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"William Hartley an Englishman," was my prompt response. "I must, I regret, insist on your presence at the police-office," he said authoritatively. "Oh!" I cried, annoyed. "I suppose I must go through the same farce as at Zerbst last night." "You were at Zerbst you admit that?" asked the man in uniform. The instant those words left his lips I saw that I was trapped.
Marked and suspicious, he began to fear the solitude of the country; he left the horse-fair for the city, and sought in the budging-kens of Edinburgh the secrecy impossible on the hill-side. A clumsy experiment in shop-lifting doubled his danger, and more than once he saw the inside of the police-office.
On the following morning, which was Saturday, Phineas was early at the police-office at Westminster looking after the interests of his landlord; but there had been a considerable number of men taken up during the row, and our friend could hardly procure that attention for Mr. Bunce's case to which he thought the decency of his client and his own position as a member of Parliament were entitled.
The new-comer, accompanied by two housekeepers, first repairs to the Police-office of the arrondissement, or district, in which he has taken up his residence, where he delivers his travelling passport; in lieu of which he receives a sort of certificate, and then he shews himself at the Prefecture de Police, or General Police-office, at present established in the Cite.
Our former experience of Danville suggested to me the propriety of making the experiment, and my old police-office practice came in useful in carrying it out. I saw the carriage standing at the door, and waited till the old lady came down. I walked your sister away as she got in, and walked her back again past the window as the carriage drove off.
I answered in astonishment; "it has been viséed at every police-office betwixt and London; and especially at those of Austria, under whose suzerainty the territory of Ferrara is, and no one may prevent me entering the Papal States." The man coolly replied, "You cannot go an inch farther with us;" and proceeded to take down my luggage, and deposit it on the bank.
He lodged in the house of one of my warders, at the very time when he first wrote to you; and then he was eating spring-lamb at eighteen-pence a pound, and early asparagus at I don't know how much a bundle! On that very same day, and in that very same hour, my injured gentleman wrote a solemn address to me, demanding to know what compensation I proposed to make him for his having passed the night in a 'loathsome dungeon. And next morning an Irish gentleman, a member of the same fraternity, who had read the case, and was very well persuaded I should be chary of going to that Police-Office again, positively refused to leave my door for less than a sovereign, and, resolved to besiege me into compliance, literally 'sat down' before it for ten mortal hours.
Of the squares, the finest is the Largo do Rocio; the largest, the Largo St. Anna. In the first, which is always kept tolerably clean, stand the Opera-house, the Government-house, the Police-office, etc. This, too, is the starting-place for most of the omnibuses, which traverse the town in all directions. The last-named square is the dirtiest in the whole town.
The police-office is a small dark room, in the basement story of the Town Hall of Southport; and over the mantel-piece, hanging one upon another, there are innumerable advertisements of robberies in houses, and on the highway, murders, too, and garrotings; and offences of all sorts, not only in this district, but wide away, and forwarded from other police-stations.
He was never given to much talking, and the little accident which had just occurred to him did not tend to make words easy to him. But he pressed our hero's hand, and Lady Laura said that of course Phineas would come to them on the morrow. Phineas remarked that his first business must be to go to the police-office, but he promised that he would come down to Grosvenor Place immediately afterwards.
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