I dragged myself round it; but saw no one, nor even a footprint in the waning of the light; neither was there any sound among the trees beyond it. Wondering greatly, and very angry with the fellow who had left the line there, I collected my tools with some difficulty, and was obliged to leave the tree unsyringed. Then, as I went stiffly home, I thought of the fuss my Kitty would have made, to see me in that bleeding hobble; and if I was weak in body through it, I fear that I was weaker still in mind.
CHAPTER XLIII.
THE GREAT LADY.
At this time, I slept, or lay down to sleep, on a couple of good-sized chairs in the kitchen, with a cushion laid along them, which had come from my uncle’s pew in Sunbury church. He had established a new cushion there, on the strength of my marriage and Kitty’s good clothes; and the old one, being stuffed with sound horsehair, was not to be despised when upside down. And to save all risk of rolling off, I set it against the front legs of the dresser. The door of the room was left wide open, and the front door also, unless the night was windy; for I had nothing to lose, having lost my all; and I only wished that anybody would come and try to rob me. It would have been bad for him, unless he had been either Hercules, of Ulysses; for I was armed with recklessness, and eager to tackle any open foe. Nervousness (such as a happy man may feel, when he hears a strange noise in the dead of the night) was an unknown power to me now, and I would have fought, like a bull-dog in his own kennel, and enjoyed it. This was not the proper turn of mind for a young man to indulge in. That I knew as well as could he; but the blame lay elsewhere.
Although I was very stiff and sore from the bruises of that awkward fall, I went at daylight to examine the place, where that stranger must have stood. The ground was dry and hard just there; but I found enough to show me that I had not been deceived by any trick of the imagination. Not only had the soil been trodden by a foot unlike my own, but the thick mat of the Thuja tree had some of the lobed leaves (which composed it and stood together like moss compressed), ruffled and crushed into one another, as if by the thrust of a heavy form. Then I went to the place where I had stood over against the peach-tree, and put my hat on a nail to represent my height, and returning to the clipped tree gazed through the nick of the fiddle at it, just as the face had gazed at me. I was obliged to stoop, to bring my eyes to the level at which those eyes had been; which showed that my visitor had been of some three or four inches lower stature, probably not more than five feet ten.
I could not trace his footsteps far, nor make out what kind of boots he wore, except that there was no sign of hob-nails, such as all our workmen had. It struck me that a man with such a face was not very likely to hurry himself, and the ground bore no traces of hasty flight, neither were the branches of the plum-trees (through which he must have retreated) broken. Probably he had retired at his leisure, while I was disabled from following. There were no signs of entrance to be discovered at or near the door into Love Lane; all our men had left work at the time of his visit, and no one had seen any stranger.
What on earth had he come for? was the question which arose, and could not be answered. There was nothing much to steal just there, for none of the tree-fruit was ripe; and though darkness forbade entire certainty, I felt pretty sure that the owner of that face would call himself a gentleman. It seemed to me better upon the whole to say nothing about the matter, for my uncle would probably laugh at it, as the product of my imagination; and as for the police, I knew too well that they would make nothing out of it. Only it was evident to my mind that this little adventure had some bearing on my trouble; and in spite of the dusk, I could swear to that face, wherever I should come across it.
My uncle would have stopped me from going to London, on account of the injuries which I could not hide, for my hands as well as my knees were cut. But I went by the ’bus, being very lame as yet, and unable to walk without aid of a stick. Mrs. Wilcox received me very kindly, and I was glad to find her business thriving, and the sharp boy released from the pots, and growing very useful at the counter.
“It has done him a deal of good, indeed it has, Mr. Kit,” she said, when I ventured to hint that his employment had not been elevating; “he knows every soul it is safe to give tick to; and as for bad shillings, of which I had a dozen, not one have we took since he come back. Ah, what a tradesman he will make! But now, sir, about your poor dear self. No one to stitch your knees better than that—ah, the righteous is always punished in this earth.”
I told her exactly how things stood—that everything was as dark as ever, that the neighbourhood had been searched in vain (as might have been expected), that one or two false clues had been followed, not by myself, but by the police, and that now I meant to take the matter entirely into my own hands, as I should have done at first except for a private reason, which I told her, to wit the disappearance of the money. She was angry that this should have been allowed to hinder me even for a day. But when I told her how it weighed upon my spirits, and seemed to show that my wife was not at all in her duty to me, Mrs. Wilcox sided with me, and said that every one must do the same, whether I were right in the end or wrong. And then I asked her what she thought; and she said that she was afraid to say.