The two faces at the upper window were interesting, had there been time to consider them; and one—that of a lady, obviously the child's mother—struck me as uncommonly beautiful, though pale and desperately sad. Beside her stood a man, as obviously the father; a handsome gentleman, with the flushed face and glassy stare of a drunkard. He stood there chuckling at the trick, and even the lady was smiling indulgently until she leaned out and caught a glimpse of the victim: whereupon, with a sudden terrified snatch, she drew the boy back from the window, and out of sight.
It was then, as I looked at the bald-headed man, seeking some explanation of her terror, that I caught sight of the face staring over the wire blind in the lower window, and lost not a second in presenting my back to it.
It belonged to an old acquaintance of mine. "Acquaintance," I say, because Robert Leggat and I had never been able to stomach each other. There was perhaps a trifle too much of the gentleman about both of us—enough, at any rate, to suggest rivalry, though we hunted different game. "Buck" Leggat was by gifts and election a sedentary scoundrel, with a tongue and a presence fatally plausible among women and clergymen, and a neat adaptable pen. Whence he came, or of what upbringing, I could never discover. I had heard some hint of an Oxford education, but he never alluded to that University in my company. Flash notes had brought him to the Old Bailey, and then his elegant deportment and a nice point of circumstantial evidence had saved his neck. This was about four years ago, and I had supposed him to be somewhere in the Plantations when his bad handsome face confounded me across Tregarrick Fore Street. He wore a clergyman's bands, too.
By good luck he had not recognised me, but was occupied with the bald-headed man who still groped on the pavement. The placard which I appeared to be studying announced the Sale by Auction of a considerable country estate, and my eyes roamed among such words as "farms," "tenements," "messuages," "acres," while I cast up the possible profit of my discovery. Here was I, pretty hungry, with barely the coin for a night's lodging. Here was Leggat, escaped convict, lording it in the coffee-room of a hotel, masquerading as a parson; therefore up to some game—a bold one—by the look of it a paying one. Decidedly I ought, with a little prudence, to handle a percentage.
I edged away from the hoarding to the shop-front on my left—a watchmaker's; and so, still presenting my back to the Red Hart, past a saddler's, a tailor's, the entrance of the County Hall, and the Town Clerk's office. Here, out of view from Leggat's window, I turned, stepped across the street into the hotel archway, and walked boldly into the coffee-room which opened out of it on the left.
Leggat had disappeared. The room in fact was empty.
I rang the bell, and after some minutes it was answered by a waitress, a decent girl, though somewhat towzled.
"There was a clergyman here a moment since," said I.
"That will be Mr. Addison. Do you wish to see him?" She eyed me with no great favour, and indeed my clothes ill agreed with the respectable dinginess of the coffee-room.