CONCLUSION.
THE whole town is alarmed. You may be sure the vicar’s house is in a pretty flutter at the news. Miss Laura, always something of an idol, is now, and for days after, worshipped with a frantic adoration.
Dr. Lincote and Mr. Tarlcot are at the “George and Dragon,” with Mr. Turnbull; and these three wise men of Golden Friars are putting their heads together over this ghastly break-down of their pattern philanthropist.
“I never was so deceived in man!” said the doctor. “‘Pon my soul, it’s a nice knock to our dispensary! And Sir John says he found him with his teeth in one tumbler, and his eye in another, and a hole in its place you could put a turnip in, and his face like a nutcracker, and blazing like a furnace, and the old villain himself as drunk as a fiddler! He must be a heartless scoundrel, or he could not have played such a trick on the poor.”
“I never had occasion to advise anyone about him. It was only through the vicar and you, that I knew anything of him,” said Mr. Tarlcot. “He did not take me in, I promise you. I hope he has not hit you very hard, Mr. Turnbull — a stiff bill, I’m afraid?”
Mr. Turnbull scratched his head, and looked pompous, and perhaps a little sheepish.
“Might a’ bin worse, sir. There’s a big boxful o’ things upstairs; but I mun lose five pounds or more. Who’d a’ took him for such a ramscallion?”
“Did he get drunk here?” asked the doctor. “I think you should have put us a bit on our guard.”
“I never sid him nappy,” said Mr. Turnbull. “But he got through a deal o’ brandy, considering what an old man he was. I could a’ wished it less, sir,” said the innkeeper, and considering that it was not paid for, I can well believe him.
“But didn’t he correspond with half the swells in England?” inquired the attorney.
“Well, I was thinking o’ that. I’m not sa sure. He sent letters to the highest in the land, no doubt; no end o’ them. But I can’t mind that he got many letters in answer. I don’t think he did. Why, I could write to the Archbishop o’ Canterbury every week — what for no? — and to the Dook o’ Wellington, or the Lord Mayor o’ Lunnon, though I never sid one o’ the lot, and that, I do consayt, was that old boy’s case.”
“Not a bad notion,” said the attorney, with an attorney’s amused appreciation.
In the meantime, a full score of tall fellows from the town and about it, with hasty fury threw down sledge, or spade, or cricket-bat, and set off to scour the fells in search of the old miscreant.
Evening came. The elder townsmen were gathered on the margin of the water, and many glasses were directed to the opposite side of the lake, the bleak mountain sides, the jagged ravines, and angular summits. But a fog spread gradually down the sides of the mountains, and by-and-by shrouded the scene of the pursuit in white folds of vapour from their view.
It was late that night in the thick fog, which, creeping across the lake, had by this time enveloped the town, when, in broken detachments, by twos and threes, the police, with the other pursuers, dropped in, unsuccessful, and quite “done up.”
It was prodigious that the old villain should have foiled the police and a body of the most experienced mountaineers in Golden Friars!
The mysterious veil of fog was still hanging over the landscape next morning, when people peeped out of their bedroom windows in Golden Friars, in vain search for the outline of the fells. Hidden behind that curtain was the scene of Mr. Burton’s bivouac. One comfort was, that the most which impeded search, also very nearly precluded escape.
The fells aie so precipitous at the further side that, the fog taken into account, it was next to impossible he could, walled in by those awful stone frontages, have found a passage among them to the level beneath.
The pursuers this morning divided their force into two parties; one beginning their march across the fells from the upper end of the lake, the other from the end nearest Golden Friars; and so soon as the mist began to clear, they commenced their movement from opposite ends of the range, in a long chain of scouts, each maintaining its respective communications by shouting and signalling from point to point.
They had taken their rations with them, and returned again to Golden Friars at nightfall, after a fatiguing and fruitless search.
If they had known the truth it would have saved them many renewed searches and many scourings of those steep and dangerous mountains.
Another week revealed it, and the swollen body of the old villain, drowned in the lake on the night of his attempt on the life of Miss Mildmay, in the endeavour, under cover of the mountain fog, to accomplish his escape, came to the surface, and was floated by the breeze to the shore, not far from Golden Friars.
Need I say what further happened; or how happy Laura and Charles Shirley are in the union that followed?
THE END