Chapter Thirteen.
Bob Queeker Comes out Very Strong Indeed.
It is both curious and interesting to observe the multitude of unlikely ways in which the ends of justice are ofttimes temporarily defeated. Who would have imagined that an old pump would be the cause of extending Morley Jones’s term of villainy, of disarranging the deep-laid plans of Mr Larks, of effecting the deliverance of Billy Towler, and of at once agonising the body and ecstatifying the soul of Robert Queeker? Yet so it was. If the old pump had not existed—if its fabricator had never been born—there is every probability that Mr Jones’s career would have been cut short at an earlier period. That he would, in his then state of mind, have implicated Billy, who would have been transported along with him and almost certainly ruined; that Mr Queeker would—but hold. Let us present the matter in order.
Messrs Merryheart and Dashope were men of the law, and Mr Robert Queeker was a man of their office—in other words, a clerk—not a “confidential” one, but a clerk, nevertheless, in whose simple-minded integrity they had much confidence. Bob, as his fellow-clerks styled him, was sent on a secret mission to Ramsgate. The reader will observe how fortunate it was that his mission was secret, because it frees us from the necessity of setting down here an elaborate and tedious explanation as to how, when, and where the various threads of his mission became interwoven with the fabric of our tale. Suffice it to say that the only part of his mission with which we are acquainted is that which had reference to two men—one of whom was named Mr Larks, the other Morley Jones.
Now, it so happened that Queeker’s acquaintance, Mr Durant, had an intimate friend who dwelt near a beautiful village in Kent. When Queeker mentioned the circumstance of the secret mission which called him to Ramsgate, he discovered that the old gentleman was on the point of starting for this village, in company with his daughter and her cousin Fanny.
“You’ll travel with us, I hope, Queeker; our roads lie in the same direction, at least a part of the way, you know,” said the hearty little old gentleman, with good-nature beaming in every wrinkle, from the crown of his bald head to the last fold of his treble chin; “it will be such a comfort to have you to help me take care of the girls. And if you can spare time to turn aside for a day or two, I promise you a hearty welcome from my friend—whose residence, named Jenkinsjoy, is an antique paradise, and his hospitality unbounded. He has splendid horses, too, and will give you a gallop over as fine a country as exists between this and the British Channel. You ride, of course?”
Queeker admitted that he could ride a little.
“At least,” he added, after a pause, “I used frequently to get rides on a cart-horse when I was a very little boy.”