“Make haste, Josh. All’s ready; and fortune has done more for us than I could expect.”
“Well,” said the Jew to the hunchback, “and how is the trick to be done?”
“Safely,” replied the other. “Julia Travers has got him to meet her. Lord, what a girl it is!—There’s not a decoy in London to be compared to her. He believes her to be a soldier’s orphan—and she played her game so deep, and dressed so well too—I would have passed her myself in the street, and never suspected she was anything but a regular respectable. Well, Jim and the smasher are waiting at the dark turn of the alley—we follow—and while the chap’s attention is engaged in front, his back will be to you.”
“I understand ye; and this shall settle matters.”
The ruffian took from the implements of his villanous profession, a murderous weapon formed of whalebone and lead, and then producing a glass and bottle, the hunchback and he drank a glass to good-luck, extinguished the candle, and, locking the door of the apartment, descended the staircase, and closed the street door heavily.
Before the fosterer and his friend could express their mutual astonishment, the key was turned in the door of the closet where they had lain perdue, and Mrs. Spicer presented herself.
“Hush!” she said, “for the sake of Heaven!—My husband has gone for a minute to the Fox!—Hurry—or we’re ruined!”
She took Mark Antony’s hand—piloted him down stairs—the ratcatcher followed—and when both had gained the street, she shut the door suddenly, leaving her lover and his friend, as they say in Ireland, “on the right side to run away.”
The rapidity with which Mrs. Spicer had effected their deliverance, enabled Mark Antony and his companion to reach the street so close upon the heels of the ruffians, that they saw them turn the corner. By a sort of mutual consent, they too took the same direction; and, keeping the scoundrels in sight, regulated their movements as they proceeded. As the clock struck ten, St. Paul’s churchyard was at the same moment honoured with the presence of divers personages—to wit, myself and the incognita, the Jew and the hunchback—and, by a strange accident, the fosterer and Shemus Rhua. How singular—that my deliverance from certain death should have been effected through the agency of my foster brother!
While the parties paused for a few moments in the church-yard, the brief remarks that passed indicated the feelings and business of the triads.