Wylder's Hand Part 78

But what was this little tip from fortune, compared with the splendid pieces of scrivenery in his despatch box. The white parchment--the blue and silver stamps in the corner--the German text and flourishes at the top, and those broad, horizontal lines of recital, 'habendum,' and so forth--marshalled like an army in procession behind his march of triumph into Five Oaks, to take the place of its deposed prince? From the captain's deed to the vicar's his mind glanced fondly.

He would yet stand the highest man in his county. He had found time for a visit to the King-at-Arms and the Heralds' Office. He would have his pictures and his pedigree. His grandmother had been a Howard. Her branch, indeed, was a little under a cloud, keeping a small provision-shop in the town of Dwiddleston. But this circ.u.mstance need not be in prominence. She was a Howard--_that_ was the fact he relied on--no mortal could gainsay it; and he would be, first, J. Howard Larkin, then Howard Larkin, simply; then Howard Larkin Howard, and the Five Gaks' Howards would come to be very great people indeed. And the Brandons had intermarried with other Howards, and Five Oaks would naturally, therefore, go to Howards; and so he and his, with clever management, would be anything but _novi homines_ in the county.

'He shall be like a tree planted by the water-side, that will bring forth his fruit in due season. His leaf also shall not wither. So thought this good man complacently. He liked these fine consolations of the Jewish dispensation--actual milk and honey, and a land of promise on which he could set his foot. Jos. Larkin, Esq., was as punctual as the clock at the terminus. He did not come a minute too soon or too late, but precisely at the moment which enabled him, without fuss, and without a tiresome wait, to proceed to the details of ticket, luggage, selection of place, and ultimate ascension thereto.

So now having taken all measures, gliding among the portmanteaus, hand-barrows, and porters, and the clangorous bell ringing, he mounted, lithe and lank, into his place.

There was a pleasant evening light still, and the gas-lamps made a purplish glow against it. The little b.u.t.ter-cooler of a gla.s.s lamp glimmered from the roof. Mr. Larkin established himself, and adjusted his rug and m.u.f.flers about him, for, notwithstanding the season, there had been some cold, rainy weather, and the evening was sharp; and he set his two newspapers, his shilling book, and other triumphs of cheap literature in sundry shapes, in the vacant seat at his left hand, and made everything handsome about him. He glanced to the other end of the carriage, where sat his solitary fellow-pa.s.senger. This gentleman was simply a ma.s.s of cloaks and capes, culminating in a queer battered felt hat; his shoulders were nestled into the corner, and his face buried among his loose m.u.f.flers. They sat at corners diagonally opposed, and were, therefore, as far apart as was practicable--an arrangement, not sociable, to be sure, but on the whole, very comfortable, and which neither seemed disposed to disturb.

Mr. Larkin had a word to say to the porter from the window, and bought one more newspaper; and then looked out on the lamplit platform, and saw the officials loitering off to the clang of the carriage doors; then came the whistle, and then the clank and jerk of the start. And so the brick walls and lamps began to glide backward, and the train was off.

Jos. Larkin tried his newspaper, and read for ten minutes, or so, pretty diligently; and then looked for a while from the window, upon receding hedgerows and farmsteads, and the level and s.p.a.cious landscape; and then he leaned back luxuriously, his newspaper listlessly on his knees, and began to read, instead, at his ease, the shapeless, wrapt-up figure diagonally opposite.

The quietude of the gentleman in the far corner was quite singular. He produced neither tract, nor newspaper, nor volume--not even a pocket-book or a letter. He brought forth no cigar-case, with the stereotyped, 'Have you any objection to my smoking a cigar?' He did not even change his att.i.tude ever so little. A burly roll of cloaks, rugs, capes, and loose wrappers, placed in the corner, and _tanquam cadaver_, pa.s.sive and motionless.

I have sometimes in my travels lighted on a strangely shaped mountain, whose huge curves, and sombre colouring have interested me indefinably.

In the rude ma.s.s at the far angle, Mr. Jos. Larkin, I fancy, found some such subject of contemplation. And the more he looked, the more he felt disposed to look.

As they got on there was more night fog, and the little lamp at top shone through a halo. The fellow-pa.s.senger at the opposite angle lay back, all cloaks and m.u.f.flers, with nothing distinct emerging but the felt hat at top, and the tip--it was only the tip now--of the shining shoe on the floor.

The gentleman was absolutely motionless and silent. And Mr. Larkin, though his mind was pretty universally of the inquisitive order, began in this particular case to feel a special curiosity. It was partly the monotony and their occupying the carriage all to themselves--as the two uncommunicative seamen did the Eddystone Lighthouse--but there was, beside, an indistinct feeling, that, in spite of all these wrappers and swathings, he knew the outlines of that figure; and yet the likeness must have been of the rudest possible sort.

He could not say that he recognised anything distinctly--only he fancied that some one he knew was sitting there, unrevealed, inside that ma.s.s of clothing. And he felt, moreover, as if he ought to be able to guess who he was.

CHAPTER LXVIII.

THE COMPANION DISCLOSES HIMSELF.

But this sort of musing and wonderment leads to nothing; and Mr. Jos.

Larkin being an active-minded man, and practical withal, in a little while shook it off, and from his breast-pocket took a tiny treasure of a pocket-book, in which were some bank-notes, precious memoranda in pencil, and half-a-dozen notes and letters, bearing upon cases and negotiations on which, at this juncture, he was working.

Into these he got, and now and then brought out a letter bearing on some point of speculation, and read it through, and then closed his eyes for three minutes at a time, and thought. But he had not his tin boxes there; and, with a man of his stamp, speculation, which goes upon guess as to dates and quant.i.ties, which are all ascertainable by reference to black and white, soon loses its interest. And the evidence in his pocket being pretty soon exhausted, he glanced again at his companion over the way.

He had not moved all this while. He had a high stand-up collar to the cape he wore, which covered his cheeks and nose and outside was loosely swathed a large, cream-coloured, cashmere handkerchief. The battered felt hat covered his forehead and eyebrows, and left, in fact, but a narrow streak of separation between.

Through this, however, for the first time, Jos. Larkin now saw the glitter of a pair of eyes gazing at him, he fancied. At all events there was the glitter, and the gentleman was awake.

Jos. returned the gentleman's gaze. It was his lofty aristocratic stare; and he expected to see the glittering lights that peeped through the dark c.h.i.n.k between brim and collar shut up under its rebuke. But nothing of the kind took place, and the ocular exercises of the attorney were totally ineffectual.

If the fellow knew that his fixed stare was observed through his narrow embrasure--and Larkin thought he could hardly be insensible to the reproof of his return fire--he must be a particularly impertinent person.

It would be ridiculous, however, to continue a contest of this kind; so the attorney lowered the window and looked out. Then he pulled it up, and took to his newspaper again, and read the police cases, and a very curious letter from a poor-house doctor, describing a boy who was quite blind in daylight, but could see very fairly by gas or candle light, and then he lighted upon a very odd story, and said to be undergoing special sifting at the hands of Sir Samuel Squailes, of a policeman on a certain beat, in Fleet Street, not far from Temple Bar, who every night saw, at or about the same hour, a certain suspicious-looking figure walk along the flag-way and enter a pa.s.sage. Night after night he pursued this figure, but always lost it in the same pa.s.sage. On the last occasion, however, he succeeded in keeping him in view, and came up with him in a court, when he was rewarded with a sight of such a face as caused him to fall to the ground in a fit. This was the Clampcourt ghost, and I believe he was left in that debatable state, and never after either exploded or confirmed.

So having ended all these studies, the attorney lifted up his eyes again, as he lowered his newspaper, and beheld the same glittering gaze fixed upon him through the same horizontal cranny.

He fancied the eyes were laughing. He could not be sure, of course, but at all events the persistent stare was extremely, and perhaps determinedly, impertinent. Forgetting the const.i.tutional canon through which breathes the genuine spirit of British liberty, he felt for a moment that he was such a king as that cat had no business to look at; and he might, perhaps, have politely intimated something of the kind, had not the enveloped offender made a slight and lazy turn which, burying his chin still deeper in his breast, altogether concealed his eyes, and so closed the offensive scrutiny.

In making this change in his position, slight as it was, the gentleman in the superfluous clothing reminded Mr. Jos. Larkin very sharply for an instant of--_some_body. There was the rub; who could it be?

The figure was once more a mere mountain of rug. What was the peculiarity in that slight movement--something in the knee? something in the elbow?

something in the general character?

Why had he not spoken to him? The opportunity, for the present, was past.

But he was now sure that his fellow-traveller was an acquaintance, who had probably recognised him. Larkin--except when making a mysterious trip at election times, or in an emergency, in a critical case--was a frank, and as he believed could be a fascinating _compagnon de voyage_, such and so great was his urbanity on a journey. He rather liked talking with people; he sometimes heard things not wholly valueless, and once or twice had gathered hints in this way, which saved him trouble, or money, which is much the same thing. Therefore upon principle he was not averse from that direst of bores, railway conversation.

And now they slackened speed, with a long, piercing whistle, and came to a standstill at 'East Had_don_' (with a jerk upon the last syllable), 'East Had_don_, East Had_don_,' as the herald of the station declared, and Lawyer Larkin sat straight up, very alert, with a budding smile, ready to blow out into a charming radiance the moment his fellow-traveller rose perpendicular, as was to be expected, and peeped from his window.

But he seemed to know intuitively that Larkin intended telling him, _apropos_ of the station, that story of the Haddon property, and Sir James Wotton's will, which as told by the good attorney and jumbled by the clatter, was perhaps a little dreary. At all events he did not stir, and carefully abstained from wakening, and in a few seconds more they were again in motion.

They were now approaching Shillingsworth, where the attorney was to get out, and put up for the night, having a deed with him to be executed in that town, and so sweetening his journey with this small incident of profit.

Now, therefore, looking at his watch, and consulting his time table, he got his slim valise from under on top of the seat before him, together with his hat-case, despatch-box, stick, and umbrella, and brushed off with his handkerchief some of the gritty railway dust that lay drifted in exterior folds and hollows of his coat, reb.u.t.toned that garment with precision, arranged his shirt-collar, stuffed his m.u.f.fler into his coat-pocket, and made generally that rude sacrifice to the graces with which natty men precede their exit from the dust and ashes of this sort of sepulture.

At this moment he had just eight minutes more to go, and the glitter of the pair of eyes, staring between the m.u.f.fler and the rim of the hat, met his view once more.

Mr. Larkin's cigar-case was open in his hand in a moment, and with such a smile as a genteel perfumer offers his wares with, he presented it toward the gentleman who was built up in the stack of garments.

He merely shook his head with the slightest imaginable nod and a wave of a pudgy hand in a soiled dog-skin glove, which emerged for a second from under a cape, in token that he gratefully declined the favour.

Mr. Larkin smiled and shrugged regretfully, and replaced the case in his coat pocket. Hardly five minutes remained now. Larkin glanced round for a topic.

'My journey is over for the present, Sir, and perhaps you would find these little things entertaining.'

And he tendered with the same smile 'Punch,' the 'Penny Gleaner,' and 'Gray's Magazine,' a religious serial. They were, however, similarly declined in pantomime.

'He's not particularly polite, whoever he is,' thought Mr. Larkin, with a sniff. However, he tried the effect of a direct observation. So getting one seat nearer, he said:--

'Wonderful place Shillingsworth, Sir; one does not really, until one has visited it two or three times over, at all comprehend its wealth and importance; and how justly high it deserves to hold its head amongst the provincial emporia of our productive industry.'

The shapeless traveller in the corner touched his ear with his pudgy dogskin fingers, and shook his hand and head a little, in token either that he was deaf, or the noise such as to prevent his hearing, and in the next moment the glittering eyes closed, and the pantomimist appeared to be asleep.

And now, again, the train subsided to a stand-still, and Shillingsworth resounded through the night air, and Larkin scrambled forward to the window, by which sat the enveloped gentleman, and called the porter, and, with many unheeded apologies, pulled out his various properties, close by the knees of the tranquil traveller. So, Mr. Larkin was on the platform, and his belongings stowed away against the wall of the station-house.

He made an enquiry of the guard, with whom he was acquainted, about his companion; but the guard knew nothing of the 'party,' neither did the porter, to whom the guard put a similar question.

So, as Larkin walked down the platform, the whistle sounded and the train glided forward, and as it pa.s.sed him, the gentleman in the cloak and queer hat was looking out. A lamp shone full on him. Mr. Larkin's heart stood still for a moment, and then bounded up as if it would choke him.

'It's him, by ----!' and Mr. Larkin, forgetting syntax, and propriety, and religion, all together, and making a frantic race to keep up with the train, shouted--

'Stop it, stop it--hollo!--stop--stop--ho, stop!'

But he pleaded with the winds; and before he had reached the end of the platform, the carriage windows were flying by him with the speed of wheel-spokes, and the end of the coupe, with its red lantern, sailed away through the cutting.

'Forgot summat, Sir,' said the porter, touching his hat.