“Yes,” said Chandler, “that’s very kind of you, Mr. Bunting. But how about her—her herself?”
Bunting stared at him. It pleased him to think that Daisy hadn’t given herself away, as Ellen was always hinting the girl was doing.
“I can’t answer for Daisy,” he said heavily. “You’ll have to ask her yourself—that’s not a job any other man can do for you, my lad.”
“I never gets a chance. I never sees her, not by our two selves,” said Chandler, with some heat. “You don’t seem to understand, Mr. Bunting, that I never do see Miss Daisy alone,” he repeated. “I hear now that she’s going away Monday, and I’ve only once had the chance of a walk with her. Mrs. Bunting’s very particular, not to say pernickety in her ideas, Mr. Bunting—”
“That’s a fault on the right side, that is—with a young girl,” said Bunting thoughtfully.
And Chandler nodded. He quite agreed that as regarded other young chaps Mrs. Bunting could not be too particular.
“She’s been brought up like a lady, my Daisy has,” went on Bunting, with some pride. “That Old Aunt of hers hardly lets her out of her sight.”
“I was coming to the old aunt,” said Chandler heavily. “Mrs. Bunting she talks as if your daughter was going to stay with that old woman the whole of her natural life—now is that right? That’s what I wants to ask you, Mr. Bunting—is that right?”
“I’ll say a word to Ellen, don’t you fear,” said Bunting abstractedly.
His mind had wandered off, away from Daisy and this nice young chap, to his now constant anxious preoccupation. “You come along tomorrow,” he said, “and I’ll see you gets your walk with Daisy. It’s only right you and she should have a chance of seeing one another without old folk being by; else how’s the girl to tell whether she likes you or not! For the matter of that, you hardly knows her, Joe—” He looked at the young man consideringly.
Chandler shook his head impatiently. “I knows her quite as well as I wants to know her,” he said. “I made up my mind the very first time I see’d her, Mr. Bunting.”
“No! Did you really?” said Bunting. “Well, come to think of it, I did so with her mother; aye, and years after, with Ellen, too. But I hope you’ll never want no second, Chandler.”
“God forbid!” said the young man under his breath. And then he asked, rather longingly, “D’you think they’ll be out long now, Mr. Bunting?”
And Bunting woke up to a due sense of hospitality. “Sit down, sit down; do!” he said hastily. “I don’t believe they’ll be very long. They’ve only got a little bit of shopping to do.”
And then, in a changed, in a ringing, nervous tone, he asked, “And how about your job, Joe? Nothing new, I take it? I suppose you’re all just waiting for the next time?”
“Aye—that’s about the figure of it.” Chandler’s voice had also changed; it was now sombre, menacing. “We’re fair tired of it—beginning to wonder when it’ll end, that we are!”
“Do you ever try and make to yourself a picture of what the master’s like?” asked Bunting. Somehow, he felt he must ask that.
“Yes,” said Joe slowly. “I’ve a sort of notion—a savage, fierce-looking devil, the chap must be. It’s that description that was circulated put us wrong. I don’t believe it was the man that knocked up against that woman in the fog—no, not one bit I don’t. But I wavers, I can’t quite make up my mind. Sometimes I think it’s a sailor—the foreigner they talks about, that goes away for eight or nine days in between, to Holland maybe, or to France. Then, again, I says to myself that it’s a butcher, a man from the Central Market. Whoever it is, it’s someone used to killing, that’s flat.”
“Then it don’t seem to you possible—?” (Bunting got up and walked over to the window.) “You don’t take any stock, I suppose, in that idea some of the papers put out, that the man is”—then he hesitated and brought out, with a gasp—“a gentleman?”
Chandler looked at him, surprised. “No,” he said deliberately. “I’ve made up my mind that’s quite a wrong tack, though I knows that some of our fellows—big pots, too—are quite sure that the fellow what gave the girl the sovereign is the man we’re looking for. You see, Mr. Bunting, if that’s the fact—well, it stands to reason the fellow’s an escaped lunatic; and if he’s an escaped lunatic he’s got a keeper, and they’d be raising a hue and cry after him; now, wouldn’t they?”
“You don’t think,” went on Bunting, lowering his voice, “that he could be just staying somewhere, lodging like?”
“D’you mean that The Avenger may be a toff, staying in some West-end hotel, Mr. Bunting? Well, things almost as funny as that ’ud be have come to pass.” He smiled as if the notion was a funny one.
“Yes, something o’ that sort,” muttered Bunting.
“Well, if your idea’s correct, Mr. Bunting—”
“I never said ’twas my idea,” said Bunting, all in a hurry.
“Well, if that idea’s correct then, ’twill make our task more difficult than ever. Why, ’twould be looking for a needle in a field of hay, Mr. Bunting! But there! I don’t think it’s anything quite so unlikely as that—not myself I don’t.” He hesitated. “There’s some of us”—he lowered his voice—“that hopes he’ll betake himself off—The Avenger, I mean—to another big city, to Manchester or to Edinburgh. There’d be plenty of work for him to do there,” and Chandler chuckled at his own grim joke.
And then, to both men’s secret relief, for Bunting was now mortally afraid of this discussion concerning The Avenger and his doings, they heard Mrs. Bunting’s key in the lock.
Daisy blushed rosy-red with pleasure when she saw that young Chandler was still there. She had feared that when they got home he would be gone,
