'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, Ifelt 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?
