“Thank you. I can’t thank you enough.”
“Nothing I like better, really, than a bit of sport. I was having difficulty, if you understand me, Master Highworth; but then first I met you and now comes this other job. I never had so much luck at one time before, except that once at the races; and then I was cheated of it.”
Hi gave him some money for expenses, thanked him and urged him to go.
“Not by the door we came in by, Mr. Highworth,” he said. “That would never do. Them that see you go in may watch for you out.”
They were near the High Altar as he spoke. The door by which they had entered the church was opened: someone crept into the church. Hi saw the snub-nosed profile of Isabella motionless for an instant, while she sought in the darkness for her prey. ’Zeke on the instant plucked him through a curtain to a swing-door and thence to a lane.
“We dodge the Close this way,” he said, “and I’ll be back in a week or a bit better. And that will be all right, Mr. Highworth; and I thank you, sir, I’m sure, very kindly. And I wish you a happy Christmas, sir, though I know it’s a long time to wait.”
He set off as he finished speaking, in the shambling run with much bending of the leg which old Bill Ridden called “the poachers’ trot.” Hi had often seen old men of the ’Zeke kind running in that way on winter mornings when the hounds moved off to covert. He himself set off at once by the old city ditch to the pier: it was almost full morning. He wondered whether there would be any boat for him.
He also wondered, with some misgivings, about poor old Ezekiel. The phrase, “He never had so much luck at one time before,” smote him to the heart. It might not be much luck; it might be deadly; it certainly would be dangerous, to go off on this errand when the Reds were out. “I’ve taken him from his wife, too,” he thought. “However, she’s no chicken.” As he went on, he wondered whether Isabella might not have seen, chased and caught her husband: in which case the message would not go. Or suppose the Foxes Inn proved too much for him? “I must chance all that,” he thought. “He’s as likely to get through as I am.”
Thinking these things, he came out of the ditch into the colour and life of the racing of the carts to market from the Farola, with fish and fruit. These carts were light, open lorries, each drawn by two horses, driven by natives, who stood bare-armed, cloaked with coloured serapes, singeing their lips with the sucked stubs of cigarettes across which they cursed their horses. The workers scattered from before them as they raced. The horses’ hooves struck fire, the drivers leaned on the reins, beat with their sticks, and screamed:—
“Ar-re. Ar-re, sons of malediction.”