Section 6

I missed the train.

Partly that was because the curate’s clock was slow, and partly it was due to the commercial obstinacy of the shoemaker, who would try on another pair after I had declared my time was up.  I bought the final pair however, gave him a wrong address for the return of the old ones, and only ceased to feel like the Nietzschean Over-man, when I saw the train running out of the station.

Even then I did not lose my head.  It occurred to me almost at once that, in the event of a prompt pursuit, there would be a great advantage in not taking a train from Clayton; that, indeed, to have done so would have been an error from which only luck had saved me.  As it was, I had already been very indiscreet in my inquiries about Shaphambury; for once on the scent the clerk could not fail to remember me.  Now the chances were against his coming into the case.  I did not go into the station therefore at all, I made no demonstration of having missed the train, but walked quietly past, down the road, crossed the iron footbridge, and took the way back circuitously by White’s brickfields and the allotments to the way over Clayton Crest to Two-Mile Stone, where I calculated I should have an ample margin for the 6.13 train.

I was not very greatly excited or alarmed then.  Suppose, I reasoned, that by some accident the curate goes to that drawer at once:  will he be certain to miss four out of ten or eleven sovereigns?  If he does, will he at once think I have taken them?  If he does, will he act at once or wait for my return?  If he acts at once, will he talk to my mother or call in the police?  Then there are a dozen roads and even railways out of the Clayton region, how is he to know which I have taken?  Suppose he goes straight at once to the right station, they will not remember my departure for the simple reason that I didn’t depart.  But they may remember about Shaphambury?  It was unlikely.

I resolved not to go directly to Shaphambury from Birmingham, but to go thence to Monkshampton, thence to Wyvern, and then come down on Shaphambury from the north.  That might involve a night at some intermediate stopping-place but it would effectually conceal me from any but the most persistent pursuit.  And this was not a case of murder yet, but only the theft of four sovereigns.

I had argued away all anxiety before I reached Clayton Crest.

At the Crest I looked back.  What a world it was!  And suddenly it came to me that I was looking at this world for the last time.  If I overtook the fugitives and succeeded, I should die with them—­or hang.  I stopped and looked back more attentively at that wide ugly valley.