[CHAPTER X.]
HOW MY LORD RETURNED HOME.
It was on a bright afternoon, a week after the events which have been described, that Lord Fordingbridge's travelling carriage drew up in front of his house, and my lord descended in an extremely bad humour. There was, perhaps, more than one reason why he was not in the most amiable of tempers, the principal one being that the news which he had hoped to receive ere he again made his entrance into London had not come to hand.
All the time that he had been on his Cheshire property--which he had found to be considerably neglected since his father's departure for France--he had been expecting to receive, from one source or another, the information of the arrest of those three enemies of his, about whom he had given information sufficient to bring them to justice. Yet none had come. Daily he had sent to the coach office at Chester for the journals from London, but, when he had perused them, he still failed to find that any of the three had been haled to justice. Nor was there even a description in any of them of the scene at Vauxhall--which, had he found such description, might have been exceedingly pleasant reading. But, in truth, nothing was more unlikely than that he should find it. A fracas at either Ranelagh or the Spring Gardens was by no means likely to be chronicled in either the "London Journal" or the "Craftsman," or any other news-sheet of the period, since in those days the ubiquitous reporter was unknown, or, when he existed, did not consider anything beneath a murder, a state trial, or an execution worthy of his pen. Also the proprietors of Ranelagh and Vauxhall, and similar places of entertainment, took very good care to keep anything unpleasant that happened out of the papers. Nothing short, therefore, of Mr. Jonathan Tyers sending an account of what had occurred in his grounds to the papers of the day with the request that it might be inserted--accompanied, perhaps, by a payment for such insertion--would have led to the publication of the matter, and that the worthy proprietor of the Spring Gardens would do such a thing as this was not to be supposed.
Also, my lord had received no news from his wife, nor her father, which astonished him considerably. For he had supposed that, in about a week's time, the post would bring him a letter full of accusations, reproaches, and injurious epithets from her ladyship, who, he felt sure, would at once connect him with the arrest of the three men--yet, no more from her than from the public prints did he gather one word. So that at last he began to have the worst fears that, after all, the Government had bungled in some way and that the victims had escaped. It was, therefore, in a very ill humour that he again returned to London, cursing inwardly and vehemently at any delay necessitated by the changing of horses, by nights spent at inns on the road, and by the heavy roads themselves; and at St. Albans, where he once more slept, by receiving no visit at all from Captain Morris, to whom he had written saying that he would be there on a certain evening and would be pleased to see him.
Instead, however, he received a visit from another person who had troubled his mind a great deal during the past week or so; a somewhat rough, uncouth-looking fellow, who seemed to have dogged his footsteps perpetually--who had passed him soon after he left Dunstable on his journey down, whom he saw again at Coventry and at Stafford, and who, to his amazement, now strode into the apartment he occupied as hitherto, and stated that he brought a message from the Captain.
"Hand it to me, then," said his lordship, regarding the man as he stood before him in his rough riding cloak and great boots, and recognising him as the fellow who had appeared so often on his journey.
"There is nothing to hand," the other replied. "Only a word-of-mouth message."
"A word-of-mouth message! Indeed! Captain Morris spares me but scant courtesy. Well, what is the message?"
"Only this. The work has failed, and the birds have escaped from the net. That's all."