‘Mrs Thurles! Why, that is the young fellow’s own mother!’ I exclaimed. ‘You surely don’t mean to say that he was going to play such a fraud on his mother?’
‘It was not very nice, was it?’ returned Sam. ‘I don’t pretend to any fine feelings; but when I heard his plan, I had half a mind to knock him down. But there was my wife and child to be thought of, so I simply let the matter go. Well, I know for a certainty he has had some money from her, and expects a good deal more directly. All he ever gave me was two pounds. Two pounds out of five, he said; when I know from Bill, the potman at the Royal Blue, that he asked the landlord if he could cash him a cheque for a hundred that very night. The landlord could not do it, so Bill didn’t learn much more; but he saw the cheque was in a lady’s writing. But without all that, where could he get a cheque for a hundred, except from Mrs Thurles? He’s always worrying her. Why, he was on the business that night you met me at the public-house in the mews. He had not gone on there above five minutes, when you came in.’
Recollecting on what errand it was I found myself at the public-house in question, this bit of information seemed queerer than all that had gone before. It would have been so strange if I could have seen him and Sam together.
‘He deceived me then,’ continued Sam; ‘and as I am boxed up here and can’t help myself, he will deceive me again, and do me out of my lawful rights in respect of that money. So I mean to spoil him. What I have told you is the truth. I don’t know whether you can do anything about the bills, as he neither forged them nor passed them; but that he arranged the cracking of his governor’s crib’—everybody knows the speaker meant the breaking into the step-father’s office—‘and had the best of what was got, is a fact, as you can call me as a witness upon. And I will tell you this, Mr Holdrey: I am a bad one, I own, and nearly all my ’sociates are bad uns too—they have all been in quod, and will all go there again; but none of us is worse than that young Harleston, and, in fact, very few of us are so bad.’
I was disposed to agree with him, and to think the worst of a young man who could cheat a fond mother so heartlessly. I felt that I would never believe in faces again; for if ever I saw a man who looked incapable of such conduct, young Godfrey Harleston was that person.
We had a long conversation after this, in which Sam arranged that his wife should meet me the next day; I was to write and tell her when and where—which I did directly after leaving the prison—then we were to go before a magistrate; the rest would be plain sailing.
Here, then, at last, I should be able to satisfy my employer; he would be proved to be right, and the business he had given me would be brought to a successful conclusion. I should make a handsome profit, and, as is always the case in such things, get credit for an immense amount of ability I had never shown. Yet I never felt so dissatisfied with anything in my life, and though all was now as clear as crystal, there was something in it which, like a wrong figure in a sum, would not fit.
I don’t know what induced me to do it, but before going home, I went round by Thurles & Company’s office, where I waited to see Mr Picknell come out. I thought as he came towards me, alone and thoughtful, under the shade of a big black wall which was there, I had never seen a more disagreeable-looking fellow. I was in his way, so that he almost ran against me. What a start he gave, to be sure! As I could see by the light of a lamp, he staggered and turned ghastly pale for an instant; but he rallied quickly, and exclaimed, with something like a laugh: ‘Ah!—David!’—he paused a moment before he uttered the name—‘is that you? I declare you almost startled me.’
‘Yes,’ I said; ‘you looked as if you had seen a ghost.’
‘Ghost! It would take a good many ghosts to startle me,’ he began; then at once changing his tone, continued; ‘Well, have you found a fresh job, David? It is just now a bad time to be out of work.’