“Oh, dear! and you gave me such a fright, sir. You are sure it is a good one?”
“So good, Mrs Sarson, that I’d give you ten golden sovereigns for it. Five hundred if it were necessary,” he said to himself; and after being witness to the replacing of two notes in the caddy, and giving a receipt for those confided to his charge, he made his way back to Toxeter in a state of excitement that was new to him, and did not rest till he was locked up in his own private room.
“It seems impossible,” he thought, as he compared the note with the closely written figures he had in his pocket-book, and then examined the signature at the back.
“Yes; there’s the clue I have sought for so long—dropped into my hands like this. Oh!”
He sat back with the perspiration gathering on his forehead, and the look of excitement on his face changing slowly into horror as bit by bit the meaning of the name on the back of that note gradually unfolded itself till he was gazing upon a picture of horror that appalled him.
“No, no, no! It’s too shocking,” he cried at last, as he wiped his brow. The man could not be such a wretch.
“But he is a wretch! A cold-blooded, swearing, drinking brute; and with all his flash and show, and yacht, I know that he was always hard up for money, and being hunted by that usurious scoundrel Gellow.”
Trevithick wiped his brow again.
“Why, he must have had it all. Robbed the poor old man who had taken him to his hearth. Yes, I daresay to pay off that scoundrel and get time. Yes, there’s his name to the note. He must have changed it at the hotel. I knew that money was missing. Robbed him—the man who welcomed him as a son, and encouraged him to win his daughter. The black-hearted traitor. I always hated him. A cowardly, despicable thief, stealing the money that some day would have been his.”
Trevithick leaped from his seat, and in his excitement struck a penholder, and knocked over the ink.