Antonio went wandering, with a dull half aimlessness, up and down. Presently, in a small ground-floor room to the rear, his foot kicked against some paper. He wrenched up the rusty bar of the shutters, and let in a flood of squalid light.
The thing he had encountered was a torn catalogue. He stooped and secured it. It was a thickish quarto of flimsy paper, a long dictionary of houses, many illustrated with plates, advertised for sale or lease by the firm of Foot & Liddel.
A hope gripped him. Rapidly and hungrily, moistening his right-hand second finger, he swept over the pages. Suddenly, a mark arrested his eager review of them. It was pencilled against an entry, describing a property, the Lone Farm, situated in the neighbourhood of Market Grazing, Hampshire. The place was described as desirable, and cheap. Geoletti looked all round the room, noted its time-stained paper and ragged skirting, and came back to the catalogue. Then, very carefully and comprehensively, he went through the whole book page by page, and convinced himself that there was no other marked entry whatever.
Very jealously, then, he extracted the page containing this solitary clue, folded, and put it into the pocket which contained his folded knife. Two secret things, potential, possibly, of retribution. There was at least the hope.
He went quietly about the house, effacing every sign of his examination; then passed out into the street, crossed the Square, and returned the key to its custodian.
Thenceforth he was seen no more in London.
CHAPTER XI.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL.
THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
When I got back to my woodland hermitage—which I regained, as I had foreseen I should, without my absence from the house having excited any comment—I put up, in a little frenzy of mockery, an altar to the God of Luck. I drew a picture of a clergyman (Mr Pugsley it was meant for) christening a baby out of a pint pot, and turning to demand of a villainous old pew-opener (my imaginary presentment of Mother Carey), who stood beside, the infant’s proposed title. The question, within a scroll, issued from his lips, and the answer—“Richard Gaskett, godson of the publican of that name”—from hers. I had bought in Footover, on my way back, a bottle of gin and one of peppermint essence; and these I clasped round with a single label bearing the motto “In vino veritas,” and stood them on a little table underneath the drawing, which I nailed to the wall. No one but Miss Christmas—barring my stepfather on a rare occasion—had ever invaded, or was like to invade, my snuggery; and, if anyone did, I was reckless about consequences. Then I sat down to consider, over a pipe, my present position and gains.
These amounted to something at least. The discovery that my mother, and my mother’s mother (I could hardly bring myself to acknowledge the old bibulous harpy for my grandmother) had both been on the stage; the discovery that their name was Carey; the discovery that the elder had “come into money”—been pensioned off, belike, by Lord Skene—and that the younger had “found religion” at the hands of Mr Pugsley of the tin tabernacle—all these little enlightenments and confirmations made a certain definite “grounding,” on which I might hope to embroider that web which should catch Lady Skene’s feet tripping. True, the main object of my venture was not realised. Yet even there Luck was shaping me out a promise. An usher at the Grammar School!—that villain who had taken base advantage of a poor ingénue’s warmth over his reformation! It was as much in reason as anything else. That a pedagogue could be something less than immaculate, quote Eugene Aram, not to speak of the Stockwell schoolmaster who chopped up his wife and put her in a box. But, whether it were a pedagogue or his pupil, a learned Theban or a scented puppy, I was confident that time, served by cunning and caution, would betray him to me soon or late. I had learned much already; and knowledge is always an investment which pays itself automatically at compound interest.
Nor were my discoveries the only profit I had brought back from my journey. A firmer confidence in myself; a more obdurate determination; a certain newly realised sense of humour—these were to be included in the gains. I felt a reinvigorated sense of mastery, a larger grasp of the world; I felt an insolent sense of security in Luck’s favouritism; I felt somehow like a weasel that watches a rickyard from cover. How I could make the rats squeal and run if once I elected to show myself in the open! I was in a very detestable humour, that is the truth.