“What does that matter? A man is bound by the act of his agent; besides, it is my form, and my initials on the back. Come, let us put a good face on the thing.” And he led the way to the kitchen, and got up a little laugh, and asked the scullery-maid if she could show Mr. Skinner and him the dust-hole. She stared, but obeyed, and the pair followed her, making merry.
The dust-hole was empty.
The girl explained: “It is the dustman's day: he came at eleven o'clock in the morning and carried all the dust away: and grumbled at the paper and the bones, he did. So I told him beggars musn't be choosers: just like his impudence! when he gets it for nothing, and sells it for a mint outside the town.” The unwonted visitors left her in dead silence almost before she had finished her sentence.
Mr. Hardie sat down in his parlour thoroughly discomposed; Skinner watched him furtively.
At last the former broke out: “This is the devil's doing: the devil in person. No intelligence nor ability can resist such luck. I almost wish we had never meddled with it: we shall never feel safe, never be safe.”
Skinner made light of the matter, treated the receipt as thrown into the sea. “Why, sir,” said he, “by this time it will have found its way to that monstrous heap of ashes on the London Road; and who will ever look for it there, or notice it if they find it?” Hardie shook his head: “That monstrous heap is all sold every year to the farmers. That receipt, worth L. 14,000 to me, will be strewed on the soil for manure; then some farmer's man, or some farmer's boy that goes to the Sunday-school, will read it, see Captain Dodd's name, and bring it to Albion Villa, in hopes of a sixpence: a sixpence! Heaven help the man who does a doubtful act and leaves damnatory evidence on paper kicking about the world.”
From that hour the cash Hardie carried in his bosom, without a right to it, began to blister.
He thought of telling the dustman he had lost a paper, and setting him to examine the mountain of ashes on the London Road; but here caution stepped in: how could he describe the paper without awakening curiosity and defeating his own end? He gave that up. It was better to let the sleeping dog lie.
Finally, he resolved to buy security in a world where after all one has to buy everything: so he employed an adroit agent, and quietly purchased that mountain, the refuse of all Barkington. But he felt so ill-used, he paid for it in his own notes: by this means the treaty reverted to the primitive form of barter*—ashes for rags.
* Or exchange of commodities without the aid of money: see
Homer, and Welsh Villages, passim.