“We shall want a complete list of the articles you miss, so that we can send round to the pawnbrokers,” he had said before leaving me.
“I’m a pawnbroker myself,” I replied.
“Ah! then you’ll get one.”
“Thankee. Perhaps I shall get one of the thieves too.”
“Well, you’ll know your own property, I expect, sir,” he said, with a most unbecoming grin, as he took himself off the premises. I did not see him again. I hope I never shall, the unsympathetic beast.
Time passed on and brought no tidings of the robbers or the stolen property. I was very much distressed over the whole affair, and my neighbours tried to comfort me by telling me that I could afford the loss, and that it was a good job it had not happened to a poorer man. How did they know I could afford the loss, or that I was not utterly ruined? I had never posed as a wealthy man—I was not wealthy, in the strict sense of the term. I had been only careful, I had spent nothing in waste, and I had put by a little money for a rainy day. If people in Bermondsey called me a money-grubber, it was no fault of my own; but there were a few who did, because I held to the strict letter of the law in my contracts. That was praiseworthy, but they could not see it. I believe a few of them were actually glad that I had been robbed.
“he was
very lame.”
Some six months after the burglary, in the dusk of an early winter’s afternoon, a tall, sunken-cheeked man, with a huge white moustache and a vermilion face, which seemed put on expressly to show it up by, came limping into my shop at Bermondsey. He was very lame, or pretended to be, I thought, to throw me off my guard. As if I, Edwin Kippen, was likely to be off guard in business hours, as if it were possible to be off one’s guard and get one’s living, Bermondsey way.
I told my apprentice, who was behind the counter polishing up a few window goods for next Saturday, to light up, though there was quite half-an-hour’s daylight left in the street. But, somehow—such is instinct—I did not like the get-up of this man. I had never seen him before; he did not look “made in Bermondsey,” and he was seedy, and a little nervous, though he talked in strident tones, in a Sir Anthony Absolute kind of manner, which made the gas glasses jingle.