“Mornin’, good mornin’,” he said, with one of his most amiable grins.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” said Thisbe sharply; and she went straight on to Miss Heathery’s, knocked sharply, and waited, gazing defiantly about the place the while.
“Well, she’s a stinger, she is!” muttered Gemp, standing scraping away at his face with his forefinger. “Do her good to be married, and hev some one with the rule over her. Humph! she’s gone. Now what does she want there?”
The answer was very simple, though it was full of mystery to Gemp. Thisbe wanted her mistress and the child, who had gone to Miss Heathery’s after dark, Millicent’s soul revolting against the idea of staying at the old home now that it was in the possession of Christie Bayle, her husband’s bitterest foe.
The gossips were quite correct. Hallam had been examined thrice before the county magistrates, and enough had been traced to prove that for a long time he had been speculating largely, losing, and making up his losses by pledging, at one particular bank, the valuable securities with which Dixons’ strong-room was charged. When one of these was wanted he pledged another and redeemed it, while altogether the losses were so heavy that, had not the old bank proprietors been very wealthy men, Dixons’ must have gone.
“Now, where’s she a-going, neighbour?” said Gemp, scraping away at his stubbly face. “I don’t feel up to it like I did, but I shall have to see.”
Gorringe peered through his glasses and the window at the figure in black that had just left Miss Heathery’s, leaning on Thisbe’s arm for a few moments, and then, as if by an effort, drawing herself up and walking alone.
The day was lovely, the sky of the deepest blue; the sun seemed to be brightening every corner of the whole town, and making the flowers blink and brighten, and the sparrows that haunted the eaves to be in a state of the greatest excitement. King’s Castor had never looked more quaintly picturesque and homelike, more the beau-ideal of an old English country town, from the coaching inn with yellow post-chaise outside, and the blue-jacketed postboy with his unnecessarily knotted whip, down to the vegetable stall at the corner of the market, where old Mrs Dims sat on an ancient rush-bottomed chair, with her feet in a brown earthenware bread-pancheon to keep them dry.
Mrs Pinet’s flower-pots were so red that they seemed like the blossoms of her plants growing unnaturally beneath the leaves, and her window, and every one else’s panes, shone and glittered with the true country brilliancy in the morning sun. Even the grass looked green growing between the cobble-stones—those pebbles that gave the town the aspect that, being essentially pastoral, the inhabitants had decided, out of compliment to their farm neighbours, to pave it with sheep’s kidneys.
But there was one blot upon it—one ugly scar, where the yellow deal boards had been newly nailed up, and the walls and window-frames were blackened with smoke; and it was when passing these ruins of her home that Millicent Hallam first shuddered, and then drew herself up to walk firmly by.
“Ah!” said Gorringe, making his shears click, “you wouldn’t feel happy if you didn’t know what was going on, would you, neighbour?”
“Eh? Know? Of course not. If it hadn’t been for me looking after the bank, where would you have all been, eh?”
Gemp spoke savagely, and pointed at the tailor as if he were going to bore a hole in his chest.
“Well, p’r’aps you did some good there, Master Gemp; but if you’d take my advice, you’d go home and keep yoursen quiet. I wouldn’t get excited about nothing, if I was you.”
“Humph! No, you wouldn’t, Master Gorringe; but some folk is different to others,” said Gemp, talking away from the doorway, with his head outside, as he peered down the street.
“Hey! look at ’em now!—the curiosity of these women folk! Here’s owd Mother Pinet with her neck stretched out o’ window, and Barton at the shop, and Cross at the ‘Chequers,’ and Dawson the carrier, all got their heads out, staring after that woman. Now, where’s she going, I wonder?”
Old Gemp stumped back into the shop, shaving away at his cheek.
“She can’t be going over to Lindum to see Hallam, because she went yesterday.”
The tailor’s shears clicked as a corner was taken out of a piece of cloth.
“She ain’t going up to the doctor’s, because he drove by half-an-hour ago with the owd lady.”
Another click.
“Can’t be going for a walk. Wouldn’t go for a walk at a time like this. I’ve often wondered why folk do go for walks, Master Gorringe. I never did.”
Click!
“Nay, Master Gemp, you could always find enough to see and do in the town, eh?”
“Plenty! plenty, mun, plenty!—I’ve got it!”
“Eh?”
“She’s going—Hallam’s wife, yonder—to see owd Sir Gordon, and beg Hallam off; and, look here, I wean’t hev it!”
Gemp banged his stick down upon the counter in a way that made the cloth spread thereon rise in waves, and became very broad of speech here, though it was a matter of pride amongst the Castor people that they spoke the purest English in the county, and were not broad of utterance, like the people on the wolds, and “down in the marsh.”