And so I went direct to Brown’s Close, where I knew the copartnership of Gillies and M‘Diarmid formerly carried on business, both in the domestic and trading way. Domestic! what a strange word as applied to these creatures—charm, as it is, to conjure up almost all the associations which are contained in the whole round of human happiness! Yes, I say domestic; happiness is a thing of accommodation. These beings will go forth in the morning in the spring of hope, and after threading dangers which are nothing less than wonderful, jinking the throw of the loop of the line which grazes their very shoulders, and turning and doubling in a thousand directions to escape justice, they meet at nightfall to enjoy the happiness of a home. The beefsteak, as it fries, gives out the ordinary sound, the plunk of the drawn cork is heard, and they narrate their hairbreadth escapes, their dangers, and their triumphs. They laugh, they sleep, but their enjoyment terminates with my knock at the door. The solitary inmate is wondering at the absence of the female without whom the word “domestic” becomes something like a mockery. It is needless to deny him affections; he has them, and she has them, as the tiger and the tigress have them. They don’t complain like other folk, because they don’t bark or growl at Providence; but the iron screw is in the heart. I have read its pangs in the very repression of its expression.
I had been so quick in my movements that I went right in upon my man just as he had entered, no doubt after the cautious doublings consequent upon our prior interview. The salutation given me was a growl of the wrath which had been seething in the Pappin’s digestor of his heart.
“What right have you to hound me in this way?” he cried, as he closed his fist and then ground his teeth.
“Why, Dan,” said I, calmly, “I’m still curious about the whiskers.”
“Whiskers again,” he roared.
“Aye, just the whiskers,” said I. “I have told you I am curious about them, and I want to know why you parted with what you seemed so proud of?”
“Gibe on; you’ll make nothing of me,” he cried again. “I defy you.”
“Well, but I cannot give up the whiskers in that easy way,” said I, “because I have an impression that if the lady in Leith had not lost her purse, your whiskers would still have clothed your cheeks.”
From which cheeks the colour fled in an instant. Even to the hardest of criminals the pinch of a fact is like the effect of a screw turned upon the heart. It is only we who can observe the changes of their expression. Dan knew, in short, that he was caught; and I have before remarked that the regular thieves can go through the business of a detection in a regular way.
“Well,” he said, as he felt the closing noose, and with even a kind of grim smile, “I might as well have kept my hair.”