The Borough Treasurer | Page 5

once hit on a fact
which those Wilchester folk of thirty years ago had never suspected. It
had been said at the time that the two offenders had lost the building
society's money in gambling and speculation, and there had been
grounds for such a belief. But that was not so. Most of the money had
been skilfully and carefully put where the two conspirators could lay
hands on it as soon as it was wanted, and when the term of
imprisonment was over they had nothing to do but take possession of it
for their own purposes. They had engineered everything very
well--Cotherstone's essentially constructive mind, regarding their
doings from the vantage ground of thirty years' difference,
acknowledged that they had been cute, crafty, and cautious to an
admirable degree of perfection. Quietly and unobtrusively they had
completely disappeared from their own district in the extreme South of
England, when their punishment was over. They had let it get abroad
that they were going to another continent, to retrieve the past and start a
new life; it was even known that they repaired to Liverpool, to take
ship for America. But in Liverpool they had shuffled off everything of
the past--names, relations, antecedents. There was no reason why any
one should watch them out of the country, but they had adopted
precautions against such watching. They separated, disappeared, met
again in the far North, in a sparsely-populated, lonely country of hill
and dale, led there by an advertisement which they had seen in a local
newspaper, met with by sheer chance in a Liverpool hotel. There was
an old-established business to sell as a going concern, in the dale town
of Highmarket: the two ex-convicts bought it. From that time they were
Anthony Mallalieu and Milford Cotherstone, and the past was dead.
During the thirty years in which that past had been dead, Cotherstone
had often heard men remark that this world of ours is a very small one,
and he had secretly laughed at them. To him and to his partner the
world had been wide and big enough. They were now four hundred
miles away from the scene of their crime. There was nothing whatever

to bring Wilchester people into that northern country, nothing to take
Highmarket folk anywhere near Wilchester. Neither he nor Mallalieu
ever went far afield--London they avoided with particular care, lest
they should meet any one there who had known them in the old days.
They had stopped at home, and minded their business, year in and year
out. Naturally, they had prospered. They had speedily become known
as hard-working young men; then as good employers of labour; finally
as men of considerable standing in a town of which there were only
some five thousand inhabitants. They had been invited to join in public
matters--Mallalieu had gone into the Town Council first; Cotherstone
had followed him later. They had been as successful in administering
the affairs of the little town as in conducting their own, and in time
both had attained high honours: Mallalieu was now wearing the
mayoral chain for the second time; Cotherstone, as Borough Treasurer,
had governed the financial matters of Highmarket for several years.
And as he sat there, staring at the red embers of the office fire, he
remembered that there were no two men in the whole town who were
more trusted and respected than he and his partner--his partner in
success ... and in crime.
But that was not all. Both men had married within a few years of their
coming to Highmarket. They had married young women of good
standing in the neighbourhood; it was perhaps well, reflected
Cotherstone, that their wives were dead, and that Mallalieu had never
been blessed with children. But Cotherstone had a daughter, of whom
he was as fond as he was proud; for her he had toiled and contrived,
always intending her to be a rich woman. He had seen to it that she was
well educated; he had even allowed himself to be deprived of her
company for two years while she went to an expensive school, far away;
since she had grown up, he had surrounded her with every comfort.
And now, as Kitely had reminded him, she was engaged to be married
to the most promising young man in Highmarket, Windle Bent, a rich
manufacturer, who had succeeded to and greatly developed a fine
business, who had already made his mark on the Town Council, and
was known to cherish Parliamentary ambitions. Everybody knew that
Bent had a big career before him; he had all the necessary gifts; all the
proper stuff in him for such a career. He would succeed; he would

probably win a title for himself--a baronetcy, perhaps a peerage. This
was just the marriage