‘O, Mr Finsbury, I had ventured to hope—perhaps you might be induced to—to make one of us,’ faltered Pitman.
‘Disguise myself on Sunday?’ cried Michael. ‘How little you understand my principles!’
‘Mr Finsbury, I have no means of showing you my gratitude; but let me ask you one question,’ said Pitman. ‘If I were a very rich client, would you not take the risk?’
‘Diamond, Diamond, you know not what you do!’ cried Michael. ‘Why, man, do you suppose I make a practice of cutting about London with my clients in disguise? Do you suppose money would induce me to touch this business with a stick? I give you my word of honour, it would not. But I own I have a real curiosity to see how you conduct this interview—that tempts me; it tempts me, Pitman, more than gold—it should be exquisitely rich.’ And suddenly Michael laughed. ‘Well, Pitman,’ said he, ‘have all the truck ready in the studio. I’ll go.’
About twenty minutes after two, on this eventful day, the vast and gloomy shed of Waterloo lay, like the temple of a dead religion, silent and deserted. Here and there at one of the platforms, a train lay becalmed; here and there a wandering footfall echoed; the cab-horses outside stamped with startling reverberations on the stones; or from the neighbouring wilderness of railway an engine snorted forth a whistle. The main-line departure platform slumbered like the rest; the booking-hutches closed; the backs of Mr Haggard’s novels, with which upon a weekday the bookstall shines emblazoned, discreetly hidden behind dingy shutters; the rare officials, undisguisedly somnambulant; and the customary loiterers, even to the middle-aged woman with the ulster and the handbag, fled to more congenial scenes. As in the inmost dells of some small tropic island the throbbing of the ocean lingers, so here a faint pervading hum and trepidation told in every corner of surrounding London.
At the hour already named, persons acquainted with John Dickson, of Ballarat, and Ezra Thomas, of the United States of America, would have been cheered to behold them enter through the booking-office.
‘What names are we to take?’ enquired the latter, anxiously adjusting the window-glass spectacles which he had been suffered on this occasion to assume.
‘There’s no choice for you, my boy,’ returned Michael. ‘Bent Pitman or nothing. As for me, I think I look as if I might be called Appleby; something agreeably old-world about Appleby—breathes of Devonshire cider. Talking of which, suppose you wet your whistle? the interview is likely to be trying.’
‘I think I’ll wait till afterwards,’ returned Pitman; ‘on the whole, I think I’ll wait till the thing’s over. I don’t know if it strikes you as it does me; but the place seems deserted and silent, Mr Finsbury, and filled with very singular echoes.’
‘Kind of Jack-in-the-box feeling?’ enquired Michael, ‘as if all these empty trains might be filled with policemen waiting for a signal? and Sir Charles Warren perched among the girders with a silver whistle to his lips? It’s guilt, Pitman.’