“That’s them,” repeated the boy, touching the steaming bones, “and I’d never have taken them, only the servant said they were no use.”
“It’s jewels I’m after!” shouted McSweeny in a great rage. “Jewels! £200 worth of jewels!”
“Jewels? I never saw them,” cried the boy, drying up his tears with marvellous alacrity. “You said bones, I thought—at least it was the only thing I ever took, and thought you meant them.”
All this was dreadful to McSweeny, and yet it was so simply and naturally spoken, that he could not for a moment doubt the truthfulness of either. With a great show of bluster and official activity he searched the whole of the little hovel, but, of course, found no trace of jewellery of any kind; indeed, the page-boy protested loudly that he had never seen his master with jewellery in his possession, and so could not possibly have stolen it.
The return to Mr Stafford’s house was not quite such a triumphal procession as McSweeny had expected, and when there he had nothing but utter failure to recount. He went over the whole house, and questioned the other servants, with a like result. He was not a step nearer the solution than when he began. There remained then but one slender hope—that the thief might attempt to dispose of the jewels, so McSweeny finished his work by taking a minute description of these valuables, and having them inserted in our printed lists sent round to all dealers and pawnbrokers. A tour round the most of these produced no better result. No one had offered such articles either for sale or pledge. At the end of a week, when I was beginning to “hirple” about again, we were in one of these dealers’ places, when I suggested that the description of the jewels was rather vague for the pawnbrokers, and that we might go along to the jeweller who had sold them to Mr Stafford, and have it made fuller and more complete. A reference to the scribbles which McSweeny called notes revealed the fact that no such name was recorded. I sent McSweeny out to the South Side to have the omission rectified, not being able to walk as far myself, and on his return learned that Mr Stafford had had some difficulty in remembering the name himself. However, on McSweeny naming two or three of the principal ones in Princes Street, he at length spotted one as the right one. In the evening I chanced to be in Princes Street, and went into the shop to get the description. To my surprise, the jeweller and all his assistants declared that no such purchase had been made in the shop. Back I sent McSweeny to Mr Stafford, when that gentleman at once smiled out knowingly, and said—
“I think I understand that statement of the jeweller. It is all a plot between him and my servants—he is to swear that he never sold them, and they are to declare that they never took them. The jeweller will thus get them back, and they will divide the spoil.”
McSweeny scratched his red pow, looked up at the ceiling, and then down at the carpet, and finally confessed that he did not exactly catch the drift of the gentleman’s reasoning.
“I will explain—I will confide in you as a friend,” said Mr Stafford, waxing warm. “I am a lonely man, without wife or children to look after my interests and protect me from designing persons. The consequence is that I am continually being persecuted, robbed, and cheated. One of my acquaintances, whom I never injured by thought or deed, carried this torture to such an extent that I was forced to leave the city.”
“Could you not have got the protection of the police?” suggested McSweeny.
“Useless. How could I prove the persecution? I fled to London; the wretch followed me there; I took the first train from the place; it landed me at one of their pleasure gardens—the grounds of the Crystal Palace, I think. I enjoyed myself there; when all at once my fiend—my tormentor—as I must call him—appeared before me. I ran from the spot; a balloon was just starting; I leaped in, cut the rope, and shot up into the air, laughing in triumph at the chagrin of my persecutor.”