Elster's Folly: A Novel

by Mrs. Henry Wood

There was a tone of mockery in the man's answer, not altogether acceptable to his hearer; and he let him go without further hindrance. But the man turned back in an instant of his own accord.

"I dare say you are wanting to know why I did you this little turn, Mr. Elster. I have been caught in corners myself before now; and if I can help anybody to get out of them without trouble to myself, I'm willing to do it. And to circumvent these law-sharks comes home to my spirit as wholesome refreshment."

Mr. Pike finally departed. He took the lonely way, and only struck into the high-road opposite his own domicile, the shed. Passing round it, he hovered at its rude door—the one he had himself made, along with the ruder window—and then, treading softly, he stepped to the low stile in the hedge, which had for years made the boundary between the waste land on which the shed stood and Clerk Gum's garden. Here he halted a minute, looking all ways. Then he stepped over the stile, crouched down amongst Mr. Gum's cabbages, got under shelter of the hedge, and so stole onwards, until he came to an anchor at the kitchen-window, and laid his ear to the shutter, just as it had recently been laid against the glass in the dining-room of my Lord Hartledon.

That he had a propensity for prying into the private affairs of his neighbours near and distant, there could be little doubt about. Mr. Pike, however, was not destined on this one occasion to reap any substantial reward. The kitchen appeared to be wrapped in perfect silence. Satisfying himself as to this, he next took off his heavy shoes, stole past the back door, and so round the clerk's house to the front. Very softly indeed went he, creeping by the wall, and emerging at last round the angle, by the window of the best parlour. Here, most excessively to Mr. Pike's consternation, he came upon a lady doing exactly what he had come to do—namely, stealthily listening at the window to anything there might be to hear inside.

The shrill scream she gave when she found her face in contact with the wild intruder, might have been heard over at Dr. Ashton's. Clerk Gum, who had been quietly writing in his office, came out in haste, and recognized Mrs. Jones, the wife of the surly porter at the station, and step-mother to the troublesome young servant, Rebecca. Pike had totally disappeared.

Mrs. Jones, partly through fright, partly in anger arising from a long-standing grievance, avowed the truth boldly: she had been listening at the parlour-shutters ever since she went out of the house ten minutes ago, and had been set upon by that wolf Pike.

"Set upon!" exclaimed the clerk, looking swiftly in all directions for the offender.

"I don't know what else you can call it, when a highway robber—a murderer, if all tales be true—steals round upon you without warning, and glares his eyes into yours," shrieked Mrs. Jones wrathfully. "And if he wasn't barefoot, Gum, my eyes strangely deceived me. I'd have you and Nancy take care of your throats."

She turned into the house, to the best parlour, where the clerk's wife was sitting with a visitor, Mirrable. Mrs. Gum, when she found what the commotion had been about, gave a sharp cry of terror, and shook from head to foot.

"On our premises! Close to our house! That dreadful man! Oh, Lydia, don't you think you were mistaken?"