The note she read was short, written so that the lines fell thus:—
"Ralph Daverill—The police are
on the look out for you and it is now not
safe to come to the Court—This is written
by your wife to say you will run
great risk of being took if you come—
For you to know who I am I write my name—
Polly Daverill.
Sapps Court Dec 9 1854."
The lines were ill-spaced, so that blanks were left as shown. At the end of the second, a crowded line, the word not was blurred on the paper-edge, and looked like a repetition of the previous word.
One does not see without thought, why this letter sent its reader's heart beating furiously. Why should she turn scarlet with anger and all but draw blood from a bitten lip? She knew perfectly well that this gutter Don Juan's depravity could boast as many victims as his enforced prison life had left possible to him. But no particular one had ever become concrete to her, and jealousy of a multitude, no one better off than herself, had never rankled. Jealousy of Heaven-knows-who is a wishy-washy passion. Supply a definite object, and it may become vitriolic. Polly Daverill, whoever she was, was definite, and might be the wife the convict had acknowledged—or rather claimed—when he first made Miss Julia's acquaintance, over twenty years ago.
The lip was perhaps saved from bloodletting by an idea which crossed the mind of the biter. A look of satisfaction grew and grew as she contemplated the letter; not for its meaning—that was soon clear. It was something in the handwriting; something that made her hide half-words with a finger-point, and vary her angle of inspection. Then she said, aloud to herself:—"Yes!" as though she had come to a decision.
She examined an inkstand that the dried ink of ages had encrusted, beyond redemption, in a sunken cavity of restraint in an inktray overstocked with extinct and senile pens. Its residuum of black fluid had been glutinous ever since Miss Julia had known it; ever since she had written, as a student, that Bounty Commanded Esteem all down one page of a copybook. The pens were quill pens past mending, or overwhelmed by too heartfelt nibs; or magnum bonums whose upstrokes were morally as wide as Portland Place, or parvum malums that perforated syllables and spluttered. The penwiper was non-absorbent, and generally contrived to return the drop it refused to partake of on the hands of incautious scribes, who rarely obtained soap and hot water time enough to do any good.
Miss Julia first remedied the ink. A memory of breakfast unremoved still hung about the parlour table—a teapot and a slop basin. The former supplied a diluent, the latter a haven for the indisputably used-up quill whose feather served to incorporate it with the black coagulum. With the resultant fluid you could make a mark about the same blackness as what the letter was, using by preference the newest magnum bonum pen, which was all right in itself, only stuck on an old wooden handle that scribes of recent years had gnawed.
What this woman's jealous violence was prompting her to do was to alter this letter so as to encourage its recipient to put himself in danger of capture. It was an easy task, as the only words she had to insert could be copies from what was already written. The first line required the word not at the end, the fourth the word no. The only other change needed was the erasure of the word not, in the second line, which already looked like an accidental repetition of now. Was an erasure advisable? she decided against it, cleverly. She merely drew her pen through the not, leaving the first two letters intentionally visible, and blurring the last. She then re-enveloped the letter, much pleased with the result, and wrote a short note in pencil to accompany it; then hunted up an envelope large enough to take both, and directed it to W. at the Post Office, East Croydon. This was the last address the convict had given. Where he was actually living she did not know.
Her own letter to him was:—"The enclosed has come for you. I write this in pencil because I cannot find any ink." It was a little stroke of genius worthy of her correspondent's father. Nothing but clairvoyance could have bred suspicion in him. Micky reappeared that evening in Sapps Court, and found an opportunity to convey to Aunt M'riar that he had obeyed his instructions. He did so with an air of mystery and an undertone of intelligence, saying briefly:—"That party, missis! She's got the letter."
"Did you give it her?" said Aunt M'riar.