No response. As she reentered at the door, he dropped over the bank and made his way back, among the ooze and near the hiding-place, to Mortimer Lightwood: to whom he told what he had seen of the girl, and how this was becoming very grim indeed.
“If the real man feels as guilty as I do,” said Eugene, “he is remarkably uncomfortable.”
“Influence of secrecy,” suggested Lightwood.
“I am not at all obliged to it for making me Guy Fawkes in the vault and a Sneak in the area both at once,” said Eugene. “Give me some more of that stuff.”
Lightwood helped him to some more of that stuff, but it had been cooling, and didn’t answer now.
“Pooh,” said Eugene, spitting it out among the ashes. “Tastes like the wash of the river.”
“Are you so familiar with the flavour of the wash of the river?”
“I seem to be tonight. I feel as if I had been half drowned, and swallowing a gallon of it.”
“Influence of locality,” suggested Lightwood.
“You are mighty learned tonight, you and your influences,” returned Eugene. “How long shall we stay here?”
“How long do you think?”
“If I could choose, I should say a minute,” replied Eugene, “for the Jolly Fellowship Porters are not the jolliest dogs I have known. But I suppose we are best here until they turn us out with the other suspicious characters, at midnight.”
Thereupon he stirred the fire, and sat down on one side of it. It struck eleven, and he made believe to compose himself patiently. But gradually he took the fidgets in one leg, and then in the other leg, and then in one arm, and then in the other arm, and then in his chin, and then in his back, and then in his forehead, and then in his hair, and then in his nose; and then he stretched himself recumbent on two chairs, and groaned; and then he started up.
“Invisible insects of diabolical activity swarm in this place. I am tickled and twitched all over. Mentally, I have now committed a burglary under the meanest circumstances, and the myrmidons of justice are at my heels.”
“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, I felt 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 limekiln.”
“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
