Dorothy's Double Volume I Part 9

'It is a very simple matter, Captain Hampton. I have been engaged in two or three turf cases, and one of my men knows a lot of the hangers-on at racecourses. Watches and other valuables are constantly stolen there, and as often enough these things are gifts, and are valued beyond their mere cost in money, their owners come to us to try if we can get them back for them, which we are able to do three times out of four. Whoever may steal the things, they are likely to get into one of four or five hands, and as soon as we let it be known that we are ready to pay a fair price for their return and no questions asked, it is not long before they are brought here. I don't say I may be able to find out this man's exact address, but I can find out the public-house or other place where he is generally to be met with. I don't suppose the actual address of one in ten of these fellows is known to others. They are to be heard of in certain public-houses, but even their closest pals often don't know where they live. Sometimes, no doubt, it is in some miserable den where they would be ashamed to meet anyone. Sometimes there may be a wife and family in the case, and they don't want men coming there. Sometimes it may be just another way. Many of these fellows at home are quiet, respectable sort of chaps, living at some little place where none of their neighbours, and perhaps not even their wives, know that they have anything to do with racing, but take them for clerks or warehous.e.m.e.n, or something in the city. So I don't promise to find out the fellow's home, only the place where a letter will find him, or where he goes to meet his pals, and perhaps do a little quiet betting in the landlord's back parlour.'

'That will be enough for us, to begin with at any rate.'

'Of course, the private address is only a matter of a day or two longer,' Mr. Slippen went on. 'I have only to send that boy of mine up to the place, and the first time the fellow goes there he will follow him, if it is all over London, till he traces him to the place where he lives. If, as he said, he is going to give up attending the races for the present, he may not go there for a day or two. But he is sure to do so sooner or later for letters.'

'Thank you. It would be as well to know where he lives, but at any rate when we have what we may call his business address we shall have time to talk over our next move.'

'Yes, that is where the real difficulty will begin, Captain Hampton. I expect you have got to deal with a deep one, and I own that at present I do not see my way at all clear before me.'

CHAPTER V

That evening Mr. Slippen's boy presented himself at Captain Hampton's lodgings with a note. It contained only the words 'Dear sir,--Our man uses the "White Horse," Frogmore Street, Islington. I await your instructions before moving further in the matter.'

'Well, youngster, what is your name?' Captain Hampton asked, as he put the note on the table beside him.

'Jacob Wrigley,' the lad replied promptly.

'Here is half-a-crown for yourself, Jacob.'

'Thank you, sir,' the boy said, as he took it up with a duck of the head and slipped it into his pocket.

'Your office hours seem to be long, Jacob; that is, if you have been there since I saw you this morning.'

'No, sir, I ain't a-been there since one o'clock, not till an hour ago.

I have been down at Greenwich, keeping my eye on a party there. I got done there at six o'clock, and as the governor had said "Come round and tell me what you have found out, I shall be in up to nine o'clock,"

round I went in course. The governor and me don't have no regular hours.

Some chaps wouldn't like that, but it doesn't matter to me, 'cause I sleeps there.'

'Sleep where, Jacob?'

'In where you see me. The things is stowed away in that cupboard in the corner, and I get on first-rate. It is a good place, especially in winter. I lays the blankits down in front of the fire, and keeps it going all night sometimes.'

'But haven't you got any place of your own to go to, Jacob?'

The boy shook his head. 'I was brought up in a wan, I was,' the boy said. 'I hooked it one day, two years ago, 'cause they knocked me about so. I pretty nigh starved at first, but one day I saw a chap prigging an old gent's ticker. The old one shouted just as he got off; I was on the look-out and as the chap came along I chucked myself down in front of him and down he came. I grabbed him, and afore he could shake me off a lot of chaps got hold of him and held him till a peeler came up. They did not find the watch on him, but I had seen him as he ran pa.s.s something to a chap he ran close to and pretty nigh knocked down. I gave my evidence at the police court. The governor happened to be there, and arter it was over and the chaps had got six months, and the beak had said I gave my evidence very well, and gave me five bob out of the poor box, he came up to me and said, "You are a smart young fellow. Do you want a job?" I said I just did, and so he took me on; that is how it came about, you see. The only thing I don't like is, he makes me go to a night school. He says I shan't never do no good unless I can get to read and write; so I does it, but I hates it bitter.'

'He is quite right, Jacob. You stick to it; it will come easier as you get on.'

'Yes, I know I wants it, for letters and that sort of thing, but it is bitter hard. I would rather stand opposite a house all day in winter than I would sit for an hour trying to make my pen go where I wants it to. It allus will go the other way, and the drops of ink will come out awful. Good night, sir.'

'Good night, lad. Tell Mr. Slippen when you see him that I shall probably be round to-morrow or next day.'

On the following morning Captain Hampton called early at Chester Square.

Mr. Hawtrey and Dorothy had just finished breakfast. Mrs. Daintree, as was her custom after being out late the night before, had taken hers in bed.

'I have good news so far. I have discovered, or rather Slippen has, where Truscott is to be found. He frequents a public-house called the White Horse, Frogmore Street, Islington.'

'That is good news indeed, Ned,' Mr. Hawtrey said warmly, as he shook hands with him. As he turned to Dorothy, he saw with surprise that she had turned suddenly pale, and that her hands shook as she put down the cup.

'You are pleased, are you not, Dorothy?' he asked in surprise.

The girl hesitated. 'Yes,' she said, 'of course, I am pleased in one way, but not in another. It frightens me to think that the man may be brought up, and that I may have to give evidence; it is horrid being talked about, but it would be much worse to stand up to be stared at, and to have it all put in the papers.'

'Pooh, pooh, my dear, your evidence will be very simple,' her father said. 'You will only have to tell that you received the first of these letters, that you know nothing of the man, and that his a.s.sertion that he has letters of yours is utterly false.'

'Yes, father, but I have noticed that in all trials of this sort they ask such numberless questions, and that they always manage somehow to put the witnesses into a false light. They will say, "How do you know that he has no letters of yours? Do you mean to tell this court that you have never written any letters?" And when I have said I have never written any letters that I should object to having read out in court they will insinuate that I am telling a lie, and that I have done all sorts of dreadful things; and though they will not be able to prove a word of it, I shall know, as I go out, that half the people will believe that I have. I shall hate it, and I am sure that Algernon will hate it even more.'

'Well, Algernon has no one but himself to thank for its having come to this pa.s.s,' Mr. Hawtrey said sharply. 'It was his interference, and his going down to Scotland Yard, that caused that paragraph to appear in the paper. If he had left the matter alone nothing whatever would have been heard about it outside our circle. I like Halliburn, but I must say that at present nothing would give me more satisfaction than to hear that he had gone for a month upon the Continent, for he comes round here every afternoon, and worries and fusses over the matter until he upsets you and fills me with an almost irresistible desire to seize him by the shoulders and turn him out of the room.'

'He is a little trying, father,' Dorothy admitted, 'but of course he does not like it.'

'Nor do any of us. It is a hundred times worse for you than it is for him, and yet--But there, let us change the subject. What is it you were saying, Ned? Oh yes, you have heard where Truscott lives.'

'Not exactly where he lives, but the public-house where he is to be met with, and in his case it comes to pretty well the same thing. I had nothing to do with finding it out. The man Slippen took it in hand, and in a few hours did more than I had done in three weeks. He sent a fellow down to Windsor, to some betting men he knew, and sent me word in the evening. It was rather mortifying, I must confess, and I feel as if I had been taken down several pegs in my own estimation.'

'And what is to be done next, father?' Dorothy asked anxiously.

'Ah, that is the point we shall have to talk over, my dear. At present we have not a thread of evidence to connect him with the affair. We must, in the first place, bring it home to him. Afterwards, we will see whether we must have him arrested and charged in court, or whether we can frighten him into making a confession. I am very much afraid that, after all that has been said about it, there will be nothing for it but a public prosecution; however, there will be time to think of that afterwards.' Captain Hampton saw Dorothy go pale again, and mentally resolved that he would do all in his power to save her from the ordeal from which she evidently shrank. He was a little surprised at her nervousness, for as a child she had been absolutely fearless, but he supposed that the worry, and perhaps the fidgeting of Halliburn had shaken her somewhat, as, indeed, was natural enough. 'You are going round to see this detective, I suppose?' Mr. Hawtrey asked.

'Yes, I came in on my way for instructions. Slippen will no doubt propose that a sharp watch shall be kept over his movements, and I suppose that there can be no doubt that is the right thing to be done.'

'I should say so, certainly.'

'That, at least, Miss Hawtrey, will commit us to nothing afterwards, and I trust even yet we may find some way of avoiding the unpleasantness you feared.'

'I may as well go with you, Ned,' Mr. Hawtrey said; 'I have nothing particular to do this morning; a walk will do me good. I am getting bilious and out of sorts with all this worry, and would give a good round sum to be quietly down in Lincolnshire again. Dorothy evidently feels it a good deal more than I should have thought she would,' he went on as they left the house.

'It is a horribly annoying sort of thing to happen to anyone, Mr.

Hawtrey; because it is so desperately difficult to meet anonymous slander of this sort, and of course her engagement makes it so much the worse for her.'

'Yes, that is the rub, Ned. I am not at all pleased with the fellow; he seems to think of nothing but the manner in which it affects himself. I have had, once or twice, as much as I could do not to let out at him. I had it on the tip of my tongue to say, "Confound it, sir! What the deuce do I care for you or your family? The ancestors through whom you got your t.i.tle were doubtless respectable enough, and as far as I know, may, two or three generations back, have been washer-women, when our people had already held their estates hundreds of years." Of course, Dorothy takes his part, but my own belief is that it is he who is worrying her, quite as much as the scandal itself.

'Dorothy is not marrying for a t.i.tle; she refused a higher one than his last autumn. I don't say that his being a lord might not have influenced her to some extent; I suppose all girls have vanity enough to like to carry off a man whom scores of others will envy her for, but I don't think that went very far with her. I believe that, as far as she knew of him, she liked him for himself; not, I suppose, in any desperate sort of way, but as a pleasant, gentlemanly sort of fellow of whom everyone spoke well, and whom she esteemed and thought she could be very happy with. She has no occasion to marry for money; of course my estate is, as I dare say you know, entailed, and will go to my cousin, Jack Hawtrey, who is a sporting parson down in Somersetshire--a good fellow, with a large family; but there will be plenty for her from her mother, besides my unentailed property.

'I cannot help thinking that Halliburn's worrying, and the very evident fact that he thinks more of the scandal as affecting his future wife than of her feelings in the matter, may have shown her that she had over-estimated him, and that although he may be a very respectable and well-behaved young n.o.bleman, he is a selfish and shallow-minded fellow after all. Dorothy may say nothing now, but she is not the sort of girl to forgive that sort of thing, and I don't mind saying it to you, as an old friend, Ned, that I should not be at all surprised if, when once this affair is thoroughly cleared up, she throws Halliburn over altogether.'

Captain Hampton made no reply, but had his companion turned to look at him he could hardly have avoided noticing that the expression on his face expressed anything but sympathy with the tone of irritation in which he had himself spoken.

Mr. Slippen was in when they arrived at Clifford's Inn. The door was opened by him when they knocked, a proof that the boy was not at his post.

'Come in, Captain Hampton; I fancied that you would be down here.'

'This is Mr. Hawtrey, Mr. Slippen,' said Ned, as they followed him into his room; 'he thought he would like to talk over with you the plan of campaign.'