“He might have known my face,” answered Parslewe. “But he wouldn’t have known my name; at least, I mean, he never knew my name when I met him here. We chanced to meet here, as strangers, happening to dine together at the same table; we smoked a cigar together afterwards, and chatted about the old town. I heard his name, but he never heard mine; to him I was a mere bird-of-passage. I guess,” he went on, with one of his cynical laughs, “old Sperrigoe would have been vastly astonished if he’d found me in at Kelpieshaw and had recognised in me the stranger of the Crown!”
“Have you come here to see old Sperrigoe?” demanded Madrasia.
Parslewe was the best hand I ever came across at the fine art of disregarding a direct question. His face became utterly blank and his lips set, and remained so until a new whim came over him, and he began to tell us something of the history of the old house to which he had brought us. Of that he would talk, but we both saw that it was no use questioning him on any other subject, and we left him alone. But I had already learned something—Parslewe had been there before; he had met White Whiskers there; White Whiskers would know him: without a doubt he had come there to meet White Whiskers. But why on earth did he elude White Whiskers at Kelpieshaw?
Before the evening closed I learned something else. Madrasia retired early; Parslewe began writing a letter in the smoking-room; left to myself, I strolled out to the front door of the hotel to take a look at my surroundings. The old Market Place was flooded in bright moonlight, and I saw at once that Parslewe had been right when he spoke of it as a bit of mediæval England. On all sides of me were ancient half-timbered houses with high gables and quaintly ornamented fronts; above them, at one end of the square, rose the tall square tower of a church; fronting it, at the other end, was what I took to be an old Moot Hall. But for the gas-lamps which twinkled here and there, and for the signs and names above the shops, I should have thought myself thrown back to Tudor times.
The hall-porter came out as I stood there, looked up at the sky, and remarked that we should have a fine day to-morrow, and that good weather was desirable, for people were beginning to go about.
“You get tourists here, I suppose?” said I.
“No end of ’em, sir,” he answered. “Deal of Americans come here—they like that sort of thing”—waving his hand towards the old houses opposite. “Nothing of that sort in their country, I understand, sir. Oh, yes, full of tourists all the summer months, sir.”
“But you don’t remember all their faces, do you?” I suggested.
He laughed at my reference to his remark on our arrival.
“Why, no, sir, not chance comers like that,” he admitted. “Though I wouldn’t be too sure on that point—one gets into a habit of noticing, you know, sir. But in the case of anybody who stops here a day or two—never forget, sir. I knew your friend at once—noticeable gentleman, of course.”