The man took it without the least apparent curiosity and went away. Then Pelham turned to the police constable.
“I am at your service,” he said. “I presume you will not think it necessary to handcuff me?”
“I think you are to be trusted, sir,” said the man.
Pelham nodded, and the ghost of a smile flitted across his lips. A moment later he was driving to Haversham in the company of the two police constables. When they reached the station they took tickets in a third-class compartment; one of them tipped the guard to allow them to have it to themselves.
Dick sat in a corner and kept looking out at the landscape. Surely this was a dream, and he would wake presently to find it was so. His thoughts were busy, but not greatly with himself. He felt a certain sense of satisfaction. His old suspicions were right—there was something unnatural about the death of the child. It was strange why he was arrested. Of course, he was the wrong man—Tarbot was the guilty person. Why had they arrested him? This journey was unpleasant, but to-morrow, at the farthest, before the magistrate, he, Dick Pelham, would be abundantly cleared. Tarbot, beyond doubt, was the guilty person.
On the night that Clara Tarbot faced the awful fact that she was not long for this world, that consumption had claimed her for its prey, and when she had also discovered that her great secret was in jeopardy, and that at any moment her husband’s plans would be brought to utter ruin, Mrs. Ives was also restless and uneasy. Mrs. Ives did not like sleeping in Luke Tarbot’s house.
“It don’t suit me,” said the little woman to herself, “a bed like this. I want my feather bed. I don’t like these sort of springs under me—shaky and unnatural, and mighty like earthquakes they seems to me. And I don’t like carpets all over the floor, unwholesome they is, they don’t let enough air in, and you can’t clean ’em often enough, and I hates heavy curtains to the winders.
“Finery don’t suit me, nor luxuries—I weren’t born to ’em, and the worst of it is that Clary, my own darter, don’t suit me neither. No, she nor her ’ouse ain’t my sort. I hope to goodness I’ll soon be able to get out of this. I’ll get back to Cornwall as fast as ever I can go. If I don’t go away she’ll be after wringing a promise out of me. Well, I just won’t make it—I’d rather a deal lose the money. What’s money, after all, if it only brings you things like this? My word! my old bones will be shook into a jelly if I lie much longer on this bed. I can’t move without the thing jumping under me. I’ll be out of this house at dawn.”