‘You’re a green un, I can see,’ said the man; ‘and you’ve been made a mug of. You’re mixed up with the awfullest set of swindlers in London. They’ll all be in quod in half an hour; and it’s because I see you’ve been made a mug of I want to give you a chance of getting clear.’
George went hot and cold. Smith and Co. swindlers! A hundred little things, many that he had thought nothing of, now rushed back to his memory. A sudden revelation came, and in a moment the fabric of commercial eminence he had reared for himself fell to the ground.
‘Good heavens!’ he exclaimed, as the situation dawned upon him, ‘I must clear myself, and at once. What can I do?’
‘Take my advice and do nothing. Hook it. I believe you’re innocent, or I shouldn’t have given you this warning. But you wouldn’t be able to prove your innocence to a jury. The gang you’re in is the artfullest in London; they’d lay it all on you, and bring twenty witnesses to prove it. What witnesses to character have you got?’
‘Why, plenty!’ began George. Then suddenly he checked himself. He had been living under a false name. He had left his home in debt and difficulties after quarrelling with his father. How could he allow all this to be known to the world? How could he let his father and the people at home come to a police court, to find him in the dock with a gang of swindlers?
All these considerations flashed through the young man’s brain with lightning rapidity. Then he thought of Bess, and became almost speechless with horror. His position was terrible.
‘I don’t know why you tell me this,’ he gasped, seizing the dark man’s arm; ‘but for God’s sake tell me what to do? I have a wife and an old father; for their sakes I would do anything rather than have my name dragged before the world in a case like this.’
‘That’s reasonable,’ said the man. ‘I’m sorry for you, and I believe in you. I ought to arrest you, but I shan’t. I’m going to let you get clear away, and I’ll give the missus the tip too, and she can follow at once. Where do you live?’
George never stopped to ask himself if this sudden interest in his affairs on the part of a stranger could be genuine. He saw the facts in their ghastly reality, and he clutched at this small offer of help as a drowning man clutches at the first thing he sees.
George pulled out a letter from his pocket, and scribbled his address on it in pencil. Underneath he wrote: