“Mr. Tuke—your honour,” said he, in a hoarse, vibrative voice, “I weren’t never fitted to be a landlord—that’s the solemn truth. A man as keeps a inn stands balanced between his custom and his conscience; and then comes an extry pot and bowls him off of his legs. Give me your word to compensate me agen the loss, and I’ll shut up the ‘Dog and Duck’ to-morrow and set the place a-fire.”
He said it in a tentative, apologetic way, and was quite ready to join in the other’s cackle of merriment over the suggestion.
“No, no, my friend,” said Mr. Tuke. “I’ve plenty on my conscience without the guardianship of a scrupulous innkeeper.”
Then he added sternly:
“You’ve said much or little, but enough. Dree your pothouse weird, my friend; and take the consequences if you knowingly harbour law-breakers. We’ve talked round the subject; and now you can hardly expect me, upon my soul, to fall in with your offer of a half-way market.”
“Very well, sir,” said the landlord, chapfallen; and, “Bear in mind, Mr. Breeds,” said the other, “that to be caught examining a householder’s shutters is scarcely a recommendation to his favour.”
He saw the fellow off the premises—marked his going till he was well out of sight; then returned to the hall and pondered the interview.
This seemed to him, as regarded the visitor’s share in it, a confirmation of his suspicions that there was a certain mystery toward which he was the indefinite subject and centre. More—it convinced him that if mischief of any sort was somewhere in process of incubation the tavern of which Mr. Breeds was landlord was the place most likely to contain the egg.
Now, as a man who had once already taken his own life in hand, he was not greatly sensitive to alarms that might have unnerved persons of a more precise conduct. Indeed, in the tasteless monotony of his present days, he would have welcomed, perhaps, the necessity of some vigorous action justly undertaken on his own behalf. But it was this blind search for a clue to the intangible—this turning round and round in a vain effort to grasp a chimera, that at first worried and depressed him.
If he could only have received certain confirmation of his surmises that some rascal intrigue was afoot; if in all his little world there had been a single soul he could trust and depend upon, his course would have been easier. As it was, how did the case stand? A very desert loneliness had begotten in him already a distrust of his neighbours, of whom, undoubtedly, were a few of shady visage and equipment. But, here, surely every ale-house had its personnel of loafers and idle rogues; and it seemed monstrous to assume that in broad day, within call, as it were, of a considerable village, a plot—of which a private gentleman, making out life meagrely in a near empty house, was the object—could be hatching at his very door.