Caillaud was unsettled for an instant, and then, slowly untwining the embrace, he made a sign to Pauline, who took Zachariah’s hand and led him outside; the heavy well-oiled bolt of the lock shooting back under the key with a smooth strong thud between them. She walked down the corridor alone, not noticing that he had not followed her, and had just passed out of sight when an officer stepped up to him and said:
“Your name is Coleman?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry to hear it. My name is Nadin. You know me, I think. You must consider yourself my prisoner.”
Zachariah was in prison for two years. He had not been there three months when his wife died.
Let us now look forward to 1821; let us walk down one of the new streets just beginning to stretch northwards from Pentonville; let us stop opposite a little house, with a little palisade in front, enclosing a little garden five and twenty feet long and fifteen feet broad; let us peep through the chink between the blind and the window. We see Zachariah and Pauline. Another year passes; we peep through the same chink again. A cradle is there, in which lies Marie Pauline Coleman; but where is the mother? She is not there, and the father alone sits watching the child.
XVI
Cowfold
Cowfold, half village, half town, lies about three miles to the west of the great North Road from London to York. As you go from London, about fifty miles from the Post-Office in St. Martin’s le Grand—the fiftieth milestone is just beyond the turning—you will see a hand-post with three arms on it; on one is written in large letters, “To London;” on the second, in equally large letters, “To York;” and on the third, in small italic letters, “To Cowfold.” Two or three years before the events narrated in the following chapters took place—that is to say, about twenty years after the death of Zachariah’s second wife—a hundred coaches a day rolled past that hand-post, and about two miles beyond it was a huge inn, with stables like cavalry barracks, where horses were changed. No coach went through Cowfold. When the inhabitants wished to go northwards or southwards they walked or drove to the junction, and waited on the little grassy triangle till a coach came by which had room for them. When they returned they were deposited at the same spot, and the passengers who were going through from London to York or Scotland, or who were coming up to London, always seemed to despise people who were taken up or who were left by the roadside there.
There was, perhaps, some reason for this contempt. The North Road was at that time one of the finest roads in the world, broad, hard-metalled, and sound in the wettest weather. That which led to Cowfold was under the control of the parish, and in wintertime was very bad indeed. When you looked down it it seemed as if it led nowhere, and indeed the inhabitants of the town were completely shut off from any close communication with the outer world. How strange it was to emerge from the end of the lane and to see those wonderful words, “To London,” “To York!” What an opening into infinity! Boys of a slightly imaginative turn of mind—for there were boys with imagination even in Cowfold—would, on a holiday trudge the three miles eastward merely to get to the post and enjoy the romance of those mysterious fingers. No wonder; for the excitement begotten by the long stretch of the road—London at one end, York at the other—by the sight of the Star, Rover, Eclipse, or Times racing along at twelve miles an hour, and by the inscriptions on them, was worth a whole afternoon’s cricket or wandering in the fields. Cowfold itself supplied no such stimulus. The only thing like it was the mail-cart, which every evening took the letters from the post-office, disappeared into the dark, nobody could tell whither, and brought letters in the morning, nobody could tell whence, before the inhabitants were out of bed. There was a vague belief that it went about fifteen miles and “caught” something somewhere; but nobody knew for certain, except the postmistress and the mail-cart driver, who were always remarkably reticent on the point. The driver was dressed in red, carried a long horn slung at the side of the cart, and was popularly believed also to have pistols with him. He never accosted anybody; sat on a solitary perch just big enough for him; swayed always backwards and forwards a little in a melancholy fashion as he rode; was never seen during the daytime, and was not, in any proper sense, a Cowfold person.
Cowfold had four streets, or, more correctly, only two, which crossed one another at right angles in the middle of the town, and formed there a kind of square or open place, in which, on Saturdays, a market was held.
The Angel was in this square, and the shops grouped themselves round it. In the centre was a large pump with a great leaden spout that had a hole bored in it at the side. By stopping up the mouth of the spout with the hand it was possible through this hole to get a good drink,
