Crawley rose with a puzzled air.
“Come here to-morrow evening at nine o'clock, and you shall have your wish. All the worse for you,” added he, moodily. “All the worse for me. Now go, without one word.”
Crawley retired dumfounded. He saw the iron man had received some strange, unexpected and terrible blow; but for a moment awe suppressed curiosity, and he went off on tiptoe, saying almost in a whisper, “To-morrow night at nine, sir.”
Meadows spread George's letter on the table and leaned on his two hands over it.
The letter was written some weeks after the last desponding one. It was full of modest, but warm and buoyant exultation. Heaven had been very good to Susan and him. Robinson had discovered gold; gold in such abundance and quality as beat even California. The thousand pounds, so late despaired of, was now a certainty. Six months' work, with average good fortune, would do it. Robinson said five thousand apiece was the least they ought to bring home; but how could he (George) wait so long as that would take! “And, Susan, dear, if anything could make this wonderful luck sweeter, it is to think that I owe it to you and to your goodness. It was you that gave Tom the letter, and bade me be kind to him, and keep him by me for his good; he has repaid me by making us two man and wife, please God. See what a web life is! Tom and I often talk of this. But Tom says it is Parson Eden I have to thank for it, and the lessons he learned in the prison; but I tell him if he goes so far back as that, he should go farther, and thank Farmer Meadows, for he it was that sent Tom to the prison, where he was converted, and became as honest a fellow as any in the world, and a friend to your George as true as steel.”
The letter concluded as it began, with thanks to Heaven, and bidding Susan expect his happy return in six months after this letter. In short, the letter was one “Hurrah!” tempered with simple piety and love.
Meadows turned cold as death in reading it. At the part where Farmer Meadows was referred to as the first link in the golden chain, he dashed it to the ground and raised his foot to trample on it, but forbore lest he should dirty a thing that must go to Susan.
Then he walked the room in great agitation.
“Too late, George Fielding,” he cried aloud—“too late; I can't shift my heart like a weathercock to suit the changes in your luck. You have been feeding me with hopes till I can't live without them. I never longed for a thing yet but what I got it, and I'll have this though I trample a hundred George Fieldings dead on my way to it. Now let me think.”
He pondered deeply, his great brows knitted and lowered. For full half an hour invention and resource poured scheme after scheme through that teeming brain, and prudence and knowledge of the world sat in severe and cool judgment on each in turn, and dismissed the visionary ones. At last the deep brow began to relax, and the eye to kindle; and when he rose to ring the bell his face was a sign-post with Eureka written on it in Nature's vivid handwriting. In that hour he had hatched a plot worthy of Machiavel—-a plot complex yet clear. A servant-girl answered the bell.