just that time—how long it is or how short no man who has felt it can tell—for just that time it takes the body to recover itself from a halt of the blood, the old man sat immovable, his eyes unnaturally bright and unwinking like a bird's.
Then motion returned to him, and it was a motion as rapid as a lizard's.
His greasy old dressing-gown was off. The ample, the substantial, the English Green Overcoat was on that miserable, shrivelled form of the old man with the crusading name. His sticks of arms were struggling wildly into the massive sleeves, when that thundering at the door came again, and with it a loud, peremptory order in a voice which he knew.
Mr. Montague coaxed on, with quite other gestures, over the overcoat and like a skin, that vast, greasy dressing-gown wherein for so many years he had shuffled across the lonely floors of his four-room house. He was in the passage, and was trying to shout, forcing his voice huskily—
"You 'll break the door! You 'll break the door!"
He opened it. Two men were outside whom he knew. Each was burly and strong. Each carried upon a well-fed body a large, sufficient, beefy face. Each had the bearing of a trained, drilled man. The one who stood somewhat forward as the superior had something approaching to kindness in his intelligent eyes, and both had the eyes of brave men—though not of loyal ones.
"Well, Sammy?" said the one in command.
"Oh, Mr. Ferguson! Mr. Ferguson!" came in Mr. Montague's half-voice.
"Well, Sammy," said Mr. Ferguson again, "you nearly lost some of your paint that time! You weren't asleep, Sam," he said, winking; "you 's never are! I believe you sleep dinner-time, like the owls."
The inferior of the two visitors grinned as in duty bound at the excellent joke. Mr. Montague smiled with the smile of an aged idol.
"Mr. Ferguson! Mr. Ferguson!" he rasped in that half-voice of his, "yer will have yer fun!"
He led the two big men in. It was curious to note how these Englishmen of the Midlands showed a sort of deference in their gesture, an old inherited thing, as they entered another man's house. The lesser of them made to wipe his boots, but there was no mat. Mr. Montague sniffed and smiled or sneered, or sneered and smiled.
"Mister," he said to the second of the two, "I don't know yer name?"
He did not say this in a very pleasant way.
"Never mind, Samuel," said Mr. Ferguson heartily, "he 's only just joined the force. You 'll know him soon enough." And he laughed out loud in a manner very different from Mr. Montague's.
"And now then, Samuel," he added, "we haven't much time to lose."
He pulled himself up (he had been a soldier) and he led the way mechanically to the second little ground-floor room at the back, which he had visited often and often before in his capacity of that member of the Ormeston police who best knew and could best deal with receivers. Mr. Ferguson was, you see, the providence of these financiers, managing them, saving them—punishing them reluctantly when it was absolutely necessary, but generally keeping them (as a matter of policy) upon a string, and through them controlling his knowledge of all the avenues by which the more adventurous of the poor played Tom Tiddler's ground upon the frills of the propertied classes.
Mr. Montague shuffled as he had shuffled so often before, he shuffled cautiously after the burly man. As he shuffled he protested for the mere sake of ritual, and chuckled the while a little to himself as though he were thinking aloud—
"Me! Me of all men! S'help!"
Mr. Ferguson went in. There was not much in the place. Five or six articles of furniture recently sold at an auction, which the policeman recognised as being legally acquired; an exceedingly dirty oil-picture in an even dirtier frame, which his innocent eyes thought might be an old master. He kicked it with his foot.
"What 's that?" he said.
Mr. Montague was alarmed.
"Don't yer kick that with your foot now; come, don't yer!" he whispered through his defective throat imploringly. "Don't yer there! It 's right as Rechts. May I die! 'Tis surely."
He looked up anxiously, and put a protecting hand upon it.
The policeman moved it roughly forward and saw a label upon the back. He remembered the sale and let it go again.
"Yes," he said, "that 's all right, Samuel."