His next proceeding was a very singular one. From an inner pocket of his waistcoat he extracted a key, which key be proceeded to insert into the lock of the patent safe in the corner. "Not quite the thing yet," he muttered, as he tried the key. "Wants another touch of the file here and there. Grainger's three thousand will fall due in about a month's time. I must have everything ready by then. It's sure not to be all in bills. There will be a few hundreds in gold. Then there will be Van's private stock, and other things. Altogether, a pretty little haul."
He withdrew the key from the lock and put it back into his secret pocket. "If he had not treated me like a dog, if he had treated me as one man ought to treat another, I should never have thought of this thing. He thinks that he has me in his power, and that I dare not turn; but he will find himself mistaken. I'm not quite a worm, though he tramples on me as if I were. He will find that I can turn, and sting too, when the proper time comes."
He went back upstairs, turned down the gas in the office, and taking his hat and his faded gingham umbrella, he left the house.
Jonas Pringle was from fifty to fifty-five years old. He was bald, except for a straggling fringe of hair round the back of his head, and had weak, watery eyes, that gave him the appearance, to strangers, of being habitually in tears. He always dressed in black, and always wore an old-fashioned dress coat. But his black clothes were never otherwise than very shabby and threadbare, and shiny with old age at the elbows and knees. He wore a thick black silk neckcloth, above which peered the frayed edge of a dirty collar. Among Pringle's intimates at the Pig and Whistle (his favourite evening haunt) there was a story current that he had not had a new hat for twenty years.
This evening he went mooning slowly along the streets, muttering under his breath, as was his habit, and glancing up with a queer, sudden stare into the face of every woman that passed him. Years before, he had lost his daughter, an only child: lost her, that is, in the sense of her being stolen from him by a villain. It was a fixed article of Pringle's belief that he should one day find his daughter again, and he had got into the habit, when walking along the streets, of looking into the face of each woman that he met, ever hoping that among them he might some time see again the face of his lost Jessie.
It was quite impossible for Pringle to get as far as his lodgings without making one or two calls for refreshment by the way. There were certain houses where his face was well known as that of a regular frequenter, and where they knew, without his having to be at the trouble of asking for it, the particular article (twopennyworth of gin, neat) with which to supply him.
"He's been at it again," remarked Pringle, parenthetically, to the landlord of one of the dirty little taverns which he favoured with his patronage. "He was raving about all morning like a bear with a sore head. Nothing pleased him, nothing one could do was right."
"Ay, ay. I shouldn't stand it if I was you," answered the publican.
"I sha'n't stand it much longer; you may take your oath of that," said Pringle. "There'll be a day of reckoning before long: mark my words, if there ain't."
About the very time that Jonas Pringle was giving utterance to this mysterious threat, the man to whom he referred was sitting alone, thinking deeply--thinking of Miriam Byrne, of her manifold charms of fortune and person, and trying to screw up his courage to the point of asking her to become his wife. He had fully made up his mind that he would so ask her, but he wished with all his heart that the task were well over. In all business transactions he was one of the most prompt and decisive of men, and, it may be added, one of the hardest; but the thought of having to tell this dark-eyed beauty of twenty that he loved her and would fain marry her, fluttered his nerves strangely. That it must be done, and done soon, he had quite made up his mind; but none the less did the thought of having it to do trouble him. To old Byrne he had thrown out one or two hints already, and had not been repulsed. In fact, the old man seemed desirous of seeing his daughter comfortably settled in life, and would perhaps be more likely to encourage the addresses of a man like Van Duren, who knew the world and the value of money, rather than those of some empty-headed popinjay of Miriam's own age, who would, in all probability, first spend her fortune and then neglect her. Ah! if he could only win her for himself--win her and her fortune too--what a happy stroke of luck that would be! He admired the girl for her beauty, admired her more than any woman he had ever met before, and even if she had not been worth a penny, he might in some moment of rashness have flung all other considerations to the winds, and have asked her to marry him. But knowing what he knew about her, would he not be an idiot to let such a golden opportunity slip through his fingers without trying to grasp it and claim it for his own? "If I can find a chance of doing so, I'll propose to her to-morrow," he said to himself, emphatically, as he rose from the table. "I cannot afford to lose another day."