One sheet, half-defaced with the wind and rain and mud splashed against it, caught his eye—
“Escaped,” so ran the fragment, “from... mingham Asylum, a lunatic of homicidal tendencies... Stabbed a warder... killed his wife by driving a nail into her head... Is at large. His description—Long grey hair, restless eye, peculiar ears, walks with a shambling gait, and has a melancholy expression of countenance. Plays fantastic airs upon a tin whistle, and is particularly fond of tinkering.”
A new bill, “Two Hundred Pounds Reward,” for the apprehension of a defaulting bank manager, blotted out the rest.
But Aymer had read enough. A sickening sensation seized him—this horrible being loose upon society, tinkering, playing upon a tin whistle, and driving nails into women’s heads! In his ears sounded the din of tremendous shouts, “Baskette for ever!” and he saw a carriage go by from which the horses had been taken, and in which a man was standing upright, with his hat off, bowing. It was Marese Baskette returning from an evening meeting, and dragged in his carriage by the mob to his hotel.
Aymer caught a glance of his dark eye flashing with triumph, and it left an unpleasant impression upon him. But the shouts rose up to the thick cloud of smoke overhead—“Baskette for ever! Baskette for ever!”
“Oh! my love,” wrote Aymer to Violet, “this is, indeed, an awful place. I begin to live in dread of my fellow-creatures. Not for worlds—no, not for worlds, would I be the owner of this city (as so many are striving to be), lest I should be held, partly at least, responsible hereafter for its miseries, its crimes, its drunkenness, its nameless, indefinable horrors.”
These words, read by what afterwards happened, are remarkable. Aymer’s last vision of Stirmingham was the same man drawn again in his carriage amid tenfold louder shouts than before, “Baskette for ever!” He headed the poll by over 1000 votes.
The grey rats were triumphant.
End of Volume Two.