“Bandying words! I’m a jolly good
mind—”
“Come up,” said a Voice, and Mr. Marvel
was suddenly whirled about and started marching off
in a curious spasmodic manner. “You’d
better move on,” said the mariner. “Who’s
moving on?” said Mr. Marvel. He was receding
obliquely with a curious hurrying gait, with occasional
violent jerks forward. Some way along the road
he began a muttered monologue, protests and recriminations.
“Silly devil!” said the mariner, legs
wide apart, elbows akimbo, watching the receding figure.
“I’ll show you, you silly ass—hoaxing
me! It’s here—on the paper!”
Mr. Marvel retorted incoherently and, receding, was
hidden by a bend in the road, but the mariner still
stood magnificent in the midst of the way, until the
approach of a butcher’s cart dislodged him.
Then he turned himself towards Port Stowe. “Full
of extra-ordinary asses,” he said softly to
himself. “Just to take me down a bit—that
was his silly game—It’s on the paper!”
And there was another extraordinary thing he was presently
to hear, that had happened quite close to him.
And that was a vision of a “fist full of money”
(no less) travelling without visible agency, along
by the wall at the corner of St. Michael’s Lane.
A brother mariner had seen this wonderful sight that
very morning. He had snatched at the money forthwith
and had been knocked headlong, and when he had got
to his feet the butterfly money had vanished.
Our mariner was in the mood to believe anything, he
declared, but that was a bit too stiff.
Afterwards, however, he began to think things over.
The story of the flying money was true. And all
about that neighbourhood, even from the august London
and Country Banking Company, from the tills of shops
and inns—doors standing that sunny weather
entirely open—money had been quietly and
dexterously making off that day in handfuls and rouleaux,
floating quietly along by walls and shady places,
dodging quickly from the approaching eyes of men.
And it had, though no man had traced it, invariably
ended its mysterious flight in the pocket of that
agitated gentleman in the obsolete silk hat, sitting
outside the little inn on the outskirts of Port Stowe.
It was ten days after—and indeed only when
the Burdock story was already old—that
the mariner collated these facts and began to understand
how near he had been to the wonderful Invisible Man.
THE MAN WHO WAS RUNNING
In the early evening time Dr. Kemp was sitting in
his study in the belvedere on the hill overlooking
Burdock. It was a pleasant little room, with
three windows—north, west, and south—and
bookshelves covered with books and scientific publications,
and a broad writing-table, and, under the north window,
a microscope, glass slips, minute instruments, some
cultures, and scattered bottles of reagents.
Dr. Kemp’s solar lamp was lit, albeit the sky
was still bright with the sunset light, and his blinds
were up because there was no offence of peering outsiders
to require them pulled down. Dr. Kemp was a tall
and slender young man, with flaxen hair and a moustache
almost white, and the work he was upon would earn him,
he hoped, the fellowship of the Royal Society, so
highly did he think of it.
