“Yes, sir. His lordship had been playing till a late hour in a gaming-house, you may remember, and had won very heavily. He was walking away from the house, his pockets full of gold. He was attended by a servant and a linkboy. It was a very dark night. No doubt, sir, you know the place,—what they call the piazza in Covent Garden, where the gaming-houses are.”
“I was there—once,” replied the Squire, with a glum look: no doubt he had reason to repent the experience.
“Ay, sir, once is enough for many a country gentleman,” said the other, sympathetically, “though the tables don’t always have the best of it. There’s been fortunes retrieved there, as well as fortunes lost. And certainly Lord Hilby had been in wonderful luck that night. Some think that word of his large winnings had been passed out to a person in the street, in the short time between his rising from the table and his leaving the house. Of course everybody in the room knew how great his winnings were, and saw where he put them. In any case, there was no chair to be had when he came out, and he started to walk to Pall Mall. But he hadn’t gone far when suddenly three ruffians sprang up from the foot of one of the pillars of the colonnade, where they had been crouching all in a heap. One of them knocked the link out of the boy’s hand, one attacked the servant with a bludgeon, and the third caught my lord by the throat and called for his money.”
“’Tis a wicked, dangerous place, London!” observed the Squire, in a low voice, shaking his head.
“The linkboy ran away, leaving his torch still burning on the ground. The fellow who had knocked it now joined him that was grappling with his lordship. All this the servant saw, and then he was felled to the earth, where he lay stunned for a little while. During that time, it must have been, the footpads struck my lord dead with a bludgeon.”
Thornby gave a shiver of discomfort.
“When the servant came to,” the narrator continued, “he found that the footpads had gone; and two gentlemen, who had left the same gaming-house soon after his master, were now examining him to see if he was alive, by the light of the torch, which one of them had picked up. They had seen the scuffle as they were coming from the gaming-house, and had run up with their swords drawn, making such a noise that maybe the footpads had imagined them to be a large party. In any case, the footpads had taken to their heels. The two gentlemen informed the servant they believed his master to be dead. He joined them in a further examination, and found that his lordship’s money was gone.”
“Ay, to be sure,” said Thornby. “The rascals got the money before they ran away.”
“A very natural supposition, sir,—in fact, the only probable one. The servant came to that at once, and the world accepted it afterwards,—that the footpads had succeeded in getting the money before the two gentlemen arrived. But, sir, do you know that in this world ’tis just as often that the probable supposition isn’t the true one?”
“What d’ye mean?”