Could she explain this, with the eyes of her father and Mr. Williamson upon her? She succeeded in leaving on the mind of the latter gentlemen the impression that she had had a mind to pry into the private doings of these gentlemen from idle girlish curiosity, and that Paul had been very foolish in giving way to her; but Mr. Somerton saw a little further than this into the secret of his daughter.
“Well, we must not stay chatting here,” said Mr. Williamson at length; “I will go and apply for a warrant against this Mr. Gibbs for conspiracy; and with regard to your husband, Mrs. Dibble, you had better take no steps at present to discover him.”
Mrs. Dibble, who had been mechanically lighting the fire and boiling the kettle all this time, turned round and requested Mr. Williamson to attend to his own business, and promised the whole company that she would attend to hers.
Upon this Mr. Williamson declined the lady’s invitation to breakfast, and went away in company with Paul, whom Mr. Somerton and his daughter promised to meet at Bow Street at twelve o’clock, when Paul’s bail expired.
A warrant for conspiracy was granted against Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs; but nearly an hour before a detective from Scotland Yard tapped at Mr. Gibbs’ door to execute the warrant, his landlady had slipped inside her lodger’s bedroom the rough-looking note of Dibble’s. It happened that Mr. Gibbs rose a little earlier that morning, or he would not have received the warning in time to have taken measures for his own safety. As it was, he no sooner received the letter than he commenced to prepare for flight.
In the midst of a volley of “curses not loud but deep,” he deposited a few articles of linen and other things in a valise, into which he emptied the contents of a small cash-box. Then from a drawer beneath the bedstead he brought forth a grey wig, a long strait coat, and a pair of green spectacles.
“Somehow I thought I should come to this at last,” he said, tossing the things upon the bed and locking the bedroom door. “The luck’s against me.”
And then he swore bitterly, and savagely ground his teeth, and coughed, and vowed the direst vengeance against everybody.
Taking up a pair of scissors, he cut off his whiskers and moustaches, and wrapped them up in paper.
“I must burn them somehow,” he said to himself. “What an ass I must be to get myself into this mess to satisfy my revenge on a boy,—a twopenny-halfpenny clerk whom I ought to have thrashed within an inch of his life.”