He was confident that the Ministers would be punished (that was a favourite word of his) for their interference with the only Power which had shown any practical sympathy for the “suffering races,” and so on.
With tea, toast, and talk, and anything in season from the neighbouring greengrocer’s at the corner, the evening passed pleasantly away, the later hours being filled up with music by Mrs. Thompson, Mr. Thompson and the boy “Ward,” who had been taught to play on many strange instruments until he was almost equal to Peace himself in his proficiency.
Shortly after tea, Mr. Thompson would quietly rise from his chair, and the guests—usually only one, or at the most two—would take the hint and leave, Mr. Thompson apologising by saying that he was not quite so strong as he once was, and late hours being detrimental to his health and opposed to his habits, he was obliged to go to bed at what other people would consider very early hours.
This idea he seemed anxious to impress upon the neighbourhood, and succeeded in doing it.
Mrs. Long, who lived near him for the most of those six months, tells me that they were very early people—“the light,” she says, “was out at No. 5 before any other house in the neighbourhood.”
The explanation, of course, is easy. Peace might ostentatiously lock his front door at half-past ten, and half an hour after, when the people supposed he and his family were sleeping the sleep of the just, he would be stealing out at the back, climbing the railway embankment, and off on his midnight raids, which always meant robbery and plundering, and, if necessary a murder.
Mrs. Thompson played a most conspicuous part throughout the latter part of Peace’s career. How she and Mrs. Peace could have consented to live under the same roof with the burglar Peace is altogether unaccountable.
The ladies of the house in the Evelina-road are thus described by one who had an opportunity of learning something of the doings in that abode of bliss.
I am afraid (says the narrator) I must knock on the head a good many of the stories that have been printed about Peace’s establishment, as well as about his ways of life.
In the first place he had no servants at all. There were in the house, in addition to himself, the younger person who passed as Mrs. Thompson, the other elderly woman, who gave herself the name of Mrs. Ward, and a lad of seventeen, who was named Willie Ward.