Henry Dunbar (Mystery Classics Series). Mary Elizabeth Braddon
I see the money for it,” the languid youth answered, with a sneer.
“So you’ve learned the way of the world already, have you, my lad?” said Joseph Wilmot, bitterly. Then, pulling his brother’s memorandum-book from his pocket, he opened it, and took out the little packet of bank-notes. “I suppose you can understand these?” he said.
The languid youth lifted his nose, which by its natural conformation betrayed an aspiring character, and looked dubiously at his customer.
“I can understand as they might be flash uns,” he remarked, significantly.
Mr. Joseph Wilmot growled out an oath, and made a plunge at the young shopman.
“I said as they might be flash,” the youth remonstrated, quite meekly; “there’s no call to fly at me. I didn’t mean to give no offence.”
“No,” muttered Mr. Wilmot; “egad! you’d better not mean it. Call your master.”
The youth retired to obey: he was quite subdued and submissive by this time.
Joseph Wilmot looked about the shop.
“The cur forgot the till,” he muttered; “I might try my hand at that, if —” He stopped and smiled with a strange, deliberate expression, not quite agreeable to behold —“if I wasn’t going to meet Henry Dunbar.”
There was a full-length looking-glass in one corner of the shop. Joseph Wilmot walked up to it, looked at himself for a few moments in silent contemplation, and then shook his clenched hand at the reflected image.
“You’re a vagabond!” he muttered between his set teeth, “and you look it! You’re an outcast; and you look it! But who set the mark upon you? Who’s to blame for all the evil you have done? Whose treachery made you what you are? That’s the question!”
The owner of the shop appeared, and looked sharply at his customer.
“Now, listen to me!” Joseph Wilmot said, slowly and deliberately. “I’ve been down upon my luck for some time past, and I’ve just got a bit of money. I’ve got it honestly, mind you; and I don’t want to be questioned by such a jackanapes as that shopboy of yours.”
The languid youth folded his arms, and endeavoured to look ferocious in his fiery indignation; but he drew a little way behind his master as he did so.
The proprietor of the shop bowed and smiled.
“We shall be happy to wait upon you, sir,” he said; “and I have no doubt we shall be able to give you satisfaction. If my shopman has been impertinent —”
“He has,” interrupted Joseph; “but I don’t want to make any palaver about that. He’s like the rest of the world, and he thinks if a man wears a shabby coat, he must be a scoundrel; that’s all. I forgive him.”
The languid youth, very much in the background, and quite sheltered, by his master, might have been heard murmuring faintly —
“Oh, indeed! Forgive, indeed! Do you really, now? Thank you for nothing!” and other sentences of a derisive character.
“I want a complete rig-out,” continued Joseph Wilmot; “a new suit of clothes — hat, boots, umbrella, a carpet-bag, half-a-dozen shirts, brush and comb, shaving tackle, and all the et-ceteras. Now, as you may be no more inclined to trust me than that young whipper-snapper of yours, for all you’re so uncommon civil, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I want this beard of mine trimmed and altered. I’ll go to a barber’s and get that done, and in the meantime you can make your mind easy about the character of these gentlemen.”
He handed the tradesman three of the Bank of England notes. The man looked at them doubtfully.
“If you think they ain’t genuine, send ’em round to one of your neighbours, and get ’em changed,” Joseph Wilmot said; “but be quick about it. I shall be back here in half an hour.”
He walked out of the shop, leaving the man still staring, with the three notes in his hand.
The vagabond, with his hat slouched over his eyes, and big hands in his pockets, strolled away from the High Street down to a barber’s shop near the docks.
Here he had his beard shaved off, his ragged moustache trimmed into the most aristocratic shape, and his long, straggling grey hair cut and arranged according to his own directions.
If he had been the vainest of men, bent on no higher object in life than the embellishment of his person, he could not have been more particular or more difficult to please.
When the barber had completed his work, Joseph Wilmot washed his face, readjusted the hair upon his ample forehead, and looked at himself in a little shaving-glass that hung against the wall.
So far as the man’s head and face went, the transformation was perfect. He was no longer a vagabond. He was a respectable, handsome-looking gentleman, advanced in middle age. Not altogether unaristocratic-looking.
The very expression of his face was altered. The defiant sneer was changed into a haughty smile; the sullen scowl was now a thoughtful frown.
Whether this change was natural to him, and merely brought about by the alteration in his hair and beard, or whether it was an assumption of his own, was only known to the man himself.
He put on his hat, still slouching the brim over his eyes, paid the barber, and went away. He walked straight to the docks, and made inquiries about the steamer Electra. She was not expected to arrive until the next day, at the earliest. Having satisfied himself upon this point, Joseph Wilmot went back to the outfitter’s to choose his new clothes.
This business occupied him for a long time; for in this he was as difficult to please as he had been in the matter of his beard and hair. No punctilious old bachelor, the best and brightest hours of whose life had been devoted to the cares of the toilet, could have shown himself more fastidious than this vagabond, who had been out-at-elbows for ten years past, and who had worn a felon’s dress for thirteen years at a stretch in Norfolk Island.
But he evinced no bad taste in the selection of a costume. He chose no gaudy colours, or flashily-cut vestments. On the contrary, the garb he assumed was in perfect keeping with the style of his hair and moustache. It was the dress of a middle-aged gentleman; fashionable, but scrupulously simple, quiet alike in colour and in cut.
When his toilet was complete, from his twenty-one shilling hat to the polished boots upon his well-shaped feet, he left the shady little parlour in which he had changed his clothes, and came into the shop, with a glove dangling loosely in one ungloved hand, and a cane in the other.
The tradesman and his shopboy stared aghast.
“If that turn-out had cost you fifty pound, sir, instead of eighteen pound, twelve, and elevenpence, it would be worth all the money to you; for you look like a dook;” cried the tailor, with enthusiasm.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Mr. Wilmot said, carelessly. He stood before the cheval-glass, and twirled his moustache as he spoke, looking at himself thoughtfully, with a smile upon his face. Then he took his change from the tailor, counted it, and dropped the gold and silver into his waistcoat-pocket.
The man’s manner was as much altered as his person. He had entered the shop at eight o’clock that morning a blackguard as well as a vagabond. He left it now a gentleman; subdued in voice, easy and rather listless in gait, haughty and self-possessed in tone.
“Oh, by the bye,” he said, pausing upon the threshold of the door, “I’ll thank you to bundle all those old things of mine together into a sheet of brown paper: tie them up tightly. I’ll call for them after dark to-night.”
Having said this, very carelessly and indifferently, Mr. Wilmot left the shop: but though he was now as well dressed and as gentlemanly-looking as any man in Southampton, he turned into the first by-street, and hurried away from the town to a lonely walk beside the water.
He walked along the shore until he came to a village near