In vain the gentleman protested against this outrage, and sometimes gently threatened to bring down all the vengeance of the law upon his sister’s tormentors. The sergeant treated the threat with disdain, and ridiculed the claim of his prisoner to kinship with Miss Goodwin. All entreaties, menaces, expostulations, and threats were answered by references to his duty, or intimations that he knew what he was about.
The search and exploration revealed nothing. The officer was sorely disappointed, but not yet discomfited. He saw that, at all events, he was safe if he went on, and that if he turned back he might expose himself to the charge of negligence. There was enough that was wrong, more than sufficient that was mysterious, to cover any excess of vigilance, or any stretch of duty. So on he resolved to go.
When Mr. Goodwin was told that he must accompany the officer as his prisoner, and that the lady must also share that inconvenience, they again put forth every form of remonstrance. All were useless. The officer was inexorable and unbelieving. He rudely expressed his disbelief of the assertion that the fair tenant of the cottage was a pure and innocent young lady, of small independent estate, and that the visitor was her brother and guardian. Those explanations, he said, might do for the magistrate to-morrow, but they would not do for the police.
There was no getting out of the awful mess. Mr. and Miss Goodwin were removed by the sergeant, under his warrants, to the chief metropolitan police station, and there confined in vulgar cells.
At times during the wretched journey to London the prisoners were defiant, and at others they sank into despair.
Once, on the way to the metropolis, the lady remarked to her companion,
“Never mind, dear George; we’re not thieves; they have searched my house in every part, but they have found nothing.”
“Now,” observed the officer, “don’t say any thing that’ll injure yourselves while I’m with you. I don’t want you to criminate yourselves. Only mind, I shall give all that I hear as evidence; and I don’t mind saying that I don’t like the look of things. ‘Found nothing!’ well, if that sort of talk ain’t thieves’ patter, I don’t know what is. I ain’t found nothing yet; but if I get a remand, won’t I find nothing!”
Mr. Goodwin shuddered. Miss Goodwin was eloquent in the form of denunciation.
The gentleman, by the time of the arrival of the party at the station-house, had recovered his self-possession. He demanded the means of communicating with a solicitor. This was afforded him. He chose the name of a well-known criminal practitioner, one of the cleverest and one of the most respectable of his class.