For, a few minutes later, a figure emerged from Cooper Silwood's bedroom—the figure of a man of the height and general build of Cooper Silwood, but otherwise not like him in the least. Yet it was he, though changed beyond recognition.
His mien was that of a respectable workman in his everyday clothes. They were such clothes as might be worn by men of half a dozen different trades with equal appropriateness, so little distinctive of any one trade were they, and yet they stamped themselves unmistakably as a workman's clothes. Silwood wore them like one who was thoroughly at home in them; he moved at ease in them. To all appearance he was a workman, and from his bearing it might be guessed that the part he was playing was no new one. To be in this disguise was no novelty to him.
That it was no new rôle for him to assume was also manifest from the skill and success with which his face was made up. To begin with, the heavy brown wig he usually had on his head had disappeared, and he was now quite bald, with the exception of a narrow fringe of dark-grey hair round the base of the skull. He was no longer clean-shaven; an untidy blackish moustache covered his upper lip. A dark line had been pencilled on either side of his nose, these lines alone imparting to the face a marvellous change in its expression. Besides, the skin of the face had been slightly stained, as had also been that of the hands.
His disguise was absolute. His own mother, as the phrase goes, would not have known him. He looked to the life the part he was playing. Mr. Cooper Silwood, the eminent solicitor, had disappeared, and a sober, respectable workman had taken his place.
Could Francis Eversleigh now have seen this partner of his he would have had much food for thought; if he could have followed him he would have had much more.
The night was now very still—the roar of London was hushed. Silwood opened his door gently, and listened. The stairs were lit, but no sound came from any of the chambers. Locking his door softly, he stole down into the court of Stone Buildings; they, too, were wrapped in silence. For a moment he stood still and strained his ears to catch the slightest noise, but there was not a breath. Taking from his pocket a key, he unlocked a small iron gate at the north-east corner of the court, and passed through it and went along a short narrow footway closed on the Chancery Lane side by another iron gate, which he opened, and so reached Chancery Lane. All this he did without hurry or confusion. It was plain that he had got out of Lincoln's Inn by this footway many times before. Yet it was believed to be shut up every evening by the porter, who was supposed to be the only person possessing the keys of the gates.
From this footway—which is not much used even in the day-time, and is hardly to be noticed at all in the night-time—to Holborn is but a step. Silwood found Chancery Lane deserted; no one saw him emerge from the Inn. He was quickly in Holborn, and set out eastwards at a rapid pace. And on he went, mile after mile, stepping out briskly, through the city proper, and on, on beyond it until he reached one of the great districts of East-End London, where in small humble houses, huddled together in a wilderness of mean streets, thousands upon thousands live out their obscure and uneventful lives.
Silwood went on like a man who knows his way well. Never once did he pause until he reached the end of his journey. He halted at a door in Douglas Street, Stepney, and knocked a peculiar knock. Two or three minutes passed, and then a light was shown at the window, whereupon Silwood knocked in the same way a second time.
"Is it you, James?" asked a woman's voice, as the door was partially opened.
"Yes, Meg; let me in," said Silwood.