But even the longest sentence must come to an end, and after a period of separation which had seemed like eternity to both of them Beavis walked out of the prison gates a free man. The first person he saw was Dolores, dressed simply in black and looking more beautiful than ever. Without a word they went away arm in arm to begin life anew.
Beavis had a sense of humour, and he must have realized the funny side of the scene when Dolores proudly told him that she had scraped together the large sum of forty-eight dollars! To the man who had once refused to think of anything under a million this was a descent from the sublime to the ridiculous, yet the impostor, who had paid for his sins, could find himself regarding her fortune with enthusiasm, and he could spend hours debating as to the best way to lay it out with advantage to themselves.
It was Dolores who decided their future. She had been brought up on a ranch and away from the crowded centres, so she voted for a small farm in a remote corner of the great United States, and Beavis willingly submitted. The Peralta estate and its twenty million pounds seemed like a dream now, and he would not have troubled to devote even an hour to a similar scheme even if it promised to produce twice as much.
Thus it was his wife's love that saved James Addison Beavis from himself, and made his name unfamiliar to the police. His one great adventure in crime had met with disaster, and ever afterwards he was content with the fortune the labour of his hands earned for him.
[CHAPTER XIV]
JAMES GREENACRE
According to his own description of himself, James Greenacre was a very respectable grocer, a lenient creditor, and one of the most popular residents in the parish of Camberwell; and to prove the latter statement he pointed to the fact that he had been elected one of the overseers of the parish by a substantial majority.
But the plain truth is that, during the greater part of the fifty-two years which comprised his span of life, Greenacre was a hypocritical scoundrel who preached virtue and practised vice and whose egregious vanity found an outlet in seconding the notoriety-seeking eccentricities of politicians of the Daniel Whittle Harvey type. Greenacre presided at Harvey's meetings when the latter was Radical candidate for Southwark, and there is a certain grim humour in the fact that three years after Greenacre was executed for murder his political confrère was appointed commissioner of the metropolitan police. Greenacre was prospering when an offence against the inland revenue entailed unpremeditated emigration to America, and after a brief sojourn in New York and Boston he returned to London in 1835 and began the manufacture of "an infallible remedy for throat and chest disorders." He was struggling to make this venture pay when he met Hannah Browne.
Greenacre had regained his reputation for solvency when he astonished his numerous friends by hinting that he would not mind undergoing the ordeal of matrimony if a woman with plenty of money could be found for him. He said that, as he was a rich man, it would be only fair if the other party to the contract brought a fair fortune into the common pool. In fact, with him marriage was a business deal and nothing else, and he made no secret of his opinion.