Never, until after his apprehension, had the truth been revealed to any one member of that Camberwell household. Long ago, when Jack the Scribe was a dashing young articled clerk, with bold black eyes and a handsome face,—long ago, when Isabel was only a baby, the knowledge of a bill-discounting transaction which the clerk designated an awkward scrape, but which his employers declared to be a felony, had come suddenly upon Mr. Sleaford's first wife, and had broken her heart. But when the amateur artist developed into the accomplished professional, Isabel's father learned the art of concealing the art. His sudden departure from Camberwell, the huddling of the family into an Islington lodging, and his subsequent flight to Liverpool, were explained to his household as an attempt to escape an arrest for debt; and as angry creditors and sheriffs' officers had been but common intruders upon the peace of the household, there seemed nothing very unnatural in such a flight. It was only when Mr. Sleaford was safely lodged within the fatal walls of Newgate, when the preliminary investigations of the great forgeries were published in every newspaper, that he communicated the real state of the case to his horror-stricken wife and children.
There is little need to dwell upon the details of that most bitter time. People get over these sort of things somehow; and grief and shame are very rarely fatal, even to the most sensitive natures. "Alas, sweet friend," says Shelley's Helen, "you must believe this heart is stone; it did not break!" There seems to be a good deal of the stony element in all our hearts, so seldom are the arrows of affliction fatal. To Isabel the horror of being a forger's daughter was something very terrible; but even in its terror there was just the faintest flavour of romance: and if she could have smuggled her father out of Newgate in a woman's cap and gown, like Lady Nithisdale, she might have forgiven him the crimes that had helped to make her a heroine. The boys, after the first shock of the revelation, took a very lenient view of their father's case, and were inclined to attribute his shortcomings to the tyranny and prejudice of society.
"If a rich cove has a jolly lot of money in the bank, and poor coves are starving, the rich cove must expect to have it forged away from him," Horace Sleaford remarked, moodily, when debating the question of his father's guilt. Nor did the hobbledehoy's sympathy end here; for he borrowed a dirty and dilapidated copy of Mr. Ainsworth's delightful romance from a circulating library, and minutely studied that gentleman's description of Newgate in the days of Jack Sheppard, with a view to Mr. Sleaford's evasion of his jailers.
It was not so very bad to bear, after all; for of course Jack the Scribe was not so imprudent as to make any admission of his guilt. He represented himself as the victim of circumstances, the innocent associate of wicked men, entrapped into the folly of signing other people's names by a conspiracy on the part of his companions. Hardened as he was by the experiences of a long and doubtful career, he felt some natural shame; and he did all in his power to keep his wife and children dissociated from himself and his crimes. Bitterly though the cynic may bewail the time-serving and mercenary nature of his race, a man can generally find some one to help him in the supreme crisis of his fate. Mr. Sleaford found friends, obscure and vulgar people, by whose assistance he was enabled to get his family out of the way before his trial came on at the Old Bailey. The boys, ever athirst for information of the Jack-Sheppard order, perused the daily record of that Old Bailey ordeal by stealth in the attic where they slept; but Isabel saw nothing of the newspapers, which set forth the story of her father's guilt, and only knew at the last, when all was decided, what Mr. Sleaford's fate was to be. Thus it was that she never saw Mr. Lansdell's name amongst those of the witnesses against her father; and even if she had seen that name, it is doubtful whether it would have lived in her memory until the day when she met the master of Mordred Priory.
No language can describe the horror that she felt on her father's sudden appearance in Midlandshire. Utterly ignorant of the practices of prison life, and the privileges of a ticket-of-leave, she had regarded Mr. Sleaford's dismal habitation as a kind of tomb in which he was to be buried alive for the full term of his imprisonment. Vaguely and afar off she saw the shadow of danger to Roland, in the ultimate release of his enemy; but the shadow seemed so very far away, that after the first shock of Mr. Lansdell's story, it had almost faded from her mind, blotted out by nearer joys and sorrows. It was only when her father stood before her, fierce and exacting, hardened and brutalized by prison-life, a wretch for ever at war with the laws he had outraged,—it was only then that the full measure of Roland Lansdell's danger was revealed to her.
"If ever I come out of prison alive, I will kill you!"
Never had she forgotten the words of that threat. But she might hope that it was only an empty threat, the harmless thunder of a moment's passion; not a deliberate promise, to be fulfilled whenever the chance of its fulfilment arose. She did hope this; and in her first stolen interview with her father, she led him to talk of his trial, and contrived to ascertain his present sentiments regarding the man who had so materially helped to convict him. The dusky shadows of the summer evening hid the pallor of her earnest face, as she walked by Mr. Sleaford's side in the sheltered hollow; and that gentleman was too much absorbed by the sense of his own wrongs to be very observant of his daughter's agitation.
Isabel Gilbert heard enough during that interview to convince her that Roland Lansdell's danger was very real and near. Mr. Sleaford's vengeful passions had fed and battened upon the solitude of the past years. Every privation and hardship endured in his prison life had been a fresh item in his long indictment against Mr. Lansdell, the "languid swell," whom he had never wronged to the extent of a halfpenny, but who, for the mere amusement of the chase, had hunted him down. This was what he could not forgive. He could not recognize the right of an amateur detective, who bore witness against a criminal for the general benefit of society.
After this first meeting in Nessborough Hollow, the Doctor's Wife had but one thought, one purpose and desire; and that was, to keep her father in ignorance of his enemy's near neighbourhood, and to get him away before mischief arose between the two men. But this was not such an easy matter. Mr. Sleaford refused to leave his quarters at the Leicester Arms until he obtained that which he had come to Midlandshire to seek—money enough for a new start in life. He had made his way to Jersey immediately after getting his release, and had there seen his wife and the boys. From them he heard of Isabel's marriage. She had married well, they said: a doctor at a place called Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne—an important man, no doubt; and she had not been unkind to them upon the whole, writing nice long letters to her step-mother now and then, and sending post-office orders for occasional sovereigns.
Heaven only knows with what difficulty the poor girl had contrived to save those occasional sovereigns. Mr. Sleaford demanded money of his daughter. He had made all manner of inquiries about George Gilbert's position, and had received very satisfactory answers to those inquiries. The young doctor was a "warm" man, the gossips in the little parlour at the Leicester Arms told Jack the Scribe; a prudent young man, who had inherited a nice little nest-egg—perpetually being hatched at a moderate rate of interest in the Wareham bank—from his father, and had saved money himself, no doubt. And then the gossips entered into calculations as to the value of Mr. Gilbert's practice, and the simple eeonomy of his domestic arrangements; all favourable to the idea that the young surgeon had a few thousands snugly invested in the county bank.