“Ha! true. But she has not been suffered to speak to a soul not in the company, Mrs. Crane excepted.”
“Perhaps at the performance last night some signal was given?”
“But if Waife had been there I should have seen him; my troupe would have known him: such a remarkable face; one eye too.”
“Well, well, do what you think best. I’ll call on you after breakfast; let me go now. Basta! Basta!”
Losely wrenched himself from the manager, and strode off to the inn; then, ere joining Poole, he sought Mrs. Crane. “This going before a magistrate,” said Losely, “to depose that I have made over my child to that blackguard showman—in this town too, after such luck as I have had and where bright prospects are opening on me—is most disagreeable. And supposing, when we have traced Sophy, she should be really with the old man; awkward! In short, my dear friend, my dear Bella,” (Losely could be very coaxing when it was worth his while) “you just manage this for me. I have a fellow in the next room waiting to breakfast: as soon as breakfast is over I shall be off to the race-ground, and so shirk that ranting old bore; you’ll call on him instead, and settle it somehow.” He was out of the room before she could answer.
Mrs. Crane found it no easy matter to soothe the infuriate manager when he heard Losely was gone to amuse himself at the race-course. Nor did she give herself much trouble to pacify Mr. Rugge’s anger or assist his investigations. Her interest in the whole affair seemed over. Left thus to his own devices, Rugge, however, began to institute a sharp, and what promised to be an effective, investigation. He ascertained that the fugitive certainly had not left by the railway or by any of the public conveyances; he sent scoots over all the neighbourhood: he enlisted the sympathy of the police, who confidently assured him that they had “a network over the three kingdoms.” Rugge’s suspicions were directed to Waife: he could collect, however, no evidence to confirm them. No person answering to Waife’s description had been seen in the town. Once, indeed, Rugge was close on the right scent; for, insisting upon Waife’s one eye, and his possession of a white dog, he was told by several witnesses that a man blind of two eyes, and led by a black dog, had been close before the stage, just previous to the performance. But then the clown had spoken to that very man; all the Thespian company had observed him; all of them had known Waife familiarly for years; and all deposed that any creature more unlike to Waife than the blind man could not be turned out of Nature’s workshop. But where was that blind man? They found out the wayside inn in which he had taken a lodging for the night; and there it was ascertained that he had paid for his room beforehand, stating that he should start for the race-course early in the morning. Rugge himself set out to the racecourse to kill two birds with one stone,—catch Mr. Losely, examine the blind man himself.
He did catch Mr. Losely, and very nearly caught something else; for that gentleman was in a ring of noisy horsemen, mounted on a hired hack, and loud as the noisiest. When Rugge came up to his stirrup, and began his harangue, Losely turned his hack round with so sudden an appliance of bit and spur, that the animal lashed out, and its heel went within an inch of the manager’s cheek-bone. Before Rugge could recover, Losely was in a hand-gallop. But the blind man! Of course Rugge did not find him? You are mistaken: he did. The blind man was there, dog and all. The manager spoke to him, and did not know him from Adam.
Nor have you or I, my venerated readers, any right whatsoever to doubt whether Mr. Rugge could be so stolidly obtuse. Granting that blind sailor to be the veritable William Waife, William Waife was a man of genius, taking pains to appear an ordinary mortal. And the anecdotes of Munden, or of Bamfylde Moore Carew, suffice to tell us how Protean is the power of transformation in a man whose genius is mimetic. But how often does it happen to us, venerated readers, not to recognize a man of genius, even when he takes no particular pains to escape detection! A man of genius may be for ten years our next-door neighbour; he may dine in company with us twice a week; his face may be as familiar to our eyes as our armchair; his voice to our ears as the click of our parlour-clock: yet we are never more astonished than when all of a sudden, some bright day, it is discovered that our next-door neighbour is—a man of genius. Did you ever hear tell of the life of a man of genius but what there were numerous witnesses who deposed to the fact, that until, perfidious dissembler! he flared up and set the Thames on fire they had never seen anything in him; an odd creature, perhaps a good creature,—probably a poor creature,—but a MAN of GENIUS! They would as soon have suspected him of being the Khann of Tartary! Nay, candid readers, are there not some of you who refuse to the last to recognize the maa of genius, till he has paid his penny to Charon, and his passport to immortality has been duly examined by the customhouse officers of Styx! When one half the world drag forth that same next-door neighbour, place him on a pedestal, and have him cried, “Oyez! Oyez! Found a man of genius! Public property! open to inspection!” does not the other half the world put on its spectacles, turn up its nose, and cry, “That a man of genius, indeed! Pelt him!—pelt him!” Then of course there is a clatter, what the vulgar call “a shindy,” round the pedestal. Squeezed by his believers, shied at by his scoffers, the poor man gets horribly mauled about, and drops from the perch in the midst of the row. Then they shovel him over, clap a great stone on his relics, wipe their foreheads, shake hands, compromise the dispute, the one half the world admitting that though he was a genius he was still an ordinary man; the other half allowing that though he was an ordinary man he was still a genius. And so on to the next pedestal with its “Hic stet,” and the next great stone with its “Hic jacet.”
The manager of the Grand Theatrical Exhibition gazed on the blind sailor, and did not know him from Adam!