Our Mutual Friend
Thereupon he stirred the fire, and sat down on one side of it. It struck
eleven, and he made believe to compose himself patiently. But gradually
he took the fidgets in one leg, and then in the other leg, and then in
one arm, and then in the other arm, and then in his chin, and then in
his back, and then in his forehead, and then in his hair, and then in
his nose; and then he stretched himself recumbent on two chairs, and
groaned; and then he started up.
‘Invisible insects of diabolical activity swarm in this place. I am
tickled and twitched all over. Mentally, I have now committed a burglary
under the meanest circumstances, and the myrmidons of justice are at my
heels.’
‘I am quite as bad,’ said Lightwood, sitting up facing him, with a
tumbled head; after going through some wonderful evolutions, in which
his head had been the lowest part of him. ‘This restlessness began with
me, long ago. All the time you were out, I felt like Gulliver with the
Lilliputians firing upon him.’
‘It won’t do, Mortimer. We must get into the air; we must join our dear
friend and brother, Riderhood. And let us tranquillize ourselves by
making a compact. Next time (with a view to our peace of mind) we’ll
commit the crime, instead of taking the criminal. You swear it?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Sworn! Let Tippins look to it. Her life’s in danger.’
Mortimer rang the bell to pay the score, and Bob appeared to transact
that business with him: whom Eugene, in his careless extravagance, asked
if he would like a situation in the lime-trade?
‘Thankee sir, no sir,’ said Bob. ‘I’ve a good sitiwation here, sir.’
‘If you change your mind at any time,’ returned Eugene, ‘come to me at
my works, and you’ll always find an opening in the lime-kiln.’
‘Thankee sir,’ said Bob.
‘This is my partner,’ said Eugene, ‘who keeps the books and attends to
the wages. A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work is ever my partner’s
motto.’
‘And a very good ’un it is, gentlemen,’ said Bob, receiving his fee, and
drawing a bow out of his head with his right hand, very much as he would
have drawn a pint of beer out of the beer engine.
‘Eugene,’ Mortimer apostrophized him, laughing quite heartily when they
were alone again, ‘how CAN you be so ridiculous?’
‘I am in a ridiculous humour,’ quoth Eugene; ‘I am a ridiculous fellow.
Everything is ridiculous. Come along!’
It passed into Mortimer Lightwood’s mind that a change of some sort,
best expressed perhaps as an intensification of all that was wildest and
most negligent and reckless in his friend, had come upon him in the last
half-hour or so. Thoroughly used to him as he was, he found something
new and strained in him that was for the moment perplexing. This passed
into his mind, and passed out again; but he remembered it afterwards.
‘There’s where she sits, you see,’ said Eugene, when they were standing
under the bank, roared and riven at by the wind. ‘There’s the light of
her fire.’
‘I’ll take a peep through the window,’ said Mortimer.
‘No, don’t!’ Eugene caught him by the arm. ‘Best, not make a show of
her. Come to our honest friend.’
He led him to the post of watch, and they both dropped down and crept
under the lee of the boat; a better shelter than it had seemed before,
being directly contrasted with the blowing wind and the bare night.
‘Mr Inspector at home?’ whispered Eugene.
‘Here I am, sir.’
‘And our friend of the perspiring brow is at the far corner there? Good.
Anything happened?’
‘His daughter has been out, thinking she heard him calling, unless it
was a sign to him to keep out of the way. It might have been.’
‘It might have been Rule Britannia,’ muttered Eugene, ‘but it wasn’t.
Mortimer!’
‘Here!’ (On the other side of Mr Inspector.)
‘Two burglaries now, and a forgery!’
With this indication of his depressed state of mind, Eugene fell silent.
They were all silent for a long while. As it got to be flood-tide, and
the water came nearer to them, noises on the river became more frequent,
and they listened more. To the turning of steam-paddles, to the clinking
of iron chain, to the creaking of blocks, to the measured working
of oars, to the occasional violent barking of some passing dog on
shipboard, who seemed to scent them lying in their hiding-place. The
night was not so dark but that, besides the lights at bows and mastheads
gliding to and fro, they could discern some shadowy bulk attached; and
now and then a ghostly lighter with a large dark sail, like a warning
arm, would start up very near them, pass on, and vanish. At this time
of their watch, the water close to them would be often agitated by some
impulsion given it from a distance. Often they believed this beat and
plash to be the boat they lay in wait for, running in ashore; and again
and again they would have started up, but for the immobility with which
the informer, well used to the river, kept quiet in his place.
The wind carried away the striking of the great multitude of city
church clocks, for those lay to leeward of them; but there were bells to
windward that told them of its being One—Two—Three. Without that aid
they would have known how the night wore, by the falling of the tide,
recorded in the appearance of an ever-widening black wet strip of shore,
and the emergence of the paved causeway from the river, foot by foot.
As the time so passed, this slinking business became a more and more
precarious one. It would seem as if the man had had some intimation of
what was in hand against him, or had taken fright? His movements might
have been planned to gain for him, in getting beyond their reach, twelve
hours’ advantage? The honest man who had expended the sweat of his brow
became uneasy, and began to complain with bitterness of the proneness of
mankind to cheat him—him invested with the dignity of Labour!
Their retreat was so chosen that while they could watch the river, they
could watch the house. No one had passed in or out, since the daughter
thought she heard the father calling. No one could pass in or out
without being seen.
‘But it will be light at five,’ said Mr Inspector, ‘and then WE shall be
seen.’
‘Look here,’ said Riderhood, ‘what do you say to this? He may have
been lurking in and out, and just holding his own betwixt two or three
bridges, for hours back.’
‘What do you make of that?’ said Mr Inspector. Stoical, but
contradictory.
‘He may be doing so at this present time.’
‘What do you make of that?’ said Mr Inspector.
‘My boat’s among them boats here at the cause’ay.’
‘And what do you make of your boat?’ said Mr Inspector.
‘What if I put off in her and take a look round? I know his ways, and
the likely nooks he favours. I know where he’d be at such a time of the
tide, and where he’d be at such another time. Ain’t I been his pardner?
None of you need show. None of you need stir. I can shove her off
without help; and as to me being seen, I’m about at all times.’
‘You might have given a worse opinion,’ said Mr Inspector, after brief
consideration. ‘Try it.’
‘Stop a bit. Let’s work it out. If I want you, I’ll drop round under the
Fellowships and tip you a whistle.’
‘If I might so far presume as to offer a suggestion to my honourable and
gallant friend, whose knowledge of naval matters far be it from me to
impeach,’ Eugene struck in with great deliberation, ‘it would be, that
to tip a whistle is to advertise mystery and invite speculation.
My honourable and gallant friend will, I trust, excuse me, as an
independent member, for throwing out a remark which I feel to be due to
this house and the country.’
‘Was that the T’other Governor, or Lawyer Lightwood?’ asked Riderhood.
For, they spoke as they crouched or lay, without seeing one another’s
faces.
‘In reply to the question put by my honourable and gallant friend,’
said Eugene, who was lying on his back with his hat on his face, as an
attitude highly expressive of watchfulness, ‘I can have no hesitation in
replying (it not being inconsistent with the public service) that those
accents were the accents of the T’other Governor.’
‘You’ve tolerable good eyes, ain’t you, Governor? You’ve all tolerable
good eyes, ain’t you?’ demanded the informer.
All.
‘Then if I row up under the Fellowship and lay there, no need to
whistle. You’ll make out that there’s a speck of something or another
there, and you’ll know it’s me, and you’ll come down that cause’ay to
me. Understood all?’
Understood all.
‘Off she goes then!’
In a moment, with the wind cutting keenly at him sideways, he was
staggering down to his boat; in a few moments he was clear, and creeping
up the river under their own shore.
Eugene had raised himself on his elbow to look into the darkness after
him. ‘I wish the boat of my honourable and gallant friend,’ he murmured,
lying down again and speaking into his hat, ‘may be endowed
with philanthropy enough to turn bottom-upward and extinguish
him!—Mortimer.’
‘My honourable friend.’
‘Three burglaries, two forgeries, and a midnight assassination.’ Yet
in spite of having those weights on his conscience, Eugene was somewhat
enlivened by the late slight change in the circumstances of affairs. So
were his two companions. Its being a change was everything. The suspense
seemed to have taken a new lease, and to have begun afresh from a recent
date. There was something additional to look for. They were all three
more sharply on the alert, and less deadened by the miserable influences
of the place and time.
More than an hour had passed, and they were even dozing, when one of the
three—each said it was he, and he had NOT dozed—made out Riderhood
in his boat at the spot agreed on. They sprang up, came out from their
shelter, and went down to him. When he saw them coming, he dropped
alongside the causeway; so that they, standing on the causeway, could
speak with him in whispers, under the shadowy mass of the Six Jolly
Fellowship Porters fast asleep.
‘Blest if I can make it out!’ said he, staring at them.
‘Make what out? Have you seen him?’
‘No.’
‘What HAVE you seen?’ asked Lightwood. For, he was staring at them in
the strangest way.
‘I’ve seen his boat.’
‘Not empty?’
‘Yes, empty. And what’s more,—adrift. And what’s more,—with one scull
gone. And what’s more,—with t’other scull jammed in the thowels and
broke short off. And what’s more,—the boat’s drove tight by the tide
’atwixt two tiers of barges. And what’s more,—he’s in luck again, by
George if he ain’t!’
Chapter 14
THE BIRD OF PREY BROUGHT DOWN
Cold on the shore, in the raw cold of that leaden crisis in the
four-and-twenty hours when the vital force of all the noblest and
prettiest things that live is at its lowest, the three watchers looked
each at the blank faces of the other two, and all at the blank face of
Riderhood in his boat.
‘Gaffer’s boat, Gaffer in luck again, and yet no Gaffer!’ So spake
Riderhood, staring disconsolate.
As if with one accord, they all turned their eyes towards the light of
the fire shining through the window. It was fainter and duller. Perhaps
fire, like the higher animal and vegetable life it helps to sustain, has
its greatest tendency towards death, when the night is dying and the day
is not yet born.
‘If it was me that had the law of this here job in hand,’ growled
Riderhood with a threatening shake of his head, ‘blest if I wouldn’t lay
hold of HER, at any rate!’
‘Ay, but it is not you,’ said Eugene. With something so suddenly fierce
in him that the informer returned submissively; ‘Well, well, well,
t’other governor, I didn’t say it was. A man may speak.’
‘And vermin may be silent,’ said Eugene. ‘Hold your tongue, you
water-rat!’
Astonished by his friend’s unusual heat, Lightwood stared too, and then
said: ‘What can have become of this man?’