The stranger gave a keen glance towards the door.
‘If there is nothing of value there,’ he said, quickly; then, with a change of his tone, ‘Joe, my good fellow, take a little walk outside. I seem to want to have a sentinel or I can’t rest. Just go and walk about a bit outside.’
Joe gave another predatory glance around, and then with a nod of his head withdrew.
‘I’ll come back,’ he said, ‘in ’alf an ’our. If I walks about, some bobby or other will be after me. They don’t never let a poor fellow alone.’
The stranger gave John one of his humorous looks.
‘Such is the effect of prejudice,’ he said.
It was impossible that any position could be more strange. This unknown criminal, this discharged convict, of whom all that John knew was that he was a convict, and had no friend but Joe, seated himself opposite to the young man familiarly at John’s own table, with a twinkle in his eye and a grotesque sense of all that was ludicrous in his own circumstances which was entirely bewildering to a young man not used to mental phenomena of any kind. The man was dressed in clothes of an old-fashioned cut (most likely such as had been quite fashionable and appropriate, John thought, in the days when he was shut up in prison), but still perfectly correct and respectable, and there was in his aspect nothing of that unfamiliarity with comfort and decency which was evident in his companion. This person drew in his chair to John’s table with the ease and freedom of one to whom a tidy bourgeois parlour was usual and natural. Perhaps he might have been accustomed to better places—certainly not to worse. How the episode of the prison had affected him, John wondered vaguely, but at all events there was nothing visible of that association. He was able to make a good-humoured joke of it—a joke which concealed, was it philosophy, was it despair? He settled into seriousness, however, as the door closed upon Joe, though the smile was never far from his eyes—and repeated, with a slight curiosity,
‘You were very kind—that night. To find myself in a decent house, in a soft bed, was wonderful. I couldn’t help wondering why you should take such an interest in me.’
The eyes which were so expressive gave a wistful, almost imploring look in John’s face, as if the man had some suspicion, or rather hope, that John’s motive was other than that of mere charity. The young man was bewildered by this look, and by a something, he could not tell what, that was sympathetic and familiar in the air of the stranger. Sympathetic! and he was one of the criminal class, a returned convict! John’s mind was full of confusion, perplexed beyond measure by the influence which he felt to affect him in spite of himself. But, though he was angry with himself for yielding to it, he could not resist his strange companion’s eyes.
‘It does not seem becoming in me, at my age, to speak so to a man of yours,’ he said. ‘But when I saw you, helpless, with no one but that—ruffian——’