Ecce iterum Crispinus!
It was by no calculation, but by involuntary impulse, that Waife, thus escaping from the harsh looks and taunting murmurs of the gossips round the Mayor’s door, dived into those sordid devious lanes. Vaguely he felt that a ban was upon him; that the covering he had thrown over his brand of outcast was lifted up; that a sentence of expulsion from the High Streets and Market Places of decorous life was passed against him. He had been robbed of his child, and Society, speaking in the voice of the Mayor of Gatesboro’, said, “Rightly! thou art not fit companion for the innocent!”
At length he found himself out of the town, beyond its straggling suburbs, and once more on the solitary road. He had already walked far that day. He was thoroughly exhausted. He sat himself down in a dry ditch by the hedgerow, and taking his head between his hands, strove to recollect his thoughts and rearrange his plans.
Waife had returned that day to the bailiff’s cottage joyous and elated. He had spent the week in travelling; partly, though not all the way, on foot, to the distant village, in which he had learned in youth the basketmaker’s art! He had found the very cottage wherein he had then lodged vacant and to be let. There seemed a ready opening for the humble but pleasant craft to which he had diverted his ambition.
The bailiff intrusted with the letting of the cottage and osier-ground had, it is true, requested some reference; not, of course, as to all a tenant’s antecedents, but as to the reasonable probability that the tenant would be a quiet sober man, who would pay his rent and abstain from poaching. Waife thought he might safely presume that the Mayor of Gatesboro’ would not, so far as that went, object to take his past upon trust, and give him a good word towards securing so harmless and obscure a future. Waife had never before asked such a favour of any man; he shrank from doing so now; but for his grandchild’s sake, he would waive his scruples or humble his pride.
Thus, then, he had come back, full of Elysian dreams, to his Sophy,—his Enchanted Princess. Gone, taken away, and with the Mayor’s consent,—the consent of the very man upon whom he had been relying to secure a livelihood and a shelter! Little more had he learned at the cottage, for Mr. and Mrs. Gooch had been cautioned to be as brief as possible, and give him no clew to regain his lost treasure, beyond the note which informed him it was with a lawful possessor. And, indeed, the worthy pair were now prejudiced against the vagrant, and were rude to him. But he had not tarried to cross-examine and inquire. He had rushed at once to the Mayor. Sophy was with one whose legal right to dispose of her he could not question. But where that person would take her, where he resided, what he would do with her, he had no means to conjecture. Most probably (he thought and guessed) she would be carried abroad, was already out of the country. But the woman with Losely, he had not heard her described; his guesses did not turn towards Mrs. Crane: the woman was evidently hostile to him; it was the woman who had spoken against him,—not Losely; the woman whose tongue had poisoned Hartopp’s mind, and turned into scorn all that admiring respect which had before greeted the great Comedian. Why was that woman his enemy? Who could she be? What had she to do with Sophy? He was half beside himself with terror. It was to save her less even from Losely than from such direful women as Losely made his confidants and associates that Waife had taken Sophy to himself. As for Mrs. Crane, she had never seemed a foe to him; she had ceded the child to him willingly: he had no reason to believe, from the way in which she had spoken of Losely when he last saw her, that she could henceforth aid the interests or share the schemes of the man whose perfidies she then denounced; and as to Rugge, he had not appeared at Gatesboro’. Mrs. Crane had prudently suggested that his presence would not be propitiatory or discreet, and that all reference to him, or to the contract with him, should be suppressed. Thus Waife was wholly without one guiding evidence, one groundwork for conjecture, that might enable him to track the lost; all he knew was, that she had been given up to a man whose whereabouts it was difficult to discover,—a vagrant, of life darker and more hidden than his own.
But how had the hunters discovered the place where he had treasured up his Sophy? how dogged that retreat? Perhaps from the village in which we first saw him. Ay, doubtless, learned from Mrs. Saunders of the dog he had purchased, and the dog would have served to direct them on his path. At that thought he pushed away Sir Isaac, who had been resting his head on the old man’s knee,—pushed him away angrily; the poor dog slunk off in sorrowful surprise, and whined.
“Ungrateful wretch that I am!” cried Waife, and he opened his arms to the brute, who bounded forgivingly to his breast.
“Come, come, we will go back to the village in Surrey. Tramp, tramp!” said the cripple, rousing himself. And at that moment, just as he gained his feet, a friendly hand was laid on his shoulder, and a friendly voice said,
“I have found you! the crystal said so! Marbellous!”