MR. PENFOUND’S TWO BURGLARS.
THE STORY OF HIS WALK WITH THEM.
THE chain of circumstances leading to the sudden and unexpected return of Mr. and Mrs. Penfound from their Continental holiday was in itself curious and even remarkable, but it has nothing to do with the present narrative, which begins with the actual arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Penfound before the portal of their suburban residence, No. 7, Munster Gardens, at a quarter before midnight on the 30th of August.
It was a detached house with a spacious triangular garden at the back; it had an air of comfort, of sobriety, of good form, of success; one divined by looking at it that the rent ran to about £80, and that the tenant was not a man who had to save up for quarter days. It was a credit to the street, which upon the whole, with its noble trees and its pretty curve, is distinctly the best street in Fulham. And, in fact, No. 7 in every way justified the innocent pride of the Penfounds.
“I can feel cobwebs all over me,” said Mrs. Penfound, crossly, as they entered the porch and Mr. Penfound took out his latchkey. She was hungry, hot, and tired, and she exhibited a certain pettishness—a pettishness which Mr. Penfound, whenever it occurred, found a particular pleasure in soothing. Mr. Penfound himself was seldom ruffled.
Most men would have been preoccupied with the discomforts of the arrival, but not George Penfound. Mr. Penfound was not, and had never been, of those who go daily into the city by a particular train, and think the world is coming to an end if the newsagent fails to put the newspaper on the doorstep before 8 a.m.
Mr. Penfound had lived. He had lived adventurously and he had lived everywhere. He had slept under the stars and over the throbbing screws of ocean steamers. He knew the harbours of the British Empire, and the waste places of the unpeopled West, and the mysterious environs of foreign cities. He had been first mate of a tramp steamer, wood sawyer in Ontario, ganger on the Canadian Pacific Railway, clerk at a Rand mine, and land agent in California.
It was the last occupation that had happened to yield the eighty thousand dollars which rendered him independent and established him so splendidly, at the age of forty, in Fulham, the place of his birth. Thin, shrewd, clear, and kindly, his face was the face of a man who has learnt the true philosophy of life. He took the world as he found it, and he found it good.
To such a man an unexpected journey, even though it ended at a deserted and unprepared home, whose larder proved as empty as his stomach, was really nothing.
By the time Mr. Penfound had locked up the house, turned out the light in the hall, and arrived in the bedroom, Mrs. Penfound was fast asleep. He sat down in the armchair by the window, charmed by the gentle radiance of the night, and unwilling to go to bed. Like most men who have seen the world, he had developed the instincts of a poet, and was something of a dreamer. Half an hour—or it might have been an hour: poets are oblivious of time—had passed, when into Mr. Penfound’s visions there entered a sinister element. He straightened himself stiffly in the chair and listened, smiling.