The little jeweller’s shop at the corner of Mark Lane had now been established for fourteen years. For ten of those years, David and Christian had lived with Countess; but when Rudolph was old enough and sufficiently trained to manage the business for himself, Countess had thought it desirable to assist David in establishing a shop of his own at some distance. She had more confidence in David’s goodness than in his discretion, and one of her chief wishes was to have as few acquaintances as possible. Happily for her aim, Rudolph’s disposition was not inconveniently social. He liked to sit in a cushioned corner and dream the hours away; but he shrank as much as Countess herself from the rough, noisy, rollicking life of the young people by whom they were surrounded. Enough to live on, in a simple and comfortable fashion—a book or two, leisure, and no worry—these were Rudolph’s desiderata, and he found them in Mark Lane.
He had no lack of subjects for thought as he sat behind his tiny counter on the evening of the following day. Shop-counters, at that date, were usually the wooden shutter of the window, let down table-wise into the street; but in the case of plate and jewellery the stock was too valuable to be thus exposed, and customers had to apply for admission within. It had been a very dull day for business, two customers only having appeared, and one of these had gone away without purchasing. There was one wandering about outside who would have been only too glad to become a customer, had he known who sat behind the counter. Stephen had searched in vain for Rudolph in the neighbourhood where he had so mysteriously vanished from sight. He could not recognise him under the alias of “Ralph le Juwelier,” by which name alone his neighbours knew him. Evening after evening he watched the corner of Mark Lane, and some fifty yards on either side of it, but only to go back every time to Ermine with no tale to tell. There were no detectives nor inquiry offices in those days; nothing was easier than for a man to lose himself in a great city under a feigned name. For Countess he never inquired; nor would he have taken much by the motion had he done so, since she was known to her acquaintances as Sarah la Juwelière. Her features were not so patently Jewish as those of some daughters of Abraham, and most people imagined her to be of foreign extraction.
“It seems of no use, Ermine,” said Stephen mournfully, when a month had passed and Rudolph had not been seen again. “Maybe it was the boy’s ghost I saw, come to tell us that he is not living.”
Stephen was gifted with at least an average amount of common sense, but he would have regarded a man who denied the existence of apparitions as a simpleton.
“We can only wait,” said Ermine, looking up from the tunic she was making for her little Derette. “I have asked the Lord to send him to us; we can only wait His time.”
“But, Wife, suppose His time should be—never?”
“Then, dear,” answered Ermine softly, “it will still be the right time.”
The morning after that conversation was waning into afternoon, when Rudolph, passing up Paternoster Row, heard hurried steps behind him, and immediately felt a grasp on his shoulder—a grasp which seemed as if it had no intention of letting him go in a hurry. He looked up in some surprise, into the face of the man whose intent gaze and disconnected words had so roused his attention a month earlier.
“Caught you at last!” were the first words of his captor. “Now don’t fall to and fight me, but do me so much grace as to tell me your name in a friendly way. You would, if you knew why I ask you.”
The kindliness and honest sincerity of the speaker’s face were both so apparent, that Rudolph smiled as he said—