“Break down this door,” said Lord Ivywood, calmly. “I noticed they haven’t finished loading their cart.”
Under his directions, and vastly against their will, Bullrose and Leveson lifted the tree-trunk vacated by Hibbs, and swinging it thrice as a battering-ram, burst in the door. Lord Ivywood instantly sprang into the entrance.
A voice called out to him quietly from the other end of the tunnel. There was something touching and yet terrible about a voice so human coming out of that inhuman darkness. If Philip Ivywood had been really a poet, and not rather its opposite, an aesthete, he would have known that all the past and people of England were uttering their oracle out of the cavern. As it was, he only heard a publican wanted by the police.–Yet even he paused, and indeed seemed spellbound.
“My lord, I would like a word. I learned my catechism and never was with the Radicals. I want you to look at what you’ve done to me. You’ve stolen a house that was mine as that one’s yours. You’ve made me a dirty tramp, that was a man respected in church and market. Now you send me where I might have cells or the Cat. If I might make so bold, what do you suppose I think of you? Do you think because you go up to London and settle it with lords in Parliament and bring back a lot of papers and long words, that makes any difference to the man you do it to? By what I can see, you’re just a bad and cruel master, like those God punished in the old days; like Squire Varney the weasels killed in Holy Wood. Well, parson always said one might shoot at robbers, and I want to tell your lordship,” he ended respectfully, “that I have a gun.”
Ivywood instantly stepped into the darkness, and spoke in a voice shaken with some emotion, the nature of which was never certainly known.
“The police are here,” he said, “but I’ll arrest you myself.”
A shot shrieked and rattled through the thousand echoes of the tunnel. Lord Ivywood’s legs doubled and twisted under him, and he collapsed on the earth with a bullet above his knee.
Almost at the same instant a shout and a bark announced that the cart had started as a complete equipage. It was even more than complete, for the instant before it moved Mr. Quoodle had sprung into it, and, as it was driven off, sat erect in it, looking solemn.