Tony shakes his head. “I don't know. Can't imagine. If we get through this business without rousing his suspicions, I shall be better informed no doubt. How can I know, without seeing them, when he don't know himself? He is always spelling out words from them, and chalking them over the table and the shop-wall, and asking what this is, and what that is; but his whole stock, from beginning to end, may easily be the waste paper he bought it as, for anything I can say. It's a monomania with him, to think he is possessed of documents. He has been going to learn to read them this last quarter of a century, I should judge, from what he tells me.”
“How did he first come by that idea, though? that's the question,” Mr. Guppy suggests with one eye shut, after a little forensic meditation. “He may have found papers in something he bought, where papers were not supposed to be; and may have got it into his shrewd head, from the manner and place of their concealment, that they are worth something.”
“Or he may have been taken in, in some pretended bargain. Or he may have been muddled altogether, by long staring at whatever he has got, and by drink, and by hanging about the Lord Chancellor's court and hearing of documents for ever,” returns Mr. Weevle.
Mr. Guppy sitting on the window-sill, nodding his head and balancing all these possibilities in his mind, continues thoughtfully to tap it, and clasp it, and measure it with his hand, until he hastily draws his hand away.
“What, in the Devil's name,” he says, “is this! Look at my fingers!”
A thick, yellow liquor defiles them, which is offensive to the touch and sight, and more offensive to the smell. A stagnant, sickening oil, with some natural repulsion in it that makes them both shudder.
“What have you been doing here? been doing here? What have What have you been pouring out of window?”
“I pouring out of window! Nothing, I swear! Never, since I have been here!” cries the lodger.
And yet look here—and look here! When he brings the candle, here, from the corner of the window-sill, it slowly drips and creeps away down the bricks; here, lies in a little thick nauseous pool.
“This is a horrible house,” says Mr. Guppy, shutting down the window. “Give me some water, or I shall cut my hand off.”
He so washes, and rubs, and scrubs, and smells, and washes, that he has not long restored himself with a glass of brandy, and stood silently before the fire, when Saint Paul's bell strikes twelve, and all those other bells strike twelve from their towers of various heights in the dark air, and in their many tones. When all is quiet again, the lodger says:
“It's the appointed time at last. Shall I go?”
Mr. Guppy nods, and gives him a “lucky touch” on the back; but not with the washed hand, though it is his right hand.
He goes down-stairs; and Mr. Guppy tries to compose himself, before the fire, for waiting a long time. But in no more than a minute or two the stairs creak, and Tony comes swiftly back.
“Have you got them?”
“Got them! No. The old man's not there.”
He has been so horribly frightened in the short interval, that his terror
