“You have been here eight days, intent only upon finding your child and taking him to his mother as a peace offering, and all for your own happiness; and you have not once thought of the poor gentleman and his famishing family.”
“No, I have not,” said Alexander to himself, “when it would have required no more than fifteen minutes to have done it either. I will find time to see poor Everage to-day, and put him out of his misery.”
And he kept his word.
He knew exactly where the Newton Institute was situated, and he knew the hour of the afternoon at which the boys were dismissed, and at that hour he walked towards the Institute to meet Everage as the latter should come out after his pupils. He met first a troop of boys, and afterwards saw him come creeping along. But oh! how changed since Alexander had last seen him! He was now pale, thin, haggard, and somewhat gray. His eyes were cast down, and his shoulders were bowed, and he crept along like an old man of eighty.
The truth is that the poor gentleman had mistaken his vocation—it was not that of a deep-dyed villain; he had no genius for crime, and moreover, he had no stomach for it; it did not agree with him; he could not digest it; it made him ill, and was like to kill him unless he could get it off his stomach, or—his conscience.
His passions, his poverty, and his temptations had drawn him on to a deed which, just as soon as it was done, filled his soul with a corroding remorse.
Of all who suffered from the abduction of little Lenny, Clarence Everage, the abductor, suffered the most. Every night he was drawn by some irresistible influence to look upon his little victim.
He was himself a very loving father, and he had a little girl of Lenny’s age, who was his favorite child, named Clara, after himself; and when he saw poor Lenny fading in the close confinement of that dark, damp attic, and for the want of sunshine, and weeping and wailing for his mother, the sinner’s remorse was intensified to agony. He let his own family suffer that he might bring a few dainties to little Lenny.
The other lodgers in the house, who had never had a glimpse of the baby-boy, but who knew that a child had been put to “mind” with Mother Rooter, and who saw this poor, shabby gentleman come every night to bring it “goodies,” jumped to the natural conclusion that he was the father of the boy, whom for some reason or other he was keeping in concealment; and this supposition shut out the suspicion that little Lenny was the missing child whose loss was posted all over London. We who know the facts easily see the connection between the two sets of circumstances; but they who did not even suspect them, could see no such relations.
So deep was the remorse of poor Everage, that it not only dried up his blood, and wasted his flesh, and bowed his frame, and blanched his hair, but it drove him to the desperate determination to take the child and go to police head-quarters and give himself up as its abductor. And so fixed was his resolution that he was only waiting for his wife to get safely over her confinement, which was daily expected, before he should do this.