BOOK THE FOURTH: A TURNING
Chapter 1: Setting Traps (continued)
Riderhood stopped. 'If you don't get disapinted agin, T'otherest,
maybe you'll put up at the Lock-house when you come back?'
'I will.'
Riderhood nodded, and the figure of the bargeman went its way
along the soft turf by the side of the towing-path, keeping near the
hedge and moving quickly. They had turned a point from which a
long stretch of river was visible. A stranger to the scene might
have been certain that here and there along the line of hedge a
figure stood, watching the bargeman, and waiting for him to come
up. So he himself had often believed at first, until his eyes became
used to the posts, bearing the dagger that slew Wat Tyler, in the
City of London shield.
Within Mr Riderhood's knowledge all daggers were as one. Even
to Bradley Headstone, who could have told to the letter without
book all about Wat Tyler, Lord Mayor Walworth, and the King,
that it is dutiful for youth to know, there was but one subject living
in the world for every sharp destructive instrument that summer
evening. So, Riderhood looking after him as he went, and he with
his furtive hand laid upon the dagger as he passed it, and his eyes
upon the boat, were much upon a par.
The boat went on, under the arching trees, and over their tranquil
shadows in the water. The bargeman skulking on the opposite
bank of the stream, went on after it. Sparkles of light showed
Riderhood when and where the rower dipped his blades, until,
even as he stood idly watching, the sun went down and the
landscape was dyed red. And then the red had the appearance of
fading out of it and mounting up to Heaven, as we say that blood,
guiltily shed, does.
Turning back towards his Lock (he had not gone out of view of it),
the Rogue pondered as deeply as it was within the contracted
power of such a fellow to do. 'Why did he copy my clothes? He
could have looked like what he wanted to look like, without that.'
This was the subject-matter in his thoughts; in which, too, there
came lumbering up, by times, like any half floating and half
sinking rubbish in the river, the question, Was it done by accident?
The setting of a trap for finding out whether it was accidentally
done, soon superseded, as a practical piece of cunning, the
abstruser inquiry why otherwise it was done. And he devised a
means.
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