It Is Never Too Late to Mend Part 156

"What made you come home without orders?" asked Meadows, somewhat sternly.

"Why, you know as well as me, sir; you have seen them?"

"Who?"

"George Fielding and his mate."

Meadows started. "How should I see them?"

"Sir! Why, they are come home. They gave me the slip, and got away before me. I followed them. They are here. They must be here." Crawley, not noticing Meadows' face, went on. "Sir, when I found they had slipped out of the camp on horseback, and down to Sydney, and saw them with my own eyes go out of the harbor for England, I thought I should have died on the spot. I thought I should never have the courage to face you, but when I met you arm in arm, her eye smiling on you, I knew it was all right then. When did the event come off?"

"What event?"

"The marriage, sir--you and the lady. She is worth all the trouble she has given us."

"You fool," roared Meadows, "we are not married. The wedding is to be this day week!" Crawley started and gasped, "We are ruined, we are undone!"

"Hold your bawling," cried Meadows, fiercely, "and let me think." He buried his face in his hands; when he removed them, he was gloomy but self-possessed. "They are not in England, Crawley, or we should have seen them. They are on the road. You sailed faster than they; pa.s.sed them at night, perhaps. They will soon be here. My own heart tells me they will be here before Monday. Well, I will beat them still. I will be married Thursday next." The iron man then turned to Crawley, and sternly demanded how he had let the man slip.

Crawley related all, and as he told his tale the tone of Meadows altered. He no longer doubted the zeal of his hireling. He laid his hand on his brow and more than once he groaned and muttered half-articulate expressions of repugnance. At the conclusion he said moodily: "Crawley, you have served me well--too well! All the women upon earth were not worth a murder, and we have been on the brink of several. You went beyond your instructions."

"No, I did not," replied Crawley; "I have got them in my pocket. I will read them to you. See! there is no discretion allowed me. I was to bribe them to rob."

"Where do I countenance the use of deadly weapons?"

"Where is there a word against deadly weapons?" asked Crawley, sharply.

"Be just to me, sir," he added in a more whining tone. "You know you are a man that must and will be obeyed. You sent me to Australia to do a certain thing, and you would have flung me to perdition if I had stuck at anything to do it. Well, sir, I tried skill without force--look here," and he placed a small substance like white sugar on the table.

"What is that?"

"Put that in a man's gla.s.s he will never taste it, and in half an hour he will sleep you might take the clothes off his back. Three of us watched months and months for a chance, but it was no go; those two were teetotal or next door it."

"I wish I had never sent you out."

"Why," replied Crawley, "there is no harm done, no blood has been spilled except on our own side. George Fielding is coming home all right. Give him up the lady, and he will never know you were his enemy."

"What!" cried Meadows, "wade through all these crimes for nothing? Lie and feign, and intercept letters, and rob and all but a.s.sa.s.sinate---and fail? Wade in crime up to my middle, and then wade back again without the prize! Do you see this pistol? it has two barrels; if she and I are ever parted it shall be this way--I'll send her to heaven with one barrel, and myself to h.e.l.l with the other."

There was a dead silence! Crawley returned to their old relation, and was cowed by the natural ascendency of the greater spirit.

"You need not look like a girl at me," said Meadows, "most likely it won't come to that. It is not easy to beat me, and I shall try every move man's wit can devise--this last," said he, in a voice of iron, touching the pistol as it lay on the table.

There was another pause. Then Meadows rose and said calmly: "You look tired, you shall have a bottle of my old port; and my own heart is staggered, but it is only for a moment." He struck his hand upon his breast, and walked slowly from the room. And Crawley heard his step descend to the hall, and then to the cellar; and the indomitable character of the man rang in his solid tread.

Crawley was uneasy. "Mr. Meadows is getting wildish; it frightens me to see such a man as him burst out like that. He is not to be trusted with a loaded pistol. Ah! and I am in his secrets, deep in his secrets; great men sweep away little folk that know too much. I never saw him with a pistol before." All this pa.s.sing rapidly through his head, Crawley pounced on the pistol, took off the caps, whipped out a little bottle, and poured some strong stuff into the caps that loosened the detonating powder directly; then with a steel pen he picked it all out and replaced the caps, their virtue gone, before Mr. Meadows returned with two bottles; and the confederates sat in close conclave till the gray of morning broke into the room.

The great man gave but few orders to his subordinate, for this simple reason, that the game had fallen into his own hands.

Still there was something for Crawley to do. He was to have an officer watching to arrest Will Fielding on the old judgment should he, which was hardly to be expected, come to kick up a row and interrupt the wedding. And to-morrow he was to take out a writ against his "father-in-law." Mr. Meadows played a close game. He knew that things are not to be got when they are wanted. His plan was to have everything ready that might be wanted long before it was wanted.

But most of the night pa.s.sed in relation of what had already taken place, and Crawley was the chief speaker, and magnified his services.

He related from his own point of view all that I have told, and Meadows listened with all his soul and intelligence.

At the attack on Mr. Levi, Meadows chuckled. "The old heathen," said he, contemptuously, "I have beat him anyway."

"By the way, sir, have you seen anything of him?" asked Crawley.

"No."

"He is not come home, then."

"Not that I know of; have you any reason to think he has?"

"No, only he left the mine directly after they pelted him; but he would not leave the country any the more for that, and money to be made in it by handfuls."

"Now, Crawley, go and get some sleep. A cold bath for me and then on horseback. I must breakfast at Gra.s.smere."

"Great man, sir! great man! You will beat them yet, sir. You have beat Mr. Levi. Here we are in his house; and he driven away to lay his sly old bones at the Antipodes. Ha! ha! ha!"

The sun came in at the window, and the long conference broke up, and, strange to say, it broke into three. Crawley home to sleep. Meadows to Gra.s.smere. Isaac Levi to smoke an Eastern pipe, and so meditate with more tranquil pulse how to strike with deadliest effect these two, his insolent enemies.

_Siste viator_--and guess that riddle.

CHAPTER Lx.x.xI.

ISAAC LEVI, rescued by George Fielding, reached his tent smarting with pain and bitter insult; he sat on the floor pale and dusty, and anathematized his adversaries in the Hebrew tongue. Wrath still boiling in his heart, he drew out his letters and read them. Then grief mingled with his anger. Old Cohen, his friend and agent and coeval, was dead.

Another self dead.

Besides the hint that this gave him to set his house in order, a distinct consideration drew Isaac now to England. He had trusted much larger interests to old Cohen than he was at all disposed to leave in the hands of Cohen's successors, men of another generation, "progeniem vitiosiorem," he sincerely believed.

Another letter gave him some information about Meadows that added another uneasiness to those he already felt on George's account. Hence his bitter disappointment when he found George gone from the mine, the date of his return uncertain. Hence, too, the purchase of Moore's horses, and the imploring letter to George--measures that proved invaluable to that young man, whose primitive simplicity and wise humility led him not to question the advice of his elder, but obey it.

And so it was that, although the old Jew sailed home upon his own interests, yet during the voyage George Fielding's a.s.sumed a great importance, direct and incidental. Direct, because the old man was warm with grat.i.tude to him; indirect, because he boiled over with hate of George's most dangerous enemy. And, as he neared the English coast, the thought that though he was coming to Farnborough he could not come home, grew bitterer and bitterer, and then that he should find his enemy and his insulter in the very house sacred by the shadows of the beloved and dead!!

Finding in Nathan a youth of no common fidelity and shrewdness, Isaac confided in him; and Nathan, proud beyond description of the confidence bestowed on him by one so honored in his tribe, enlisted in his cause with all the ardor of youth tempered by Jewish address.

Often they sat together on the deck, and the young Jewish brain and the old Jewish brain mingled and digested a course of conduct to meet every imaginable contingency; for the facts they at present possessed were only general and vague.

The first result of all this was that these two crept into the town of Farnborough at three o'clock one morning; that Isaac took out a key and unlocked the house that stood next to Meadows' on the left hand; that Isaac took secret possession of the first floor, and Nathan open but not ostentatious possession of the ground-floor, with a tale skillfully concocted to excite no suspicion whatever that Isaac was in any way connected with his presence in the town. Nathan, it is to be observed, had never been in Farnborough before.

The next morning they worked. Nathan went out, locking the door after him, to execute two commissions. He was to find out what the young Cohens were doing, and how far they were likely to prove worthy of the trust reposed in their father; and what Susan Merton was doing, and whether Meadows was courting her or not. The latter part of Nathan's task was terribly easy.

The young man came home late at night, locked the door, made a concerted signal, and was admitted to the senior presence. He found him smoking his Eastern pipe. Nathan with dejected air told him that he had good news; that the Cohens not only thought themselves wiser than their father, which was permissible, but openly declared it, which he, though young, had observed to be a trait confined to very great fools.

"It is well said, my son," quoth Isaac, smoking calmly, "and the other business?"

"Oh, master!" said Nathan, "I bring still worse tidings of her. She is a true Nazarite, a creature without faith. She is betrothed to the man you hate, and whom I, for your sake, hate even to death."