What Will He Do with It — Volume 08 eBook

“Be silent and listen.  I retain these papers-first, because Jasper Losely must not know that they ever passed to my hands; secondly, because you must inflict no injury on Losely himself.  Betray me to him, or try to render himself up to the law, and the documents will be used against you ruthlessly.  Obey, and you have nothing to fear, and nothing to pay.  When Jasper Losely calls on you tomorrow, ask him to show you the letters.  He cannot; he will make excuses.  Decline peremptorily, but not insultingly (his temper is fierce), to pay him farther.  He will perhaps charge you with having hired some one to purloin his pocket-book; let him think it.  Stop—­your window here opens on the ground—­a garden without:  —­Ah! have three of the police in that garden, in sight of the window.  Point to them if he threaten you; summon them to your aid, or pass out to them, if he actually attempt violence.  But when he has left the house, you must urge no charge against him; he must be let off unscathed.  You can be at no loss for excuse in this mercy; a friend of former times—­ needy, unfortunate, whom habits of drink maddened for the moment—­ necessary to eject him—­inhuman to prosecute—­any story you please.  The next day you can, if you choose, leave London for a short time; I advise it.  But his teeth will be drawn; he will most probably never trouble you again.  I know his character.  There, I have done; open the door, sir.”

CHAPTER IX.

     The wreck and the life-Boat in A fog.

The next day, a little after noon, Jasper Losely, coming back from Alhambra Villa—­furious, desperate, knowing not where to turn for bread, or on whom to pour his rage—­beheld suddenly, in a quiet, half-built street, which led from the suburb to the New Road, Arabella Crane standing right in his path.  She had emerged from one of the many straight intersecting roads which characterise that crude nebula of a future city; and the woman and the man met thus face to face; not another passer-by visible in the thoroughfare;—­at a distance the dozing hack cab-stand; round and about them carcases of brick and mortar—­some with gaunt scaffolding fixed into their ribs, and all looking yet more weird in their raw struggle into shape through the living haze of a yellow fog.

Losely, seeing Arabella thus planted in his way, recoiled; and the superstition in which he had long associated her image with baffled schemes and perilous hours sent the wrathful blood back through his veins so quickly that be heard his heart beat!

Mrs. Crane.—­“So!  You see we cannot help meeting, Jasper dear, do what you will to shun me.”

Losely.”  I—­I—­you always startle me so!—­you are in town, then?—­to stay?—­your old quarters?”

Mrs. Crane.—­“Why ask?  You cannot wish to know where I am—­you would not call.  But how fares it?—­what do you do?—­how do you live?  You look ill—­Poor Jasper.”