Dead Mens Money | Page 7

me, we should be able to
make considerable additions to our stock, and the wedding-day would
come nearer.
But from these anticipations I presently began to think about the
undertaking on which I was now fairly engaged. When I came to
consider it, it seemed a queer affair. As I understood it, it amounted to
this:--Here was Mr. Gilverthwaite, a man that was a stranger in
Berwick, and who appeared to have plenty of money and no business,
suddenly getting a letter which asked him to meet a man, near midnight,
and in about as lonely a spot as you could select out of the whole
district. Why at such a place, and at such an hour? And why was this
meeting of so much importance that Mr. Gilverthwaite, being unable to
keep the appointment himself, must pay as much as ten pounds to
another person to keep it for him? What I had said to Maisie about Mr.
Gilverthwaite having so much money that ten pounds was no more to
him than ten pence to me was, of course, all nonsense, said just to
quieten her fears and suspicions--I knew well enough, having seen a bit
of the world in a solicitor's office for the past six years, that even
millionaires don't throw their money about as if pounds were empty
peascods. No! Mr. Gilverthwaite was giving me that money because he
thought that I, as a lawyer's clerk, would see the thing in its right light
as a secret and an important business, and hold my tongue about it. And
see it as a secret business I did--for what else could it be that would
make two men meet near an old ruin at midnight, when in a town
where, at any rate, one of them was a stranger, and the other probably

just as much so, they could have met by broad day at a more
convenient trysting-place without anybody having the least concern in
their doings? There was strange and subtle mystery in all this, and the
thinking and pondering it over led me before long to wondering about
its first natural consequence--who and what was the man I was now on
my way to meet, and where on earth could he be coming from to keep a
tryst at a place like that, and at that hour?
However, before I had covered three parts of that outward journey, I
was to meet another man who, all unknown to me, was to come into
this truly extraordinary series of events in which I, with no will of my
own, was just beginning--all unawares--to be mixed up. Taking it
roughly, and as the crow flies, it is a distance of some nine or ten miles
from Berwick town to Twizel Bridge on the Till, whereat I was to turn
off from the main road and take another, a by-lane, that would lead me
down by the old ruin, close by which Till and Tweed meet. Hot as the
night was, and unpleasant for riding, I had plenty and to spare of time
in hand, and when I came to the cross-ways between Norham and
Grindon, I got off my machine and sat down on the bank at the
roadside to rest a bit before going further. It was a quiet and a very
lonely spot that; for three miles or more I had not met a soul along the
road, and there being next to nothing in the way of village or farmstead
between me and Cornhill, I did not expect to meet one in the next
stages of my journey. But as I sat there on the bank, under a thick
hedge, my bicycle lying at my side, I heard steps coming along the road
in the gloom--swift, sure steps, as of a man who walks fast, and puts his
feet firmly down as with determination to get somewhere as soon as he
may. And hearing that--and to this day I have often wondered what
made me do it--I off with my cap, and laid it over the bicycle-lamp, and
myself sat as still as any of the wee creatures that were doubtless lying
behind me in the hedge.
The steps came from the direction in which I was bound. There was a
bit of a dip in the road just there: they came steadily, strongly, up it.
And presently--for this was the height of June, when the nights are
never really dark--the figure of a man came over the ridge of the dip,
and showed itself plain against a piece of grey sky that was framed by

the fingers of the pines and firs on either side of the way. A
strongly-built figure it was, and, as I said before, the man put his feet,
evidently well