About this time residents in the neighborhood of The Warren and the Maypole Inn began to tell tales of a mysterious man who roamed about the country-side.

He was seen often and by many persons, always at night, skulking in the shadow or riding furiously on a horse. He was fierce and haggard and discourteous to travelers, wore a slouch hat which he never took off, and generally kept the lower part of his face muffled in a handkerchief. He always went alone. Some said he slept in church-yards, others that he never slept at all, and still others that he was a wicked man who had sold his soul to the Evil One.

One night he rested at the Maypole Inn, and a little while after he had gone, Varden the locksmith, Dolly\'s father, as he drove home, found Edward Chester lying in the road, having been wounded and robbed of his money. Barnaby Rudge had seen the attack and was bending over him. He had been too frightened to give aid, but from his description Varden knew the robber was the stranger who had stopped at the inn.

The honest locksmith took Edward into his chaise, drove him to Barnaby\'s house, which was[Pg 84] near by, and left him in care of Mrs. Rudge, where a doctor soon dressed the wound, which was not serious.

Next day Mr. Varden came to see how the wounded man was. As he sat talking with Mrs. Rudge a tapping came at the window. She went to the door. The locksmith heard her cry out, and sprang forward to find standing there, to his astonishment, the robber of the night before. He grasped at him, but the woman threw herself before him, clasped his arm and besought him, for her life\'s sake, not to pursue the man.

The locksmith had known Barnaby\'s mother all his life, but so strange was her action now (especially since she refused to answer any question, begging him to ask her nothing) that he almost wondered if she herself could be in league with a crime-doer. Her apparent agony touched him, however, and, raising no alarm, he went home in great puzzle of mind.

He would have been far more disturbed if he had known the whole truth. For the mysterious stranger he had seen, who by night had haunted the neighborhood, was none other than Mrs. Rudge\'s husband, Barnaby\'s father, the steward who everybody believed had been murdered with his master, and whose body had been found in the pond.

Rudge himself had committed that wicked deed. He had killed both master and gardener, and to[Pg 85] cover the crime had put his own clothes, his watch and ring on the latter\'s body and sunk it in the pond. When, on the night of the murder, he told his wife what he had done, she had shrunk fearfully from him, declaring that, although being his wife she would not give him up to justice, yet she would never own him or shelter him. He had fled then with the money he had stolen, and that night, while she lay sick with horror, Barnaby had been born with his poor crazed brain, the look of terror in his baby face and the birth-mark of blood on his wrist.

For many years the guilty wretch had wandered the earth, but he could not escape the knowledge of his deed. And at last his conscience had driven him back to the scene of his crime, friendless, penniless, fearful of the sunlight, slinking by night like a ghost about the house in which he had murdered his master, and hounding his miserable wife for money with which to buy food and drink. The poor woman had kept her terrible secret, giving him every coin she could save, striving so that Barnaby, unhappily born as he was, should never know the shame of having his father suffer death on the gallows. When Rudge had come to her house that day he had thought her alone, and she had saved him from capture only by begging the locksmith to stay his hand.

After his hairbreadth escape from Varden, Rudge hid himself in a narrow street. When the[Pg 86] next dawn came, as he searched for some dark den in which he might lie sheltered till another night, he saw Simon Tappertit issuing with his noisy apprentice crew from the cellar in which they held their meetings. He entered its door, made friends with the villainous blind man who kept it and there established his headquarters.

Once more, one night after the wounded Edward had been taken to his own home, Rudge h............