CHAPTER LI.

NOT IN A HURRY.

WE were all pretty sure that this discovery of Tony’s concerned us deeply, and might lead to something, if followed up at once with luck and skill. But we thought it more important that he should go first to Woking Road, and inquire further into the story of Joe Clipson’s cab, which he was sure to do much better than myself; for he could make himself look like a brother cabman, without any trouble.

He had little more to tell us about the Coke Yard yet, for he had to feel his way very tenderly there, and must wait for opportunities. And Bulwrag (who was never very sweet of temper, though, unlike his mother, he could curb himself) had been more like a bear than a cultivated Christian, since he got that cut across his knuckles. As our sympathies were not with the sufferer, Tony made us laugh by his description of the want of resignation in a case so trifling.

“Here it is,” cried Bulwrag, after hopping round the room, as soon as his poultice began to draw; “look at this scurvy Saint! He is made of copper. Why the devil couldn’t he have a Saint made of gold?”

Tonks replied that perhaps the individual with the hat could not afford a golden Saint to sit upon the brim; and the copper perhaps had done him a much better turn than gold, both in saving his head from the crushing blow, and avenging it on the smiter. For the wound looked very angry, and it might be even dangerous. But what made him wear such a Saint at all?

“How the deuce can I tell why they wear such rubbish?” Bulwrag had answered crustily. “Those foreign sailors are such fools. You know more about him than I do.”

This was by no means true as yet, though Tonks hoped to make it so, if allowed his own time about it. And he told us quite earnestly, and as I believe sincerely, that he never had felt, not his mind alone, but his heart, more deeply engaged in solving the merits of the darkest horse in the leariest stable, than they both were now in getting to the very bottom of this affair about my Kitty. And though I did not altogether like his way of putting it, when the meaning is good we must not quarrel with the manner in which other people look at things.

So we treated him well and put him up for the night; and the following morning I drove him by way of Weybridge to Woking Road Station, or as near thereto as we could get without any one observing us. Then I went back to Weybridge, so as to meet him at that station, and hear all he had to say, before he took another train for London.

Nothing could have been better managed. I borrowed a badge from Sims the flyman, and a spotted yellow neckerchief, and a broken whip, and Tony lounged into the inn-yard, as if he had left his cab down at the blacksmith’s by the bridge. As I saw him in the distance I said to myself that nature must have meant him for the driver of a cab, for he put his knee out and turned his heels in, and carried his elbows, as if he had been born so. Any brotherhood of good will and lofty feeling, such as that of cabmen essentially is, must welcome him at once, and make him free of any knowledge it possessed that would bring in nothing.

And so it proved, when he rejoined me by the two o’clock train at Weybridge. “What have you ordered?” he asked; and I replied,—

“Chump chops, new potatoes, and pickled onions.”

“Couldn’t be better,” he was good enough to say; “but have in the pewter first. Blest if I believe there’s anything to parch the throat like a jolly good lie, and if I’ve told one, I’ve told fifty. Dinner first, business afterwards.”

That I should consent to this will show how thoroughly I had been drilled by long endurance and fretful discipline. Perpetual disappointment too, and the habit which hope had now acquired of falling without a blow—just like an over-matched prize-fighter—as well as a sense of evil fortune, drove me sometimes almost into the apathy of a fatalist. And so I let Tony Tonks munch on, and even joined him in that process.

“I wish I had got that to do again,” he said, as at last he laid down knife and fork; “I don’t often do so well as that. The air of these commons is uncommon sharp, sharper even than the Heath is. But you have been very patient, and I won’t keep you any longer. I found out all they knew back there, and it only cost a shilling. I don’t know that it is worth much more; for it carries us very little further. But so far as it goes, it is plain enough. I had it from Joe Clipson, the man who drove them; and no secret was made of the affair to him.”

Now the story, as he had it, comes to this. Some one got out at Woking Road Station, on the afternoon of May 15th, it might have been an up or it might have been a down train, Clipson could not say, for two trains came in together, and the man had no luggage of any sort. The date could be fixed by several things, and there could not be any doubt about it. And the time when two trains meet there in the afternoon is 4.15; which comes pretty close to our figures.

This man carried nothing but a little bag, a little black leather bag, such as nine people out of ten have. There were three cabs, or flies as they called them there, waiting in the station yard; for it is their busiest time of the day, and he chose Clipson’s, because the horse looked freshest, and told him to drive to Shepperton, without saying a word about the fare.

Clipson had not been in that part long, and he had scarcely heard of Shepperton, which is severed from all those Surrey places by the unbridged river. But it seemed to him a pleasant thing to start without any fettering as to money, and the man who engaged him seemed very free of that, in a style that said—“Never stand out for a shilling.” And he seems to have acted up to this; although it is scarcely ever done, except with a true friend’s money. But Clipson did not care whose it was, if he might be allowed to go home with it.

The day was very bright and pleasant—exactly as I remembered it—with plenty of light in the air, but no heat, and no flies to make horses grieve that they cannot swear. Clipson remembered how cold it grew, even before the sun went down, and he tucked a sack under his calves as he came home, because he had promised Mrs. Clipson so, and his word was more tender in absence.

He said that his fare seemed to know a good bit about the principles of the road—that was the word he used for it—as if he had learned it from a map, or description which somebody had rubbed into him. But he was not in any way up to the corners, which show—as Joe said, and with some reason too—whether a man understands what he is at properly. But he knew where he was at Chertsey Bridge, and he waved his hand at the first turn to the right.

Being a Surrey man, from some outlandish part in that straggling country, Clipson was not at all comfortable upon our side of the river. To a certain extent, and with much better reason, I feel the same thing as regards them; though I admit (without thinking twice about it) that there are plenty of good people there, and especially my Aunt Parslow. But Clipson, although he depended for his livelihood upon a railway station, did not like going into unknown places, especially with a horse who might come down and stop there; for there was only one sound knee out of sixteen that were washed in the yard every Saturday; but that one belonged to Clipson.

His horse was a clipper, by his own account; and nobody could tell how good he was, because he never had been called upon to do his best. Still it was a toughish journey for him; and Mr. Clipson could not see, taking the state of the roads into account, and the distance, and the waiting, how he could charge less than five and twenty shillings; and if asked to go again he would not do it for the money. For he waited four hours, as he vowed, and I daresay it may have been three, at the public-house, which is a sharp pull from the house of Phil Moggs at the waterside.

For these details I did not care so much (although they were full of interest) as I cared to know who the man was that employed him, and how he behaved, and whether he looked good, and above all how my darling Kitty seemed to take things, and what she said, and whether she was weeping all the way about myself. The cabman had paid no attention at all to this part of the question, and could give no more account of Kitty, than if she had been a portmanteau, or inside one. Tony Tonks had never asked (as a man of kind nature would have done) whether my dear had a handkerchief in her hand, or whether she seemed to gulp down a sob, or how she looked up at the evening-star, or even what the condition of her eyes was! For him it was quite enough to learn, that the “young ’ooman looked down in the mouth like.” Well, that is the way the world goes on.

About that I cared to make no fuss; for it even seemed a pleasure to me that none but myself should know these things; remembering as I did, that no one ever could cry as my Kitty could. For I never could understand how it was, that having so very little practice as she had (in spite of many opportunities), she could yet make anybody feel as if all the world was woe, the moment there appeared a gleam of trouble in her soft eyes. I am tolerably hard, and Uncle Corny harder still—from having lived so much longer—but either of us would rather have had a 64lb. box of strawberries drop from the tail of the van upon the tender places of both feet, than let a single word fall from us, even in the hottest moment, to bring a cloud into those tender eyes. However, all people are not like us; and perhaps she never let that cabman see what was the matter with her; for she was proud, as well as gentle.

Moreover the man was hungry, and that makes a world of difference. The kindest man that was ever born cannot be expected fairly to feel for his fellow-creatures, when he is yearning after animals. The heart being full of beef and mutton, because there are none in the stomach, how can any room be left for creatures of less relish? This explanation may be unsound; but at any rate the cabman did not melt at Kitty’s weeping.

And now two questions of prime importance rose in following out this tale. It was evident from two accounts, both that of Moggs the boatman and of Clipson the cab-driver, that no kind of compulsion had been used to make Kitty go with them. It was plain that she went of her own accord, deeply grieved—as the boatman’s story showed—but resigned and patient. In the first place, then, who was the man that had done all this to fetch her? And again, when they got to Woking Station, whither did they journey thence?

As to the first point Tony Tonks had found out little more than I did. The cabman said that he believed he would know the gent again if he saw him, but there was nothing very particular about him to notice. He seemed to be elderly, and rather short, but very sharp and active. His clothes were dark, and he wore a short cloak, not much longer than a policeman’s cape. He did not sit at the young lady’s side, but on the front seat opposite to her, and he did not seem to be talking to her much. It was quite dark when they left Shepperton, and it must have been ten o’clock when they arrived, or later; for the horse was a little lame from standing still so long. They did not seem to be in any hurry, and as they had no luggage, except a couple of light bags, he did not follow them on to the platform, and could not pretend to say which way they went, for there were three more down-trains after that, and four or it might be five to London.

As to that, Tonks had made vain inquiries of the station-porters, and booking clerks. It was so long ago by this time, that even those who might have noticed them had forgotten. They had passed into the station, that was very well established; but after that nothing at all could be discovered, and there the clue broke hopelessly.

After hearing all these things, I became sadly downcast. They reminded me of that dreadful night when the snowdrifts overwhelmed me. I seemed to be walking in the same sort of maze, continually struggling to get forward, and perpetually driven back, seeming to walk with all my might, yet by a stronger power to stand still. And losing all confidence in myself, I asked Tony Tonks what he thought of it, just as if he had been the great oracle that smelled the turtle soup of Crœsus, without even longing for a taste of it.

“It all turns out just according to my views,” replied Tonks, as if he saw his views running like the gravy, which he had been saving up to drink out of the spoon; “the same as I have expressed all along, and find them confirmed more by all I discover. Any one who puts two and two together could swear that Downy Bulwrag is at the bottom of the mischief, though he has taken uncommonly good care not to show his nose in it. I am rather inclined to think that the lady is on the Continent. They are more likely to have gone down the line than up. If they had meant to go to town, what should have taken them to Woking? Supposing they were shy of the Windsor line, Surbiton would have been their place, or Weybridge. Though of course they might have thought Woking road safer, so that we must not reason too much by that. By the way, can the lady speak French at all? That might make a difference to her.”

“I am not at all sure,” I replied after thinking; “for we never happened to talk of that. She was at a good school for a little time; and then that hateful woman, her stepmother, took her away when she was doing well, and sent her to a wretched place at £20 a year. She can read French, I know, because I asked her something; but I doubt whether she can speak it.”

“Then that’s where she is. I begin to smell a rat. He took her from Southampton, depend upon it. And now I twig some bit of meaning in that copper saint. The south of France—that’s where she is.”

“But why in the south of France, more than any other part?” I thought that he was jumping rather fast to his conclusions.

“Well, it might be Italy, or Spain,” he answered, with a fine generosity; “I can’t say very much about it. But a brother of mine was at sea, till he was drowned, and he traded a good deal from the south of France; and he had one of those things in his hat, because of being struck by lightning. They get it very bad in those waters, he declared; but I can’t call to mind the name of the saint that stops it. Of course I have no faith in such stuff, though there might be nothing to laugh at, after all I have seen about horses. But there it is. They stick those things up, as an officer’s coachman mounts a cockade; and bad luck it was for Master Downy’s knuckles. His hand was like a pease-pudding yesterday. His flesh is always of a yellow nature, like a Cochin China’s. Shouldn’t wonder a bit, if he got lockjaw.”

“Not till I have settled with him.” It made me forget the Rev. Peter, and all his style of regarding things, when people spoke as if right and wrong had an equal claim upon the Lord in heaven.