“You had better be at hand, sir, to identify the notes,” said the gentleman from Bow Street, whose appearance was clerical.
Meadows had important business five miles off; he postponed it. He wrote a line in pencil, put a boy upon his black mare, and hurried him off to the rendezvous, while he stayed and entered with strange alacrity into this affair. “Stay,” cried he, “if he is an old hand he will twig the officer.”
“Oh, I'm dark, sir,” was the answer; “he won't know me till I put the darbies on him.”
The two men then strolled as far as the village stocks, keeping an eye ever on the farm-house.
Thus a network of adverse events was closing round George Fielding this day.
He was all unconscious of them; he was in good spirits. Robinson had showed him how to relieve the temporary embarrassment that had lately depressed him.
“Draw a bill on your brother,” said Robinson, “and let him accept it. The Farnborough Bank will give you notes for it. These country banks like any paper better than their own. I dare say they are right.”
George had done this, and expected William every minute with this and other moneys. And then Susanna Merton was to dine at “The Grove” to-day, and this, though not uncommon, was always a great event with poor George.
Dilly would not come to be killed just when he was wanted. In other words, Robinson, who had no idea how he was keeping people waiting, fished tranquilly till near dinner-time, neither taking nor being taken.
This detained Meadows in the neighborhood of the farm, and was the cause of his rencontre with a very singular personage, whose visit he knew at sight must be to him.
As he hovered about among George Fielding's ricks, the figure of an old man slightly bowed but full of vigor stood before him. He had a long gray beard with a slight division in the center, hair abundant but almost white, and a dark, swarthy complexion that did not belong to England; his thick eyebrows also were darker than his hair, and under them was an eye like a royal jewel; his voice had the Oriental richness and modulation--this old man was Isaac Levi; an Oriental Jew who had passed half his life under the sun's eye, and now, though the town of Farnborough had long been too accustomed to him to wonder at him, he dazzled any thoughtful stranger; so exotic and apart was he--so romantic a grain in a heap of vulgarity--he was as though a striped jasper had crept in among the paving-stones of their marketplace, or a cactus grandiflora shone among the nettles of a Berkshire meadow.