Delighted to find that his facetious mood made him so pliant, I obeyed him in every particular, and Peter’s exultant smile only faded when the first two or three questions had been put to him at the office. The moment “Sunderland” was mentioned his jaw fell, and he fixed upon me a look of hatred most flattering and pleasing to me. On searching the lining of Peter’s coat we came upon a flat packet of papers. There were some six or seven letters, and a properly authenticated certificate of marriage, all proving that Isabella Diamond had been courted and married some twenty years before by Matthew Bannister. Peter’s rage had been working up during the search, and he now shouted out that he knew who had set that “bloodhound,” as he was pleased to name myself, on his track, and after a burst of the most awful language, he wound up by accusing Mr Bannister of having two wives living, and commanding us to go and arrest the gentleman as smartly as we had arrested the rogue.
When the papers had been discovered I fully expected to have that disagreeable task to perform. The whole case seemed clear and the proof positive to my mind, for I had seen the working of the hidden springs from the first. But the law has certain forms of its own; and I was sent first to Bell Diamond herself, who was the proper person to make the charge. To my surprise, though she gave vent to rage and vituperation over the capture of Peter, she most positively refused to charge Mr Bannister with bigamy; nay in the very face of the discovered papers she swore most positively that she had never been married in her life, and had never spoken to Mr Bannister. My firm conviction, upon hearing this extraordinary denial, was that Bell had a spark of generosity in her breast, low as she had fallen, and wished to save the man who had once loved her from the ignominy of a prison; but in that I was very far mistaken. Bell was actuated by a very different motive—a desire to get well out of an awkward plight and a very threatening complication. The secret was partly laid bare by referring to Mr Bannister, but it was not wholly made clear till long after.
Mr Bannister had really married a girl named Isabella Diamond, who drifted away from him and was lost sight of. That lost wife, after sinking lower and lower, died in a lodging-house in Glasgow, in which Peter Hart and his sister at that time lived. Nelly Hart was in trouble and likely to be taken, and the name of the dead woman was boldly given in as Helen Hart, while the living owner took the name of Bell Diamond, as well as the papers left by her, and vanished in the direction of Edinburgh. There they remained for some time, till, by merest accident, they discovered that Mr Bannister was newly married, and conceived the plan of frightening him into paying black mail, under the idea that his lost wife was still alive.
Where there is real love there is always perfect trust, and Mr Bannister had confided the whole story of his life to the devoted girl who had laid her all at his feet; and it was that knowledge and the idea that she was to be torn from him for ever which had caused her terrible agitation and swoon on the occasion of my first visit to the house.
Peter Hart duly received his sentence of twenty years, and Dick McQueen, the spider-killer, as I may name him, was avenged of his half-crown.
THE SPOILT PHOTOGRAPH.
The photographer had put up a rickety erection in shape of a tent close to the grand stand at Musselburgh race-course. He was a travelling portrait-taker, and his “saloon” was a portable one, consisting of four sticks for the corners and a bit of thin cotton to sling round them. There was no roof, partly from poverty and partly to let in more light. It was the first day of the races, and masses of people had been coming into the place by every train and available conveyance.
The photographer’s name was Peter Turnbull—a tall, lanky fellow, like an overgrown boy who had never got his appetite satisfied. He was clad in the shabbiest of clothes, but talked with the stately dignity of an emperor or a decayed actor. In spite of the gay crowds pressing past outside, business did not come very fast to Turnbull, so, after waiting patiently inside like a spider for flies, he issued from his den and tried to force a little trade with his persuasive tongue.
In front of his tent he had slung up a case of the best photographs he could pick up for money, which were likely to pass for his own, and occasionally some of those bent on pleasure paused to look at the specimens, when Turnbull at once tackled them to give him an order. Women he invariably asked to have their “beautiful” faces taken; men, who are not accustomed to be called beautiful, or to think themselves so, he manipulated in a different fashion. He appealed to them as to whether they hadn’t a mother who would like a portrait of them always beside her, or a sweetheart who would value it above a mountain of diamonds. Turnbull’s appearance was against him—he looked hungry down to the very toes of his boots—and most of those he addressed were as suspicious of his eloquence as of that of a book canvasser.
At length, however, he did get a man to listen to him—a sailor, evidently, with a jovial, happy look about his face, and plenty of money in his pocket.