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+Project Gutenberg’s Young Mr. Barter’s Repentance, by David Christie Murray
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Young Mr. Barter’s Repentance
+       From “Schwartz” by David Christie Murray
+
+Author: David Christie Murray
+
+Release Date: August 8, 2007 [EBook #22272]
+Last Updated: September 16, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOUNG MR. BARTER’S REPENTANCE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+YOUNG MR. BARTER’S REPENTANCE
+
+By David Christie Murray
+
+Author Of ‘Aunt Rachel,’ ‘The Weaker Vessel,’ Etc.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Mr Bommaney was a British merchant of the highest rectitude and the most
+spotless reputation. He traded still under the name of Bommaney, Waite,
+and Co., though Waite had been long since dead, and the Company had
+gone out of existence in his father’s time. The old offices, cramped and
+inconvenient, in which the firm had begun life eighty years before,
+were still good enough for Mr. Bommaney, and they had an air of solid
+respectability which newer and flashier places lacked. The building
+of which they formed a part stood in Coalporter’s Alley, opposite
+the Church of St. Mildred, and the hum of the City’s traffic scarcely
+sounded in that retired and quiet locality.
+
+Mr. Bommaney himself was a man of sixty, hale and hearty, with a rosy
+face and white whiskers. He was a broad-shouldered man, inclining to be
+portly, and he was currently accepted as a man of an indomitable
+will. There was no particular reason for the popular belief in his
+determination apart from the fact that it was a favourite boast of his
+that nothing ever got him down. On all occasions and in all companies he
+was wont to declare that no conceivable misfortune could really break
+a man of spirit. He confessed to a pitying sympathy for mealy-willed
+people (and everybody knew that Bommaney, in spite of his own strength
+of mind, was one of the kindliest creatures in the world); but, whenever
+he met a man in trouble, he would clip him by the shoulder, and would
+say, in his own hearty fashion, ‘You must look the thing in the face, my
+boy. Look it in the face. I’d never let anything break _me_ down.’
+
+Since his reputation for fortitude was as solid and as old-fashioned
+amongst the people who knew him as his business character itself, it
+would have come as something of a shock upon any of his friends if he
+could but have been seen by them, or any credible man amongst them, on a
+certain afternoon in the April of 1880. He had locked himself in his own
+room, and, sitting there in a big chair before a businesslike desk, with
+a great number of docketed papers in pigeon-holes, and a disordered mass
+of papers strewn before him, the determined Mr. Bommaney, the decided
+Mr. Bommaney, the Mr. Bommaney whom no misfortune could subdue, was
+crying, very feebly and quietly, and was mopping his rosy cheeks, and
+blowing his nose in an utter and unrestraining abandonment to trouble.
+
+There was another fact which would have come upon his friends with an
+equal shock of surprise if they could but have had it brought home to
+them. The man who sat unaffectedly crying in the big chair in helpless
+contemplation of the scattered papers was a hopeless bankrupt, and had
+seen himself sliding towards bankruptcy for years. When men who knew him
+wanted business advice, they went to him by preference, and nobody came
+away empty. He knew the City and its intricacies like a book. He knew
+who was safe and who was shaky, as if by a kind of instinct, and he knew
+where and when to invest, and where and when not to invest, as few men
+did. ‘You can’t get at me,’ he would say; for, old-fashioned as he was,
+he used a little of the new-fashioned slang to give spice and vigour to
+his conversation. ‘There isn’t a move on the board that I don’t know.’
+He advised his friends excellently, and there were perhaps half a score
+of fairly well-to-do speculative people who had to thank him, and him
+alone, for the comfort they lived in and the consideration they enjoyed.
+He had been wise for others all his life, and in his own interests he
+had always acted like a greenhorn. He talked loudly, he spent freely,
+he paid his way, he expressed the soundest business maxims, and was as
+shrewd in detail as he was wise in generalities, and these things made a
+natural reputation for him: whilst he traded for years at the expense of
+his capital, and went steadily and surely towards the bottomless gulf of
+insolvency. Now he was on the very verge of it, and to-morrow he would
+be in it. It lent a feeble sting to his sufferings to know how surprised
+people would be, and how completely men would find him out.
+
+He had not very profoundly involved other people in his own ruin, but he
+had gone a little farther than a man altogether brave, and honourable,
+and clearsighted would have ventured, and he knew that some would suffer
+with him. He might have made arrangements to go a little farther still
+if he had been courageous, clear-sighted, and dishonest, and might have
+held his head up for another matter too, perhaps. But he had lacked the
+nerve for that, and had never consciously been a rogue. He felt even
+now a pride of honesty. He had been unfortunate, and his creditors would
+have everything--everything.
+
+He thanked God that Phil’s mother had tied her money on her only son,
+and that the boy at least had enough to begin the world with. How should
+he face Phil when he came home again? How should he send the news to
+him? The lad was away enjoying himself, travelling all round the world
+with a wandering Baronet, who owned a yacht and had an unappeasable
+taste for the destruction of big game. He would have to surrender his
+fashionable and titled acquaintance now, poor fellow, and begin the
+world with a disgraced and broken frame to be a drag and hindrance
+to him. The more Mr. Bommaney thought of these things, the more
+unrestrainedly he cried; and the more he cried, the less he felt able or
+inclined to control his tears.
+
+He wept almost silently, only an occasional sniff betraying his emotion
+to his ear. He had always held his head so high, and had been so
+believed in. It was very bitter.
+
+Whilst he was in the midst of this childish abandonment to his grief a
+set of knuckles softly and hesitatingly tapped the door from without,
+and directly afterwards a hand made a tentative respectful sort of
+attempt upon the handle.
+
+‘Who’s there?’ cried Mr. Bommaney, steadying his voice as best he could.
+
+‘A gentleman to see you, sir,’ answered a smooth voice outside.
+
+Mr. Bommaney pushed back his chair, rose to his feet, and retiring to a
+smaller room consulted a little square looking-glass which hung upon
+the wall above his washing-stand. His blue eyes were very tearful and a
+little swollen, his cheeks and nose looked as if they had been scalded.
+
+‘Wait a moment,’ he said aloud, and his voice betrayed him by a break.
+He blushed and trembled, thinking that Mr. Hornett, his confidential
+clerk, would know how he was breaking down, and would speak of his
+want of courage and self-command hereafter. The reflection nerved
+him somewhat, and he sluiced his face with water, making a little
+unnecessary noise of splashing to tell the listener how he was engaged.
+He polished his face with the towel, and, consulting the mirror again,
+thought he looked a little better.
+
+Then he re-entered his business room, and turning the key in the lock
+opened the door slightly, a mere inch or two.
+
+‘Who is it?’
+
+‘A Mr. Brown, sir,’ said the smooth voice outside. The clerk insinuated
+a card through the space between the door and door-jamb, and Mr.
+Bommaney took it from his fingers without revealing himself. He had
+some difficulty in making out its inscription, for his eyes were newly
+tearful, and, whilst he peered at it, a reflex of his late emotions
+brought a sniffling sob again. He was freshly ashamed at this, and said
+hastily,
+
+‘Five minutes’ time. I will ring when I am ready. Ask the gentleman to
+wait.’
+
+Mr. James Hornett softly closed the door, and stood on the landing with
+long lean fingers scraping at his lantern jaws. He was a little man,
+short of stature, and sparely built. His skin was vealy in complexion,
+and he had wiry hair of a russet-red. Even when he was clean shaven his
+fingers rasped upon his hollow cheeks with a faint sound. His nose and
+chin were long and pointed, and his manner was meek and self-effacing
+even when he was alone. There was a tinge of wonder in his face, at war
+with an habitual smile, in which his eyes had no part.
+
+‘Something wrong?’ he said, under his breath. He went creeping softly
+down the stairs. ‘Something wrong? Mr. Bommaney in tears? Mr. Bommaney!’
+
+Could anything have happened to Mr. Phil? That was the only thing Mr.
+Hornett could think of as being likely to affect his employer in that
+way.
+
+Now Mr. Hornett had been in his present employ for thirty years, man
+and boy, and he was human. Therefore, when at the expiration of a
+little more than five minutes’ time Mr. Bommaney’s bell rang, he himself
+ushered the visitor upstairs, and in place of retiring to his own pew
+below stairs, lingered in a desert little apartment rarely used, and
+then stole out upon the landing and listened. He was the more prompted
+to this because the visitor, who had a bucolic hearty aspect, and was
+very talkative, had told him downstairs that Mr. Bommaney and himself
+were old friends and schoolfellows, and had been in each other’s
+confidence for years.
+
+‘I am afraid, sir,’ Mr. Hornett had said, when the visitor first
+presented himself, ‘that Mr. Bommaney may not be able to see you at
+present. He gave orders not to be disturbed.’
+
+‘Not see me?’ said the visitor with a laugh. ‘I’ll engage he will.’
+And then followed the statement about his old acquaintanceship with Mr.
+Hornett’s employer.
+
+If there were anything to be told at all, it seemed not unlikely that
+this visitor might be the recipient of the intelligence, and Mr. Hornett
+lingered to find if haply he might overhear. He heard nothing that
+enlightened him as to the reasons for his employer’s disturbance, but
+heard most that passed between the two.
+
+Bommaney had succeeded in composing himself and in washing away the
+traces of his tears. Then he had taken a stiffish dose of brandy and
+water, and was something like his own man again. He received his
+visitor cordially, and in his anxiety not to seem low-spirited was a
+little more boisterous than common.
+
+‘I’m busy, you see,’ he said, waving a hand at the papers scattered
+on the desk, and keeping up the farce of prosperous merchandise to the
+last, ‘but I can spare _you_ a minute or two, old man. What brings you
+up to town?’
+
+‘I’ve come here to settle,’ said the visitor. He was a florid man with
+crisp black hair with a hint of gray in it, and he was a countryman from
+head to heel. He seemed a little disposed to flaunt his bucolics upon
+the town, his hat, his necktie, his boots and gaiters, were of so
+countrified a fashion, and yet he looked somehow more of a gentleman
+than Bommaney.
+
+‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve come to settle.’ He rubbed his hands and laughed
+here, not because there was anything humorous and amusing in his
+thoughts, but out of sheer health and jollity of nature. Bommaney,
+still distrustful of his own aspect, and afraid of being observed, sat
+opposite to him with bent head and fidgeted with his papers, blindly
+pretending to arrange them.
+
+‘To settle,’ he said absently. Then, rousing himself with an effort, ‘I
+thought you hated London?’
+
+‘Ah, my boy,’ said his visitor, ‘when you’re in the shafts with a whip
+behind you, you’ve got to go where you are driven.’
+
+‘Yes,’ said Bommaney mechanically, ‘that is so. That _is_ so.’
+
+The visitor was laughing and rubbing his hands again in perfect
+happiness and self-contentment, and had no eye for Bommaney’s
+abstraction.
+
+‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s Patty’s doing. I’ve sold up every stick and stone,
+and I’ve taken a house in Gower Street. Do you know, Bommaney,’ he
+added, with an air and voice suddenly serious and confidential, ‘the
+country’s going to the devil. Land’s sinking in value every year. I’ve
+been farming at a growing loss these six years, and rents don’t come in
+as they used to do. I got my chance and I took it. Lord Bellamy wanted
+to join the Mount Royal and the three estates. My little bit o’ land
+lay between ‘em, and I sold it to him. Sold it, too, begad, as well as I
+could have done half a dozen years ago.’
+
+Then he laughed once more with great heartiness, and unbuttoning his
+overcoat, groped in an inner pocket. After a struggle, in the course
+of which he grew very red in the face, he drew forth a pocket-book of
+unusual dimensions, and slapped it on the desk so vigorously that his
+companion started.
+
+‘I got a tip the other day,’ he went on; ‘that old bank at Mount Royal,
+Fellowes and Fellowes, is going to crack up, my boy. There’s something
+very queer in the commercial atmosphere just now, Bommaney. There are
+lots of old-fashioned solid people breaking up.’
+
+To Bommaney’s uneasy fancy there was in his visitor’s voice an accent
+which sounded personal.
+
+‘I--I hope not,’ he answered, somewhat feebly, ‘so much depends----’
+(he tried hard to rally himself), ‘so much depends upon a spirit of
+commercial confidence.’
+
+‘Exactly,’ cried the visitor, laying hands’ upon the pocket-book and
+opening it. ‘I went to the bank and saw young Fellowes myself. “Look
+here, Fellowes,” I told him, “I want my daughter’s money.” He stuck to
+it, sir; like a dog holding on to a bone. He growled about it, and he
+whined about it, said it wasn’t fair to withdraw the money on short
+notice. Said I couldn’t do better with it anywhere, and at last I told
+him, “Look here, Fellowes, I shall begin to think by and by there’s
+something wrong.” He went as red as a turkey-cock, begad, and drew a
+note on their London agent like a lord, and here I am with the money.
+Eight thousand pounds.’
+
+By this time he had drawn a bundle of bank-notes from the pocket-book,
+and now sat flicking the edges of the notes with the tips of his great
+broad fingers. Bommaney heard the crisp music, and looked up with a
+momentary glance of hunger in his eyes.
+
+‘That’s Patty’s little private handful,’ the visitor continued, opening
+the packet of notes, and smoothing it upon his knee. ‘Eighty notes of
+a hundred. Pretty little handful, isn’t it? They don’t look,’ he added,
+with his head reflectively on one side and his eyebrows raised a little,
+‘they don’t look as they’d buy as much as they will.’
+
+Bommaney tried to find a commonplace word by answer, and an inaudible
+something died drily in his throat. When his companion began to speak
+again, the bankrupt merchant wondered that he made no comment on his
+ghastly face--he knew his face was ghastly--or his shaking hands. There
+was an intuition in his mind so strong and clear that he trembled at its
+prophecy.
+
+‘Patty,’ said the visitor, ‘will have everything in time, and a pretty
+good handful, too. But she’s bent on being independent, and she wants to
+have her own money in her own hands. She pretends it’s all because she
+wants to pay her milliner’s bills, and that kind of thing, herself; but
+I know better. The fact is’--he lowered his voice and chuckled--‘the
+fact is, she doesn’t want me to know how much she spends in charity. You
+look here, Bommaney’--the merchant’s heart seemed to stand still, and
+then to beat so wild an alarum that he wondered the other did not hear
+it The intuition multiplied in strength. He heard beforehand the spoken
+words, the very tones which marked them. ‘You’re a safe man, you’re a
+smart man. I suppose there isn’t anybody in London who can lay out money
+to more advantage than you can. I know it’s a great favour to ask, but
+I think you’ll do it for Patty’s sake and mine, if I do ask you. Take
+this, and invest it for her. Will you, now?’
+
+He stood up with the bundle of notes outstretched in his hand. The
+merchant rose and accepted it, and looked him, with a sudden curious
+calm and steadiness, straight in the face.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+Mr. Bommaney was alone again, and if it had not been for the actual
+presence of the bundle of bank-notes upon the table, he could well have
+thought that the whole episode had been no more than a dreadful and
+disturbing dream. It was very hard, he thought complainingly, that a man
+should come and put so horrible a temptation in his way. He would not
+yield to it--of course he would not yield to it. He had been an honest
+and honourable man all his life long, and had never so much as felt a
+monetary temptation until now. It was humiliating to feel it now--it
+was horrible to have his fingers itching for another man’s money, and
+his heart coveting it, and his brain, in spite of himself, devising
+countless means of use for it. It was quite unbearable to know that
+the money _might_ tide him over his troubles and land him in prosperity
+again, if he could only dare to use it, and risk engulfing it with the
+lost wreckage of his own fortunes.
+
+But no, no, no. He had never meant to use it. His only reason for
+accepting it had been that he had not found the courage to declare his
+true position to his old friend and school companion. Perhaps, he told
+himself (trying to silence and cajole that inward monitor and accuser
+who would not be silenced or cajoled), perhaps if Brown had been less
+confident and truthful--if he had had less faith in his old companion’s
+powers as a man of business--it would have come easier to tell the
+truth. And how futile a thing it was to stave off discovery for a single
+day! How doubly ashamed he would have to feel after that poor pretence
+of responsible solidity! If he had only been disposed to be tempted at
+all--here surely was an added reason for yielding to temptation.
+
+Obviously the first, and, indeed, the only thing to be done, was to
+bank this money in Brown’s name, and so have done with it; and yet
+any feeling of haste in that respect would seem to imply a fear of
+temptation, which he was, of course, quite resolute not to feel. He was
+not going any more to run away from his own suspicion of himself than
+he would have run from another man’s. So, in and out, and up and down,
+contradicting himself at every turning, with an underlying surety in his
+mind so fast rooted and so dreadful that he did not dare to look at it.
+
+When the adieux were being said between the old friends, Mr. James
+Hornett had slid noiselessly downstairs, his mind inflated by pride.
+He was not proud of having played the eavesdropper, for even in Mr.
+Hornett’s economy of things, that was an act to be proud of; but he was
+very proud, indeed, to be associated with a gentleman so magnificently
+respected as Mr. Bommaney. There were not so very many people, he
+told himself, even in the City of London, which was full of wealth and
+probity, into whose hands so large a sum would be placed with so little
+a sense of the necessity of precaution. He felt as if he himself had
+been treated in this majestic manner, and the feeling warmed his heart.
+He bowed Mr. Brown from the office door with an _empressement_ which he
+feared a moment later might almost have betrayed him, and he went about
+his duties for the rest of the day in a mood of unusual contentment. The
+earlier memory of his employer’s disturbance crossed him sometimes, and
+always excited his curiosity; but the later feeling dominated him. He
+was delighted by his association with a concern so eminently respectable
+as that of Bommaney, Waite, and Co.
+
+Meanwhile Mr. Hornett’s employer, with that dreadful rooted secret in
+his mind, which he did not dare to look at, sat alone, looking with
+staring eyes before him, and drumming in a regular tune upon the topmost
+note of the terrible little pile. He had locked the notes away before
+Brown’s departure, but they had seemed to draw him to the safe with
+almost a physical compulsion, and he had brought them out again to look
+at them, to handle them, to count them, to resolve in his own mind that
+he did not hanker after them, and was honourable to the core. It was so
+new a thing to be tempted, that at times his own self-deception was made
+easy to him. It did not occur to him to reflect that the need and the
+means had never so presented themselves together until now, or that his
+life-long honour had depended upon their absence.
+
+When he had sat in silence for a while he awoke to the fact that the
+interview had been nothing but a succession of shocks to him, and that
+he was bodily exhausted. He rose, and, walking feebly to the inner room,
+applied himself anew to the brandy bottle he kept there. He had gone
+much too often to that deceptive solace lately, and he knew it; but each
+successive visit carried its own excuses with it, and it had never in
+any individual instance been worth while to resist a habit which it was
+always easy to condemn in the main.
+
+The brandy enlightened him and opened new sluices of emotion. Perhaps
+for the moment he was a better man because of it. He seemed to wake to a
+more determined sense of the enormity of the temptation which lay before
+him. He thought of his own son, and a shadow took him from head to
+foot as, in a brandified nervous vision, he beheld some shadowy
+supposititious creature in the act of telling the tale to Phil. The vice
+of drink has had the creation of many other vices laid to its charge,
+but for once in the world’s history the obfuscated vision was clearer
+than the natural, and Philip drunk a better man, and a more righteous
+and honourable, than Philip sober.
+
+At bottom, Philip Bommaney knew himself too well to be at all sure that
+this phase of feeling would endure with him; and in a half-conscious
+dread of the return of that baser self, whose first appearance in
+his history had so affrighted him, he hurriedly attired himself for
+out-of-doors, crammed the bundle of notes into an inner pocket of his
+overcoat, and, after a final appeal to the decanter, left his room with
+a somewhat hysteric sense of courage and self-approval. He had been
+tempted--he was ready to recognise that the temptation was over, that he
+had well-nigh succumbed to it--but he had triumphed! He was a man again.
+He had been weighed in the balances and not found wanting. There were
+some tears in his eyes compounded of brandy and nerves and affections
+and remorses as he hurried into the street. Phil should never be ashamed
+of his father. Old Brown, who had trusted him like a brother, should
+never learn to shun and hate him. He had to go under--the thing was
+inevitable, unescapable, but he would at least go under like a man. His
+heart beat to the tune of the ‘Conquering Hero,’ where it might have
+beat to the ‘Rogue’s March,’ but for that friendly nip of brandy and the
+all-covering mercies of Heaven.
+
+Quickly as his resolution had been taken, he had fully arranged for the
+details of the task which lay before him. With the notes he had thrust
+into his pocket a little handful of business papers involving a knotty
+and delicate point of business, and he intended that the discussion of
+the point they raised should act as the prelude to the disclosure and
+the restitution he desired to make. He could not, even in his newfound
+heroism, and with whatever hysteric hardihood he was prepared to meet
+the stroke of fate, he could not as yet encounter Brown, and lay bare
+before him the plot of the melancholy farce he had played an hour ago.
+But there was an old friend of his, and an old friend of Brown’s into
+the bargain, a solicitor, keen as a needle and kindly as sunshine, one
+Barter, whose business chambers were in Gable Inn, and who was of all
+men the man he could confide in with least shame and best hope of help.
+He hailed a cab, and bade the driver drive his fastest. Gable Inn lay
+tranquil, the afternoon shadows already settling deeper on the little
+quadrangle than on the broad and roaring thoroughfare without. There
+was no light in the windows of the rooms in which Messrs. Fellowship,
+Freemantle, and Barter had done business and received their clients
+fifty years ago, and in which the sole surviving member of the
+firm still maintained its old-established reputation for honour and
+astuteness.
+
+Bommaney was chilled by the silence and darkness of the rooms, and he
+shivered to see the temptation he had conquered looming again before
+him. He knocked loudly with a trembling hand, and the noise of iron
+on iron went rolling and echoing up the staircase and came back in a
+hollow, lonely, sounding murmur from the rooms within. His heart
+sank, and a horrible fear of himself got hold of him. He had actually
+conquered, and here was the fight to be fought over again with almost
+a certainty of defeat at the end of it. Indeed, the defeat in that bare
+moment of time had grown so certain, that he was conscious of a distinct
+state of disappointment when a sudden footstep within the rooms answered
+his noisy summons.
+
+The door opened, and a young man stood before him, peering at him with
+half-closed uncertain eyes through the dark. He was a young man of the
+fleshly school, something too stout for his years, very pallid, and more
+than commonly personable, with a fine broad forehead, fine frank eyes,
+and features modelled with an engaging regularity. When he recognised
+his visitor his pale and handsome face glittered with a sudden smile
+of welcome, teeth and eyes gleaming quite brightly, and the whole face
+lighting up in the pleasantest and friendliest fashion conceivable.
+
+This agreeable expression faded into one of almost mechanical dolor, and
+the personable young man shook hands with Mr. Bommaney sadly, and sighed
+as if he suddenly recalled an idea that sighing was a duty.
+
+‘Come in, Mr. Bommaney,’ he said. ‘Come in, sir. I have sent home all
+the clerks, and was just about to lock up for the night. To what do I
+owe the pleasure of this visit? Let me light the gas.’
+
+Bommaney, the door being closed behind him, stumbled along the darkened
+passage after the more assured and accustomed steps of young Mr. Barter,
+and the inner office being gained, and the gas being lighted, allowed
+himself to be motioned to a chair. What with having been too much
+agitated by the contemplation of his troubles to be able to eat at all
+that day, and what with the fight he had had with his temptations, and
+the too frequent applications he had made to the brandy, it happened
+that for the moment he was by no means certain of his purpose. He sat
+for a little while wondering rather hazily what had brought him there.
+As often happens with absent-minded people, his hands remembered what
+had been required of them before his brain began to act again, and by
+and by the fact that he had unbuttoned his overcoat, and had taken a
+bundle of papers from his pocket, recalled him to his purpose.
+
+‘I wanted,’ he said, emerging from his haze, and holding the bundle of
+papers nervously in both hands, ‘I wanted to see your father upon very
+special and urgent business.’
+
+‘My father?’ the young man answered, with a look and accent of pained
+surprise. ‘Do you mean to say, sir, that you haven’t heard the news?’
+
+‘The news?’ cried Bommaney, feeling blindly as if some new misfortune
+threatened him. ‘What news?’
+
+‘My father, sir,’ said young Mr. Barter, with a certain blending of
+professional airs, something of a legal impress mingled with something
+of the manner of a medical man conveying mournful intelligence to the
+relatives of a patient, ‘my father, sir, was struck down by an omnibus
+in the street this morning. He is terribly injured, and not expected to
+recover.’
+
+‘God bless my soul!’ Bommaney cried out. His chin fell upon his breast,
+and his eyes stared at the floor, seeing nothing. He felt like a man
+upon a raft, who sees the bindings of the frail thing break apart.
+Shipwrecked already, and now the last hope gone! He hardly knew, if he
+could have asked himself the question clearly, why he so particularly
+desired to see Barter. He hardly knew what Barter could have done for
+him, except to listen to his troubles and take charge of the eight
+thousand pounds which tempted him, and yet the disappointment seemed as
+heavy and as hard to bear as anything he had hitherto endured. He sat
+staring forlornly before him, with tears in his eyes, and young Mr.
+Barter, in much astonishment at his susceptibility and tenderness, sat
+watching him. Something slid from Bommaney’s hands with a rustle, and
+dropped upon the floor. Young Mr. Barter made a mere hint or beginning
+of a movement, as if he would have picked it up for him. Bommaney
+made no movement at all, but stared before him with his blue-gray eyes
+filling more and more with tears, until two or three brimmed over and
+trickled down his cheeks. He said, ‘God bless my soul!’ once more,
+mechanically, and restored what remained of his bundle of papers to his
+pocket. Young Mr. Barter looked with one swift and vivid glance from the
+fallen bundle to his guest’s face, then back again. Bommaney rose from
+his seat, buttoned his overcoat with awkward and lingering fingers, and
+put on his hat. He was evidently unconscious of his own tears, and made
+no attempt to disguise them, or to wipe them away. He said, ‘God bless
+my soul!’ a third time, and then, shaking young Mr. Barter by the hand,
+murmured that he was sorry, very sorry, and so went stupidly away.
+Young Mr. Barter accompanied him to the door, casting a strange backward
+glance at the papers as he left the room, and was curiously voluble in
+his dismissal of his visitor. Anything he could do--Mr. Bommaney might
+rest perfectly assured--the clerks would be back to-morrow in any
+case--he would advise Mr. Bommaney of his father’s condition by that
+night’s post--he himself was naturally most profoundly anxious. In this
+wise he talked Bommaney from the chambers, and when once he had closed
+the door behind him, went back along the dark little corridor with
+an unnecessarily catlike tread. He could hardly have been other than
+certain that he was alone, yet when he reached the inner room he looked
+about him with a keen quick darting suspicion, and for half a minute
+ignored the fallen papers on the floor.
+
+‘Dear me!’ he said, when at length he suffered his eyes to rest upon
+them. ‘What can that be? How did that come here?’
+
+He stooped, picked up the papers, laid them upon his desk, and smoothed
+them out, making a fold lengthways to counteract the creases into which
+they had already fallen. He saw a crisp clean Bank of England note for a
+hundred pounds, and, lifting it, found another. Then he lifted half the
+bundle, and, finding a note of the same value, gave an inward gasp, and
+expelled his breath slowly after it. Then he looked at the last note
+of all, and sat down with the whole bundle in his hands. His pale and
+fleshy features had taken an unusual colour, and his breathing was a
+good deal disturbed. A watcher might have guessed that he was profoundly
+agitated from the swift unintermittent rustle the paper made in his
+hands. He seemed to sit as steady as a rock, and yet the crisp paper
+rustled noisily.
+
+Mr. Brown’s bank-notes had been a fruitful source of emotion that day
+already, and, in Bommaney’s mind at least, had raised very dreadful
+doubts and perplexities. There were doubts and perplexities in the mind
+of young Mr. Barter, but they were altogether of another order. Young
+Mr. Barter was perfectly aware that he was being tempted, and felt that,
+in its way, the temptation wets a kind of godsend. He even said as much
+in a low murmur to himself. His perplexities related to other things
+than the fear of any fall from honour. Bommaney had evidently been very
+queer. Bommaney had been horribly cut up about something, even before
+he heard the news the young solicitor had to give him. But was he
+so disturbed as to be likely to forget where he had last secured so
+considerable a sum of money? This mental inquiry naturally set young Mr.
+Barter to work to discover how considerable the sum of money actually
+was. He laid the notes upon the table, and tried to wet his thumb upon
+his lips. There was no moisture there, and his mouth was as dry as
+touchwood. He drank a little water, and then began to count the notes.
+He made them eighty-one at first; and then, recounting, made them
+seventy-nine. Counting them a third time, he made them eighty.
+
+‘Damn it all!’ said young Mr. Barter, ‘can’t I count? I suppose the old
+buffer will come back for them.’ He tried a fourth time, and confirmed
+his third counting. ‘They’ll get stopped at the Bank,’ he said. ‘They’ll
+be no use to anybody.’ He sat for a while thinking, with his eyes
+half-closed, drumming out a tune upon the table with the tips of his
+fat white fingers, then he folded the notes with great precision
+and delicacy, put them into his pocket, found his hat, overcoat, and
+walking-stick, and made ready for the streets. In the quiet of these
+legal chambers many chance noises from without had from time to time
+been clearly audible. He heard now a hurrying step upon the pavement of
+the quadrangle, and, with a palpitation at the heart, he moved swiftly
+to put out the light, and listened. The step stumbled at the entrance to
+the staircase, at the foot of which the outer door stood closed. Young
+Mr. Barter’s heart beat, if possible, faster than before; and the veins
+in his head so throbbed, that only the confining rim of his hat seemed
+to keep his head itself from bursting. There came an eager summons at
+the door, an imperative rapping with the head of a stout walking-stick.
+He set his teeth, and, drawing back his lips with a horrible smile
+in the dark, breathed noiselessly. The rapping grew more and more
+imperative and urgent, and then came a preternatural silence, with an
+undercurrent of distant sound in it, and the sudden blare of a cornet in
+the street, which sounded to his nerves like the trumpet of the herald
+of the day of judgment He heard the hurrying feet plunge down the steps
+again, and cross the quadrangle, and listened until their sound merged
+into the dull noises of the London night. He stood in the dark after
+this for what seemed a long time, learning that his features twitched,
+and teaching himself to control them. Then he left his chambers with
+great secrecy, and broke into a cold sweat to think, as he stood half
+through the doorway, how narrowly he had escaped from slamming the
+door behind him. This was an act which might have been suicidal in
+its stupidity; for to give any sign of his presence there after that
+thundering summons at the door would have been to betray himself beyond
+redemption. He inserted his latch-key noiselessly, and, crouching to
+escape imagined observers, drew the door gently after him, and turned
+the key slowly in the lock. As he did this he heard a footstep and a
+cough together close at hand, and, turning with a start, beheld a pale
+and slender man of brief stature, who scraped his lantern jaws with
+apologetic thumb and finger, and looking at him with a startled
+meekness, as if he would fain propitiate anger for a possible intrusion,
+sidled to the foot of the stairs, mounted the stairway with a backward
+glance and a second cough of apology, and so disappeared.
+
+Young Mr. Barter, with his nerves already shaken by this small episode,
+walked into the main thoroughfare and merged with the crowd, bearing
+Mr. Bommaney’s eight thousand pounds with him. When he had walked for a
+while he hailed a cab, and was driven home. He had, or prided himself on
+having, an exceptional eye for horseflesh, but it was not his faculty
+in this direction which had led him to choose a cab horsed by a brute
+of unusual symmetry and swiftness. This was an accident, but, like other
+accidents in this perplexed world, it served its purpose. It landed him
+at the paternal door in Harley Street almost at the instant at which
+Bommaney arrived there in pursuit of him.
+
+Now, although young Mr. Barter had not calculated on meeting Bommaney
+so soon, and although the meeting was naturally something of a shock to
+him, he had already schooled himself for interview and inquiry. He went
+a little paler than common as he grasped his father’s old friend by the
+hand for the third time that evening, and trembled ever so little as he
+spoke.
+
+‘I half expected to find you here,’ he said. ‘I could see how moved you
+were by the news of my father’s illness.’ The door stood open, and the
+old-fashioned man-servant within had been in the act of closing it upon
+Bommaney’s retreating figure when cab number two had driven up, and the
+young master of the house had alighted from it. ‘Is the news worse
+or better?’ He laid both hands upon Bommaney’s arms as he put this
+question.
+
+The elderly servitor, who had never had reason given to him to believe
+that young Mr. Barter was above the reasonable attached to his father,
+was a little surprised to see the young man so moved. He drew the door
+gently after him, and came out upon the steps.
+
+‘I’m afraid, Mr. John,’ he murmured sympathetically, ‘that it’s
+practically all over, sir. The poor gentleman’s quite unconscious, and
+the doctor don’t expect him to last till morning.’
+
+Young Mr. Barter’s mind was active, and accustomed to rapid movement. He
+knew at once that the old servant read the signs of disturbance in
+his face and manner, and how far he misread them. So, to insure the
+misreading, he took out his handkerchief, and groaned at this melancholy
+intelligence.
+
+‘I----,’ began Bommaney, stammering and speaking a little thickly, ‘I
+didn’t come to ask about your father.’ Young Barter’s heart at
+this, though he was perfectly prepared for it, began to beat like a
+sledgehammer. ‘I’ve had a dreadful loss. I have called nowhere but at
+your office since I left my own, and I have lost eight thousand pounds.
+I am convinced that I must have left it there.’
+
+‘I can’t think so, Mr. Bommaney,’ said Barter, with a face of
+innocence.’ We can go back together, if you like, and look for it.’
+Bommaney’s driver lingered for him; the other cabman was already
+jingling leisurely down the street.
+
+‘Johnson,’ said young Barter, addressing the domestic, ‘you hear what
+Mr. Bommaney says. This is a matter of the most urgent importance, and
+must be looked into at once. Tell my mother that I have been home, and
+that I have been called suddenly back on urgent business.’ Bommaney
+stood in a kind of stupid trance, and the young man, taking him by the
+arm, had some ado to secure his attention. ‘Come! Come, sir,’ he said;
+‘we will look into this at once. You must not remain in suspense about
+such a matter.’
+
+They rustled together through the straw which had been laid down upon
+the roadway, and had been scattered by the feet of passers-by upon the
+pavement, and, mounting the cab, drove in a ghastly silence for a score
+of yards, and then, with a clatter which made conversation difficult,
+Bommaney, rousing himself at intervals, shouted his certainty that
+the notes would prove to have been left at Barter’s chambers. Barter,
+growing curiously inured to the circumstances of the case, shouted back
+that he dared to say they would be; that it was very likely; that he
+really did not see where else Mr. Bommaney could possibly have left
+them, furtively pressing the notes against his breast meanwhile, and
+once, at a quiet interval, when Bommaney had sunk into his former
+stupor, venturing to steal a hand to the pocket in which the stolen
+money lay, caressing the edges of the notes with the tips of his
+fingers.
+
+‘I’m sure,’ said Bommaney, as the cab pulled up at the gate of the
+quadrangle, ‘that we shall find them here.’ He spoke with a tremulous
+uncertainty, and so obviously appealed for a confirmation of his hope,
+that Barter felt constrained to answer,
+
+‘Oh, we are bound to find them.’
+
+The striking of a wax vesta at the door of the chambers, the shaky hunt
+for the key, the well-known obstinacy of the lock, the opening of
+the door, the fevered working of Bommaney’s fingers, and the flushed
+eagerness of his face, were all memorable to young Barter for many and
+many a day. They entered together the room in which their interview had
+taken place; and Barter, nursing the remnant of the flaming vesta, lit
+the gas with it, and then, dropping it on the floor, set his foot upon
+it, and looked at his companion.
+
+‘Where do you think you left the notes, sir?’ he asked. ‘Have you any
+idea? I think you took out some papers here. You wanted to consult my
+father about them, I fancy, and, if I remember, you returned them to
+your pocket.’
+
+Bommaney stood looking about him on the floor, trailing the point of
+his walking-cane purposelessly hither and thither; and it was at this
+moment, seeing how confused and broken his victim seemed, that young Mr.
+Barter tasted the first flavour of safety.
+
+‘I don’t see anything,’ he said.
+
+‘Did you,’ Bommaney asked him, with both trembling hands grasping the
+knob of his walking-cane, and shaking in appeal before the unsuspected
+thief--’ did you lock any papers away before you left?’
+
+As a matter of fact, young Barter had not had any papers to lock away
+that evening after Bommaney’s departure; but he thought the trick worth
+playing, and, producing his keys again, opened the heavy iron safe which
+stood against the wall.
+
+‘Yes,’ he said, with an air of hopeful alacrity. ‘By Jove, I did!’ He
+stood aside, with an outstretched hand, and motioned Bommaney to examine
+the contents of the safe. There was a parchment there, there were half
+a dozen bundles of documents tied in pink tape and docketed; but there
+were no bank-notes.
+
+‘You know,’ said Bommaney, with a fretful wail, ‘I must have left them
+here; I couldn’t have left them anywhere else. I put it to you--could
+I?’
+
+Barter looked at him mournfully, with raised eyebrows. There was just a
+hint of expostulation in his raised eyebrows, and in the expression of
+his voice.
+
+‘You see, sir,’ he said, waving his white hands--’ you see for yourself,
+there’s nothing here.’
+
+Bommaney walked to a chair, and, sitting down there, lifted up his voice
+and wept. ‘I’ve been an honest man, by God! all my life long; and now
+I’m not merely ruined, but I shall be taken for a thief.’ He cried
+bitterly after this outburst, with his head between his hands. His hat
+fell off, and his walking-stick tumbled noisily to the floor. Mr. Barter
+picked them up, and, having set them on the table, looked at the shaking
+shoulders, and listened to the ruined man’s sobs and wailings. It was a
+pity--of course it was a pity--but young Mr. Barter really did not see
+how it was in his power to help it.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+On a chill spring evening the sunset over London gave a brief radiance
+of colour to the dull gray roof and smoke-stained chimneys of many
+thoroughfares. Shadows thickened in the eastern skies as if fold after
+fold of finest crape were drawn over the field of watery and opalescent
+light the fallen sun had left behind it. In one great thoroughfare
+running east and west the sky-line of the houses stood distinct, and
+bathed in light of many colours; whilst down below there was a wall of
+shadow. Two parallel walls of shadow rose from a shadowy level, and the
+dusk had a thousand indistinguishable voices.
+
+The shadowy lines became accented by twin rows of flickering fire, the
+rear jets seen with a blurred halo of mist round each of them, the halo
+crawling feebly within itself, tormented by a feeble wind. The long
+vista of pavement became chequered like a chessboard, with patches of
+light from shop windows. Gable Inn, staring at the growing darkness with
+a single fiery eye, looked like a Rip Van Winkle. It had been old when
+Chaucer and the knights and ladies of whom he sang were young; and
+its hoary stunted angles and squat chimney cowls had the grave and
+impassive aspect proper to great age. It has stood there now for over
+seven hundred years hoarding a growing store of secrets. It is roughly
+picturesque in every detail, and its every chamber is a triumph of
+narrowness, obscurity, and inconvenience.
+
+In the quadrangle the shadows climbed the sturdy walls as if they were
+an exhalation from the paving-stones. The dim staircase sent down all
+manner of muffled and echoing voices. Footsteps sounded, and the clang
+of doors, and the shriek of unwilling keys in rusty locks, and
+the hurrying traffic of the street without, softened by the moist
+atmosphere, was like the fading echo of following feet upon the stairs.
+
+Lights sprang up in the basement windows, telling of protractive legal
+labours. Lights twinkled in the garrets, telling of lonely study or
+noisy conviviality in the coming hours of darkness. At length one side
+of the quadrangle viewed by a solitary watcher from a third-floor window
+of the opposing side, winked with a hundred windows through the wet air
+and deepening shadow like a blear-eyed Argus.
+
+This watcher, lounging at his own window, was Mr. Philip Bommaney,
+recently self-entitled the ‘Solitary of Gable Inn.’ He was
+eight-and-twenty years of age or thereabouts, a broad-shouldered,
+deep-chested, manly-looking fellow, with curling brown hair, and a face
+expressive of pugnacity, good-humour, and many capacities. He was a
+little weary now, after a long day of satisfactory work. He watched the
+mounting shadows, and listened to the weird gamut of the wind among
+the telegraph lines, until the outer voices made his own dull room seem
+homely. One ruddy tongue of flame from the expiring fire in the
+grate played on the narrow walls and low ceiling, and woke twinkling
+reflections in the spare and battered furniture. A man’s dwelling-place
+is always an index to his character when its arrangement depends upon
+himself; and signs of Philip Bommaney’s nature and pursuits were visible
+in plenty here. There were symmetrical rows of books on the shelves
+flanking the fire-place. An orderly stack of newspapers occupied one
+corner of the room, and a set of boxing-gloves lay on top of the pile,
+and a pair of dumb-bells beside it. A shaded reading-lamp stood upon the
+table in the midst of a great litter of papers. The barrels of a huge
+elephant gun flashed dimly from the wall as the firelight played upon
+them, and two or three lighter weapons were ranged together lower down.
+
+He turned from the window and lit the lamp, and, wheeling round, held
+up the light to a photograph, and studied it with a pleased face. It was
+the portrait of a pretty girl, very sweetly grave, and looking as if it
+could be very sweetly vivacious. When he had looked at it for a longish
+time he nodded and smiled, as if the pictured lips had actually spoken
+to him. There was a tumbler standing beside the photograph with a bunch
+of hothouse flowers in it, the one bright spot of colour in the dingy
+chamber. He took this in his disengaged hand, and nodding and smiling
+anew at the pretty girl’s portrait, he turned about again, and walked
+into a bedroom beyond a narrow and inconvenient little window. The
+strident voice of the clock over the entrance of the old Hall, answered
+or anticipated from multitudinous spires in the City far and near,
+sounded as Philip entered his bedroom. He stood and listened, counting
+six jarring strokes. The bedroom was a microscopic apartment, with as
+many corners in it as any room of its size in London, and the bed itself
+was a perfect triumph of littleness, so tucked under the sloping roof,
+and so surrounded by projecting corners, as to make the entry to it or
+the exit from it a gymnastic performance of considerable merit. The room
+was not over-light at the best of times, the fourth part of the space
+of one small window in the sloping wall was filled by its own heavy
+framework, and for half its height it was shielded by a parapet, which
+had at least its uses in hiding the occupant of the room from the
+too-curious observation of those who dwelt in the upper stories of the
+houses opposite. These houses opposite, compared with Gable Inn, are
+of a mushroom modernness, and yet are old enough (having begun with
+a debauched and sickly constitution) to have fallen into an almost
+complete decrepitude. Their stately neighbour seems to be less grimy
+with the London smoke than they are, has always been less susceptible to
+outside evil influences, even of that unescapable sort, and drives them
+to an added shabbiness of senility by contrast with its own hale old
+age. The bedroom window was already open for the admission of such fresh
+air as, disguised in London blacks, the exhalations of moist spring
+pavements, and the reeking odours of the cuisine of Fleeter’s Rents,
+might choose to wander thither. Philip, with the lamp in one hand and
+the tumbler of flowers in the other, put out his head and looked into
+the squalid depths below him, and having gazed there a while absently
+and with no object, drew back with a vague touch of pity upon him for
+the people who dwelt in so much squalor so near to healthy effort and
+reasonable competence. He could hardly have told as much, perhaps, but
+one pallid countenance, shining very dimly at an open window, was very
+much answerable for that vague touch of pity. The face in the darkness
+started away from the window as he looked at it, as if his own
+robust health and the light that dwelt about him startled its pinched
+shabbiness into solitude. He set the tumbler of flowers upon the
+window-ledge, and closing the window, made his toilet and returned to
+the sitting-room. Then, having banked up the fire, and set the matches
+in such a position that he could easily find them, he blew out the lamp,
+left his chambers, and ran down the tortuous stairs. As he turned the
+last corner a door clanged noisily, and the next thing of which he was
+conscious was that he was struggling in the embrace of a stranger whom
+he had doubled up in an angle of the wall.
+
+‘I beg your pardon,’ he said gaspingly; ‘I stumbled.’
+
+‘You did,’ responded the stranger, gasping also. ‘Rather heavily. It was
+lucky you had something soft to fall on.’
+
+Philip began to make apologies. The stranger, breathless still, but
+jovially polite, begged him not to mention it. He was a tallish
+young man, broad set, and a little too fleshy for his years. He had a
+cleanshaven face, healthily pallid, the whitest of teeth, and a most
+frank, engaging, and contagious smile.
+
+‘Pray don’t say anything more about it,’ he said in answer to Philip’s
+reiterated apologies. ‘You are not hurt, I hope?’
+
+‘No, thanks; but I’m afraid you are.’
+
+‘Not at all. It was sharp for a minute; but I am all right now. The
+stairs are very inconvenient, especially to strangers.’
+
+‘I haven’t even that excuse for my clumsiness, said Philip; ‘for I am
+living here.’
+
+‘Indeed; then we are neighbours, and should know each other. Rather an
+informal kind of introduction, eh?’ The stranger said this with a mellow
+laugh and a flash of his white teeth. He opened his overcoat as
+he spoke, and produced a card-case, Philip catching the gleam of a
+gold-studded shirt-front as he did so. ‘That’s my name, John Barter;
+and these are my offices.’ The outer oak, cracked and blistered to the
+likeness of an ancient tar-barrel, bore an inscription, dim with long
+years--‘Fellowship, Freemantle, and Barter’--and the names were repeated
+on the doorpost at the entrance.
+
+‘I have no card,’ said Philip, accepting the stranger’s. ‘My name is
+Bommaney--Philip Bom-maney;’ Mr. Barter’s smiling face was unchanged,
+though he gave a slight but perceptible start at the name, and repeated
+it.
+
+‘Do you know it?’ asked Philip. To the ears of his companion there was
+something of a challenge in the tone. ‘It is not a common name.’
+
+‘No. Not a common name. I think I have heard it somewhere.’
+
+They were under the archway by this time, in the brief shelter of which
+the sanguine-faced, red-waist-coated lodge-keeper was taking his nightly
+constitutional. They answered the touch of the hat with which he saluted
+them.
+
+‘Which is your way?’ asked Mr. Barter.
+
+‘Westward,’ said Phil.
+
+‘Mine is east,’ said Barter, ‘so we part here. We are bound to meet
+again before long. Good-night.’
+
+‘Good-night, and many thanks for taking my clumsiness in such good
+part.’
+
+Barter’s ready smile beamed out again. They shook hands before parting
+like old acquaintances, and Philip walked on, through the incessant
+noise of Holborn into quieter Bloomsbury Street, along the eastern side
+of Bedford Square, where the bare trees were shivering in a bath of fog,
+and into Gower Street. Half way down that hideous thoroughfare he came
+upon a house, one of the few which still retain the old lamp-iron and
+extinguisher before their doors, and knocking, was admitted by a trim
+maid, with the smiling alacrity due to a frequent and favoured visitor,
+and by her conducted to the drawing-room, where sat a young lady engaged
+in a transparent pretence of being absorbed in a novel. The pretence
+vanished as the door closed behind the handmaiden, and the young lady
+jumped up and ran forward to meet him, with such a glad welcome in her
+face as answered the appeal in his own. It does not need that we should
+look at her with Philip’s eyes to pronounce her charmingly pretty, or
+to admire the face, at once shy and frank, with which she nestled beside
+him.
+
+‘I thought you were never coming,’ she said.
+
+‘Am I so late, then?’
+
+‘It seemed so, and now you are come, tell me what you have been doing.’
+
+‘Working, and thinking of you.’
+
+‘You work too much, Phil.’ She did her best to ignore the second item
+of his day’s occupation, but the deepened flush and her avoidance of her
+lover’s eyes answered it more effectively than words could have done.
+‘You are getting quite pale and thin. No wonder, sitting all alone all
+day long in those musty old chambers.’
+
+‘Well, you see, Patty, the more I work, the sooner I shall cease to be
+all alone.’ The flush deepened again, and the hand trembled in his like
+a caught bird. ‘And as for working too much, I don’t believe that’s
+possible. Work never killed anybody yet, and idleness has killed a good
+many. It’s better to work than sit still and wait for briefs which never
+corns. There’s no sensation more delightful than that of looking at a
+good day’s work, and thinking that every line and word has brought me
+nearer to you.’
+
+His tenderness conquered her shyness, and she nestled closer still,
+looking up at him with a wholehearted admiration and affection. He felt
+a little sad and unworthy under it, as almost any honest fellow would
+have been sure to do, and yet it was wonderfully sweet to him, and more
+than reward enough for any effort.
+
+‘I wish I could help you, Phil. I wish I could do something for you,
+when you have given up so much for me.’
+
+‘Hush!’ he said, laying his hand lightly upon her lips. ‘We made up our
+minds long ago that no more was to be said about that.’ He was tender
+still--he could be nothing else with her--but there was a touch of
+sternness in his manner, too--as if the theme pained him.
+
+‘But I can’t help thinking of it. It was so noble of you, Phil.’
+
+‘It was the only thing to be done--the only thing possible. It was----’
+he paused for a second, and then went on resolutely--‘it was my father’s
+act by which you suffered. I should have been a scoundrel if I had done
+otherwise.’
+
+‘And are you to do all? and am I to do nothing? It is selfish to keep
+all the generosity to yourself.’
+
+He laughed as if he found this female paradox a pleasant fancy, but she
+was not to be put off so.
+
+‘If the subject pains you, as I know it does, dear, please understand
+why I speak of it I don’t want you to think I take your sacrifice as you
+pretend to take it. It isn’t a matter of course, as you pretend it is;
+and you may say what you like, Phil, but it isn’t a thing that everybody
+would have done. Don’t grudge me my gratitude; you did it for the love
+of me.’
+
+‘I didn’t do it for the love of you,’ said Phil, laughing tenderly; ‘how
+often am I to tell you that, you little mountain of obstinacy? I did it
+because it was the right thing. I don’t say, mind you, that it wasn’t
+easier to do it for you than it might have been for somebody I didn’t
+know or care for; but that--as you will see quite clearly if you’ll
+bring your naturally logical mind to bear upon it--makes the thing so
+much the less creditable, provided there was any credit due to it at
+all.’
+
+The loving feminine scorn of this masculine process of reasoning was
+expressed in a single glance, and was delightful to see.
+
+‘It only means waiting a little longer before I claim you.’
+
+The girl would fain have asked, ‘Why should you wait when I have enough
+for both by your gift? What does it matter which of us it is who has the
+money--you or I?’ But this question went unspoken, for obvious reasons.
+A woman is tongue-tied by the countless conventionalities of education.
+She must often let her thoughts lie silent in her heart, though she
+burns to express them, and find what answer she can to questions she
+dare not offer. Philip had repaired her loss by beggaring himself. That
+was noble. But now he persisted in deferring their marriage, and had
+buried himself in that lofty sarcophagus in Gable Inn, resolved only to
+claim her, though she was all his own already, when he had reinstated
+his fortunes by his labour. That was noble also, perhaps, but in her
+own heart she thought it a trifle foolish--say Quixotic, not to be too
+severe. She would rather have seen his ardour find a more commonplace
+expression. She had a general sort of belief that whatever Philip did
+was bound to be right, and yet this actual experience rather jarred with
+that assumption.
+
+They found other themes in a while, and talked of the future and the
+happiness it would bring. That Philip was going to be rich and famous
+was a prime article in Patty’s creed, and he himself, though he had
+soberer hopes, was not likely to miss any chance of success which labour
+might bring him. He was more than modest enough in his conception of his
+own powers, and was often doubtful as to the fulfilment of the higher
+ambitions which are the necessary fuel of all artistic fires. Without
+those fires the chill of modesty will fall to the frost of cowardice,
+and in Art cowardice means indolence. In his moments of exultation--and
+these came generally at their strongest when he was in his sweetheart’s
+society--success looked easy enough. The memory of her undoubted
+belief in him came upon him often with a glow reflected from those
+magnificently hopeful moments. But then at times of depression it grew
+to look no more than a foolish unattainable dream. All young artists
+have times when they are going to be great--when the glory proper to
+white hairs makes a halo round un-wrinkled fronts and curls, brown
+or golden. They have times when the smartest turn of verse, the most
+delightful inventions of narrative, the most exquisite contrast of
+colour or mould of form their genius can compass are stricken through
+and through with the horror of commonplace. But when a man of the
+artistic _genus_ has once so far learned his own nature he has made a
+great advance towards the fulfilment of his ambitions. He has to
+learn that just as the hot fit is followed by the cold the cold fit
+is succeeded by the hot. He knows how intermittent he is. He learns to
+mistrust his own mistrust of himself. The periods of depression grow
+less frequent, and the depression grows less lasting. And then, just
+as the cold fit becomes less chilling to the one, the fit of exultation
+grows less intoxicating. The halo beams less bright--loss near.
+
+Yet Philip, with the girl’s eyes worshipping him, and her sweet voice
+cooing hope and praise, and her hands knitted on his shoulder, and her
+warm breath fanning his cheek, gave himself up to the vision, and felt
+his heart warm with a world’s welcome as yet far away from him.
+
+The prose of life will assert itself, even to visionary eight-and-twenty
+and sweet eighteen in love with one another. On this occasion it came
+as a summons to supper. The summoner was a stout and jovial elderly
+gentleman, about whose somewhat commonplace British exterior there was,
+to Philip’s mind, a reflection of the nimbus which glorified Patty to
+his mind, for he was Patty’s father. He had been called Old Brown at
+school when he was young--he had been called Old Brown in the country,
+and the prefix had found him out in town without the need for anybody
+to breathe a whisper of it. He was Old Brown to his new acquaintances in
+London before a month had gone by. The name suggests a beverage which is
+not unlike Old Brown himself--being mild and nutty to the taste as he
+to the mental palate--ripe and genial. He had a moist twinkle of the
+eye,--the look which bespeaks the kindly humorist,--and his slightly
+protruding under lip seemed covertly to taste the flavour of unspoken
+jokes. Old Brown’s jokes were mainly left unspoken, but he spent a
+good part of his life in laughing without any very apparent reason for
+laughter, and may have been internally the way he looked to be.
+
+He shook hands with Philip, and chucked Patty under the chin with a
+waggish aspect, which called an appealing blush into the girl’s
+face. Perhaps the blush stayed the intended quip, but any way the old
+gentleman contented himself with a beaming laugh, and led the way to the
+supper table, rubbing his hands and chuckling.
+
+The meal was quietly jovial, and if, after it, Old Brown was not quite
+so fast asleep as he pretended to be, at least his patience gave the
+lovers the shelter they needed. He snored in mellow murmurs from behind
+his bandanna, and they sat and talked together in low tones lest they
+might awaken him, until the time came for parting.
+
+Outside the mist had given place to a dull persistent rain, and a
+peevish wind was complaining in area and chimney cowl. Philip turned to
+the street with a pleasantly haunting vision of Patty’s vivacious face
+outlined against the warmth and brightness of the hall. The touch of her
+good-night kiss lingered on his lips like live velvet, and he carried
+warmth and brightness enough within him to defy all the rain that ever
+rained, and all the wind that ever blew on smoky London.
+
+The rain had cleared the streets, and the occasional gleam of a
+policeman’s cape or a furtive figure seeking the shelter of a doorway
+against the drifting showers was all he saw as he bored his way against
+the rising wind to the corner of Holborn. He was so absorbed by that
+fancy of music to which his own quick tread kept time that a shuffling
+step behind him rapidly drawing nearer failed to reach his sense. But as
+he came to the corner, a hand clutched his arm.
+
+He turned, with the quick defensive gesture natural to a man so accosted
+at such a time, and faced the unexpected figure. An old man, clad in
+filthy fluttering rags, stood staring at him, with both hands stretched
+out. The rags shook as much with the horrible cough that tore him as
+with the cruel wind. He was a dreadful creature, with watery eyes, and a
+head and moustache of dirty gray. His long and unvenerable hairs strayed
+loose beneath the dunghill relic which crowned them. The rain was in his
+hair and beard, and had so soaked his tattered dress that it clung
+to him like the feathers of a drenched fowl. He shook and wheezed and
+panted, and gripped the air with tremulous fingers, and through the
+rents in his clothing his white flesh gleamed in the gaslight.
+
+The look of surprise and pity which Philip bent upon this unclean
+apparition was startled into one of sudden fear and horror. In the
+very instant when these emotions struck him, they were reflected in the
+other’s face. The man made a motion to run, but Philip clutched his arm,
+and he stood cowering and unresisting.
+
+‘You! Here in London?’
+
+‘Phil,’ said the spectre imploringly, ‘for God’s sake help me. I didn’t
+know it was you, when I followed you. I thought----’ his voice trailed
+into silence.
+
+‘You have come to this?’
+
+‘Yes, Phil; this is what I’ve come to.’ The cough took him here again,
+and tore him so that he was fain to lean against the shutters of a shop
+near at hand.
+
+‘Why do you come back here? Are you mad?’
+
+‘I am--almost. What could I do? I’m as safe here as I am anywhere.
+Who would know me? or, if they did, who would hurt a wretch like me?
+I haven’t slept in a bed for weeks, Phil. I haven’t eaten a morsel for
+three days. For God’s sake! give me some money. I’ll--I’ll go away; I’ll
+never trouble you again.’
+
+‘I’ll give you all I can. But you must go away from London.’
+
+Philip thrust his hand into his pocket and brought up all the pocket’s
+contents. He took his keys and an unvalued trifle or two from the
+handful, and held the rest out towards his father. The old man shrunk
+from him with a terrible appeal and shamefaced gratitude which cut the
+son’s heart like a knife.
+
+‘Where can I go to?’
+
+‘Anywhere out of London. You are not--safe here. Go away. Write to me
+here.’ He thrust an envelope on which his name and address were written
+into the old man’s dirty trembling hand. ‘You must never come to see me.
+Promise me that.’
+
+‘I promise,’ he said; and, thrusting the money and the envelope
+somewhere among his rags, stood silent for a while. ‘I’m afraid,’ he
+said, ‘I acted very foolishly and very----’
+
+Then his voice trailed away again.
+
+‘God help you!’ said Philip with a choking voice.
+
+‘You’ll shake hands, won’t you, Phil? ‘said the old man. Phil took the
+proffered hand. ‘It’s something,’ said Bommaney the elder, clinging
+to him, ‘to feel an honest man’s hand again, God bless you, Phil!--God
+bless you!’
+
+Philip stood silent, and the old man, with another shame-stricken glance
+upon him, moved away. His son watched him for a second or two, as he
+slunk, coughing and shivering, along the gleaming pavement, and then
+turned and went his own way heavily.
+
+Bommaney senior, discerning the welcome beacon of a public-house,
+shuffled eagerly towards it, hugging beneath his rags the money his son
+had given him.
+
+‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Bommaney; if you please, sir.’ He started at
+the sound of a voice which had been familiar to him for years. ‘I should
+like a word with you, sir; if you please.’
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+James Hornett was less changed than his old employer, but it was evident
+that he too had fallen upon evil times. For a mere second the familiar
+tones of his voice were no more than familiar to Bommaney, whose mind
+was confused by long misery and hunger and sleeplessness, and the shock
+of his late encounter. But when he turned and saw Hornett’s long thumb
+and finger scraping at his stubbly jaws, the gesture and the attitude
+of apology brought him back to mind at once. Hornett’s coat sleeve was
+torn, and showed his arm half way down to the elbow, but revealed no
+hint of linen, The collar of his frock-coat was buttoned tightly about
+his neck, and there was a sparkling metallic rime upon his cheeks and
+chin and upper lip. Bommaney was ashamed before him, and afraid of him,
+and only some faint reminder of self-respect and the pride of earlier
+days held him back from the impulse to run away.
+
+‘You’re not afraid of me, sir?’ said James Hornett. He had always
+smiled, and was smiling even now. The smile was no more than a
+contortion of the muscles of the face, which made a long mirthless
+crease on either cheek, and left the eyes untouched by the least light
+of sympathy. It gave him a propitiatory dog-like look, and there was a
+hint of fawning in his attitude which matched it perfectly and carried
+out the likeness. ‘You remember me, sir?’ he went on, for Bommaney
+stared at him so wildly that there seemed room for reasonable doubt
+on that point. ‘Hornett, sir. James Hornett Your faithful servant for
+thirty years, sir.’ Bommaney looked at him with haggard watering eyes,
+and said nothing as yet ‘It’s a bit of a surprise, sir, at first, isn’t
+it?’ Hornett went on, with his unchanging smile. There was a good deal
+of hunger and even triumph in his small soul, but they found no other
+outward expression, and his attitude and voice were as apologetic
+and retiring as of old. ‘It was rather a surprise to me, sir, when I
+recognised you. Isn’t it a little dangerous for you to be here, Mr.
+Bommaney?’
+
+They both started, and each looked about him at this mention of the
+fugitive’s name.
+
+‘Hush!’ said Bommaney. ‘Don’t call me by that name. Come away from
+here.’
+
+A policeman strolled along the street, with an echoing tread, and as
+the two slunk past him he turned a casual glance upon them. The glance
+touched them like a galvanic shock, and they would have run if they had
+had courage for such an indiscretion.
+
+‘What do you want with me?’ asked Bommaney, when the policeman was
+out of sight and hearing; Hornett walking beside him, with his lean,
+propitiatory fingers at his chin, looked up with hesitating meekness.
+
+‘Well, you see, sir,’ he responded, ‘your fall was mine, sir; I was
+supposed’--he coughed behind his hand here to indicate apology for
+the introduction of a theme so necessarily disagreeable to the other’s
+feelings--’ I was supposed, sir, to have been in your confidence. I made
+many applications for employment, and nobody would employ me. Young Mr.
+Weatherall, sir, promised, personally, that if I called again, he’d kick
+me down the steps.’
+
+Bommaney groaned.
+
+‘What do you want with me?’ he asked again.
+
+They were standing by this time outside the doors of a public-house, and
+the wind-driven rain was pelting down heavily.
+
+‘I thought, sir----’ said Hornett; ‘I’m very hard pressed, sir.’ The
+dog-like, propitiatory smile never varied. ‘I was following Mr. Phil
+myself, sir, in the hope that his kindness might run to a trifle.’
+
+‘Come in,’ said Bommaney; and Hornett eagerly accepting the invitation,
+they entered the house together. There was an odour of frying in the
+room, and a hissing noise proceeded from a soft of metal caldron which
+stood over a row of gas-jets on the pewter counter. A printed legend,
+‘Sausage and Mashed, 3d.’ was pasted on the wooden partition at the
+side of the box they entered, and on the mirror which faced them, and
+displayed their own squalid misery to themselves. A year ago the fare
+would have seemed uninviting to either at his hungriest moment, but now
+Bommaney called for it with a dreadful suppressed eagerness, and, the
+barman serving them with a tantalising leisure, they watched every
+movement with the eyes of famine.
+
+‘I’ve got a little place, sir, of my own,’ whispered Hornett, when the
+pangs of hunger were appeased. ‘It’s very humble, but you could put up
+for the night there.’ Bommaney made no answer, but the two set out again
+together through the rain, and, pausing once only for the purchase of a
+flat pint bottle of whisky, made straight for Fleeter’s Rents.
+
+All that nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand of the many
+thousands who pass it every day could tell you of Fleeter’s Rents
+is that it makes a narrow black gash in the walls of the great
+thoroughfare, and that it neighbours Gable Inn. It is slimy in its very
+atmosphere all winter through, and its air in summer time is made of
+dust and grit and shadow. The old Inn elbows it disdainfully on one
+side, and on the other a great modern stuccoed pile overtops it with
+a parvenu insolence. It is the home naturally of the very poor; for
+no hermit or hater of the world, however disposed to shun his fellows,
+would hide in its dingy solitudes whilst he had but a mere shilling a
+day for lodging and bodily sustenance elsewhere.
+
+Hornett led the way up a set of narrow and broken stairs, and having
+reached the uppermost story of the house, pushed open a broken door,
+which, depending from a single hinge, scratched, noisily upon the uneven
+flooring of the room. His guest stood shivering in the doorway until a
+match sputtered and fizzed in Hornett’s fingers. Then, guided by that
+precarious light, he advanced. Hornett lit a candle which adhered by its
+own grease to the filthy wall and had already made a great cone of smoke
+with a tremulous outline there. There was a small grate, with a mere
+double-handful of shavings, chips, and coal behind its rusty bars.
+Hornett applied the match to the shavings, and, as the fire leapt up,
+the two men knelt together, coughing and choking in the smoke, and
+bathing their chilled hands in the flame. Bommaney drew the flat bottle
+from a pocket hidden somewhere in his multitudinous rags, and drank.
+Hornett watched him greedily, with hands involuntarily and unconsciously
+extended. Then when he had drunk in turn, they each shivered over
+the fire again, stealing furtive glances at each other, each mightily
+disconcerted when he met the other’s eye. Bommaney had aged dreadfully
+during his year of hiding, and Hornett, who had drunk his employer’s
+health upon his birthdays often enough to know his age to a day, could
+yet scarce believe that the dreadful spectre who knelt beside him
+numbered less than fourscore years.
+
+One question perplexed Hornett’s mind. How came it, he asked himself
+over and over again, that in the space of a mere twelvemonths a man who
+started with at least eight thousand pounds could have fallen into such
+a depth of poverty? Eight thousand pounds, if absolutely nothing were
+done with it for its own increase, meant royal living for a score
+of years for an unencumbered man. Hornett longed to satisfy his own
+curiosity upon this point, and felt as if he dared not ask the question
+for his life. He framed a score of ways by which he might approach
+it, with a road of retreat behind him, and at last, as if in spite of
+himself, he said, with apologetic impudence,
+
+‘You don’t seem to have made the money last long, sir.’
+
+‘The money,’ cried Bommaney, turning furiously upon him. ‘What money?’
+
+Hornett edged away upon his knees, and his thumb and fingers traced the
+creases of his smile up and down his stubbly cheeks.
+
+‘Do you think,’ the old man demanded passionately, ‘that I took away a
+penny?’
+
+Hornett was afraid to rise. There was such a despair and so much fury in
+the other’s looks that he could do nothing but crouch at his feet with
+his mean meek face turned fearfully towards Bommaney, and his body
+cowering.
+
+‘You think I took that eight thousand pounds?’ Bommaney quavered, with a
+voice of bitter disdain.
+
+He had never in his life regretted anything so profoundly as he had
+regretted his resistance of that temptation. To have had all the blame
+and shame, and to endure all the miseries a convicted thief might earn
+for himself, to have been an outcast and a pauper, only because he
+had been resolute against temptation! It is easy enough for a man whom
+circumstances keep honest to think himself honourable beyond the chance
+of temptation. But misery has the virtue of Ithuriel’s spear, with a
+difference. As the one touched the beast and transformed him to the
+seeming of a high intelligence, so will the other touch a seemingly
+impregnable armour of bright honour, and turn it into tinder, leaving
+the poor beast revealed and unprotected from his own base natural
+longings. The poor Bommaney was maddened to think he had not done what
+the other’s thoughts charged him with, even though he passionately
+rebelled against the accusation.
+
+‘When did you ever know me to be a rogue, James Hornett?’ he asked, with
+an air and voice to which his passion lent something like dignity. ‘When
+did you ever know me defraud a man of a farthing?’
+
+‘Never, sir, I’m sure,’ Hornett responded, not doubting in his own mind
+that Bommaney was guilty. ‘But----’
+
+‘But what?’ cried Bommaney. ‘My own son, my own flesh and blood, would
+hardly shake hands with me. My clerk--I took him out of the gutter,
+_you_ know that, Hornett! I took you out of the gutter and made a man
+of you, and lavished kindness on you. Nobody has a minute’s trust in
+me--nobody thinks of misfortune or disaster. I was right to run away and
+hide myself, for nobody would have believed me if I had stayed and told
+the truth.’
+
+Hornett looked more frightened than before after this outburst, but
+Bommaney read incredulity in his face, and answered it with an added
+passion.
+
+‘What good would it do me to tell lies to you? Suppose I made you
+believe me, am I such a fool as to, think your pity could set me on my
+legs again?’
+
+He turned away, moved by his own wrath and anguish, and Hornett, rising,
+made himself as small as he could in the corner beside the grate.
+Bommaney, in his pitiful broken boots, went shuffling up and down the
+room.
+
+‘What became of the money, sir?’ the clerk asked with a shaky voice.
+
+He was ready to run for his life, and he was more than half afraid that
+the old man was mad--his eyes blazed so, and his voice and gestures were
+so tempestuous.
+
+‘It was lost,’ said Bommaney. ‘I lost it, Heaven knows how. I’ve thought
+a thousand times,’ he said, through his clenched teeth, ‘that that young
+Barter must have had it.’
+
+‘Young Barter, sir?’ said Hornett.
+
+Then Bommaney told all he knew of the story of his own loss, and at a
+certain point in the narrative Hornett started and made a step forward.
+He remembered the night well enough--he had reason to remember it. An
+appointment for the theatre that evening had led him to call upon a
+brother clerk in Gable Inn, and he had seen young Mr. Barter leaving his
+chambers in what had struck him at the time as being an odd and stealthy
+fashion. He had remarked it for the moment, and had forgotten it
+afterwards, as men forget a thousand things of the sort which have
+no interest personal to themselves. But now he saw young Mr. Barter’s
+figure with a singular distinctness, and the face turned round in the
+gaslight was again as visible as it had been at the moment. He thought
+he read a meaning in it now. But for this slight confirmation of
+his employer’s story he would probably have disbelieved it, but the
+accidental character of the clue weighed with him, an apparent touch of
+romance in it gave it a value beyond its merits.
+
+‘Could you tell me, sir,’ he asked, ‘exactly what time it was when you
+left Mr. Barter’s office?’
+
+‘No,’ said Bommaney, suddenly weary after his outburst of
+self-exculpation, ‘I don’t know. It was after banking hours. It was
+dark; he had to light the gas. What if I could? What would that have to
+do with it?’
+
+‘Well, you see, sir,’ Hornett answered, ‘I’m not likely to forget that
+evening. Of all the evenings of my life, sir, I made a call at Gable Inn
+myself, sir, at Number One. If young Mr. Barter had found the notes
+he wouldn’t care to face you again, and he mightn’t have answered your
+knock at the door, though he might have heard it.’
+
+‘Any fool could tell me that,’ said Bommaney roughly. ‘What do you
+mean?’
+
+‘I’ve noticed, sir,’ said Hornett, with marked humility, as if he
+apologised for having said anything, ‘that young Mr. Barter is a
+gentleman who goes about in rather a large way, and noisy way, sir. He’s
+a biggish man, as it is, and to look at him at first you’d fancy that he
+was bigger than he is. He talks very loud and cheery, sir, and he bangs
+things about a good deal.’
+
+‘Well?’ said Bommaney, irritated by these slow preliminaries, ‘what
+about it all?’
+
+He could see that his late clerk was leading to a point of some sort,
+and listened with a growing impatience.
+
+‘He was leaving his rooms that night, sir,’ said Hornett, ‘as sly as a
+cat. I was just on the ground-floor of Number One as he was locking
+the door behind him. Locking it, don’t you see, sir,’ said Hornett,
+beginning to be fired by his imagination, and speaking eagerly, ‘so as
+not to make a noise in pulling it to behind him. I suppose I made some
+sort of a noise in going behind him, but any way, he looked up at me--I
+can see him now!’ he cried, with a swift conviction, ‘as if he was here
+at this very minute, white and cowardly. That’s what he was, sir. White
+and cowardly, I can see him now.’
+
+Bommaney grasped him by the wrist.
+
+‘Do you remember the time?’ he asked, passing one hand confusedly
+through the tumbled and disgraceful old locks of his hair. ‘Do you
+remember when I left the office? Do you remember when you left it?’
+
+‘Almost directly, sir, after you. But you drove, sir, and I walked. I
+stopped, and had a little conversation with a friend, and just a social
+glass that might have kept me back five minutes, sir. I was going to
+dine with Mr. Marshall (White and Fielding’s Mr. Marshall, sir) before
+the theatre.’
+
+Bommaney released his wrist, and dropping on his knees before the fire
+again, warmed his hands absently and stared into the blaze.
+
+‘The notes were all hundreds, James,’ he said, after a pause. ‘They
+were stopped at the Bank, I know, because I saw the advertisement. It
+wouldn’t be easy to get rid of them.’
+
+‘There are ways and means, sir,’ said Hornett. ‘They’d have to be
+disposed of at a loss, of course--a heavy loss--and kept quiet for a
+considerable time.’
+
+‘Have you heard of any of them coming into circulation?’ asked Bommaney.
+
+‘I haven’t been in the way to hear of anything, sir,’ the clerk answered
+mournfully, ‘but,’ with a sidelong look at his old employer, ‘if I could
+only get to look a bit respectable, I could make inquiries in an hour. I
+have no doubt I could find out, sir.’
+
+‘My boy believes I’m guilty, like the rest,’ said the old man, moaning
+and shivering and coughing again. The passion of his protest and the
+warmth of heart which Hornett’s returning confidence had taught him
+had all died away, and he was his bankrupt, disgraced, and broken self
+again, old and maudlin, and strickenly conscious of his miseries.
+
+‘Phil might help me,’ he said shakily. ‘He ‘could, but he won’t. He’s
+got plenty of money. If I’d been a rogue, James Hornett,’ and there he
+flashed up again, ever so little, ‘I could have robbed my own flesh and
+blood with safety. A rogue would have done it. I was his sole trustee,
+and I could have had nine thousand by a stroke of the pen at any
+minute.’
+
+‘Mr. Phil, sir,’ said Hornett ‘Mr. Phil hasn’t got much money left’
+
+‘Why not?’ the old man asked, staring round at him with his watery eyes.
+
+‘He paid Mr. Brown the eight thousand in full, sir, and divided the
+rest, as far as it would go, amongst the poorest of the creditors.’
+
+Bommaney turned back towards the fire, and drooped there. He seemed very
+impassive under this intelligence, but he was deeply moved by it all
+the same. The sense of his son’s high feeling of honour gave him a
+keen throb of pride, and then he thought bitterly that his own ill-luck
+pursued his offspring.
+
+The loss was double. It had disgraced and ruined him, and had robbed his
+son of his inheritance.
+
+‘Hornett,’ he said, ‘James Hornett.’
+
+‘Yes, sir.’
+
+‘I was brought up,’ the old man said, in a muffled voice, advancing and
+retiring his hands before the fire, and chafing them automatically, ‘I
+was brought up by Christian parents. I never did a dishonourable act in
+all my days. I have been a God-fearing man and a--a steady church-goer.
+I give it all up. I renounce it. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe
+in religion. I don’t believe in being honest. It’s a--it’s a vile wicked
+world, Hornett, and it’s my belief the devil rules it.’
+
+‘Oh, sir,’ cried Hornett,’ you mustn’t talk like this, sir. You must
+excuse me speaking free, sir, but I can’t stand by and hear you talk
+like that. I can’t listen to it, sir--I can’t really. I’ve never said
+a disrespectful word to you, Mr. Bommaney, but I really must speak out
+now, sir. It isn’t respectable, sir, to talk like that.’
+
+After this there was a long silence, and Bommaney, who had repouched the
+bottle after his last application to it, consulted it again, and handed
+it wordlessly to Hornett, without looking at him.
+
+‘Phil might,’ he murmured in a while--’ he might be brought to believe
+me. He’s an honest man himself, James--a very honest high-minded man
+indeed. I must look where he lives,’ he murmured, seeking for the
+envelope his son had given him. ‘He gave me his address.’
+
+‘His address, sir,’ said Hornett. ‘You could almost lay your hand on
+him. He lives there. That’s his window with the light in it.’ Bommaney
+moved to the window, and followed with his glance the direction of
+Hornett’s outstretched finger. There was a window a few feet higher than
+the one at which he stood, and half-hidden from observation by a stone
+parapet. A shadow obscured the light, and moved about the ceiling,
+visible from below.
+
+‘I saw him there to-night, sir,’ said Hornett ‘I saw his face at the
+window. He put a glass of flowers outside. That’s his shadow moving
+about there now.’
+
+‘Phil!’ groaned the wretched father, straining his dirty wasted hands
+together. ‘Phil!’
+
+‘I’m not the figure, sir,’ said Hornett, ‘to call upon a gentleman like
+Mr. Phil; nor yet are you, sir, if you’ll excuse my saying so. But if
+you’d let me go, sir, and put the case to him, he might come and see
+you here, sir, and you might set yourself straight with him, sir, which
+would at least,’ the seedy man added, somewhat moved by the old man’s
+tears and tremblings, ‘be an advantage to a father’s heart.’
+
+Bommaney stood in silence, looking upward. The moving shadow settled
+itself upon the ceiling in a huge silhouette, distinctly traceable.
+There was no doubting it was Phil’s dear head that threw the shadow,
+himself invisible, so near, so far. The foolish outcast’s heart ached
+bitterly, and he stretched both hands towards the shadow, not knowing
+that he moved.
+
+‘Shall I venture, sir?’ asked Mr. Hornett, more moved than ever, and
+coughing to clear a little huskiness in the throat. ‘Shall I venture,
+sir, to look in on Mr. Phil in the morning?’
+
+‘Yes, go, James,’ said Bommaney, sobbing outright by this time.
+‘Perhaps--perhaps he may believe me.’
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+When young Mr. Barter took time to think about things, he began,
+for more reasons than one, to be sorry. It is necessary for the due
+development of this history to go back a little, and to take up Mr.
+Barter on the day following the commission of his crime. The young man
+felt that he was unable to afford candour, and discreetly avoided the
+naming of his own action. Eight thousand pounds is a sum which most
+people would find tempting. Young Mr. Barter would never have found it
+tempting in the criminal way (though, if he had given his mind to
+the consideration, he could at any time have seen how enviable its
+unencumbered possessor might be) if he had not at the moment felt
+himself under considerable pressure. Mr. Barter’s fleshy and well-formed
+fingers were somewhat too familiar with the feel of cards. These fingers
+of his were peculiarly dexterous to look at, and had even an unnecessary
+braggadocio air of dexterity when he was engaged in his favourite
+occupation. Experienced people watched his shuffling and dealing with
+great care. In Mr. Barter’s frank and engaging countenance, and in that
+ready smile in which the faultless teeth shone so conspicuously, there
+was no hint of danger to the most unwary. Even the wariest, listening
+to his genial mellow laughter, and seeing the jolly shoulders shake with
+mirth, were inclined to think him a loyal honest-hearted fellow. His
+loud swagger, his frank rollicking gait, his hail-good-fellow-well-met
+shake of the hand, the other hand clapped upon the shoulder, the noisy
+greeting, and that unfailing smile, not merely disarmed suspicion, but
+made the mere fancy of it impossibly absurd. But young Mr. Barter had
+accustomed himself to associate with people whose experiences had forced
+them to be observant, and to these the dexterous caressing fingers with
+which he manipulated all instruments employed in games of chance seemed
+to justify a fairly constant watchfulness. The fingers handled the cards
+as if they loved them, as if they had been accustomed to them from the
+cradle. The tips turned back a good deal, and the nails hooked a little
+forward. There were little bulbs of tact at every tip, the hands were
+made for a gambler, and could by no possibility have belonged to anybody
+else.
+
+The chief ground for the young man’s sorrow may be very easily and
+briefly stated. The packet which the unfortunate cruelly-tempted
+Bommaney had let fall in his half-drunken abstraction on the floor of
+young Mr. Barter’s private room was made up exclusively, as we know
+already, of notes for one hundred pounds.
+
+Now Bank of England notes for one hundred pounds, though valuable, and
+easily enough employed in all civilised countries when honestly come by,
+are only to be got rid of when dishonestly acquired at great risk and
+loss. A note for a mere five pounds may pass through scores of hands
+before being stopped at the bank. Tens, so the experienced in such
+matters will tell you, are a little difficult. Twenties are inquired
+into rather carefully. Fifties are positively dangerous to handle
+in this way. Hundreds are, except after great lapse of time, almost
+impossible; and as for a thousand, a man might almost as well steal a
+white elephant as a bank-note of that value, except that it will cost
+him nothing for keep, unless you count the tremor of soul and nerve,
+which is surely worth something, in which a man criminally possessed of
+another’s property is almost certain to live.
+
+Mr. Barter, then, had eight thousand pounds in ready money, was liable,
+if discovered, to penal servitude, and was unable to touch a farthing
+of his ill-got gains. There are many men in the world, the world’s
+experience proves it hourly, who set so small a price upon their
+self-respect, that they will sell it for a shilling, for a drink, for
+a word. But there is hardly any man so lost to the natural human desire
+for self-approval that he will actually give away his self-respect for
+nothing. Now this absurd transaction young Mr. Barter, when he took time
+to think about things, appeared to himself to have made.
+
+He was not, and never had been, a great reader; he gave up his mind to
+pursuits which he found more attractive than the tranquil fields and
+lanes of literature. Yet he remembered, in a dim sort of way, either
+that he had read somewhere in his schoolboy days, or that a fanciful old
+nurse had told him, a story of a person somewhere, who, being possessed
+of a great chest of money, went one day to look at it, and found
+that his hard cash had changed to withered leaves. Precisely such a
+transformation had overtaken that eight thousand pounds, at the moment
+when it had fallen from the hands of a man who might have made an honest
+use of it. The fable was, and was not, true, so far as he remembered,
+and his fancy dwelt curiously about the history. There was no
+possibility of turning back the withered leaves to gold, and making them
+jingle and glitter again as only one’s own ready money can jingle and
+glitter. But, useless as these crisp and rustling leaves of paper were
+to him, they held still all their old potentialities, and in the hands
+of honest men or courageous rascals each leaf might still transmute
+itself into a hundred golden emblems of sovereignty and power. He was
+neither that honest man nor that courageous rascal, and the money grew
+to be a sort of devilish tantalising fetish to him. Before he had owned
+it a fortnight, he had felt a hundred times he could have burned it out
+of the exasperation of mere spite against it.
+
+He heard, of course, of Bommaney’s flight, and of the failure of the
+old-established business house. People talked about these things a
+good deal for a time, and he himself listened to and took part in many
+speculations as to Bommaney’s whereabouts, and the means he would take
+to get rid of the notes and make them available for his own purposes.
+He found it at first a little trying to the nerves. There was nothing,
+since Bommaney had accepted his own disgrace and run away, to connect
+young Mr. Barter with the lost eight thousand pounds, yet it took much
+courage, and a considerable amount of inward spurring, to bring himself
+to talk about the business. When a man carries a secret of a quite
+harmless nature, it happens often, as almost everybody knows, that
+casual words and quite innocent glances startle him with hints of
+understanding and participation. What is it when the detection of the
+secret involves open shame and penal servitude? Can a man of genuine
+courage be a thief? Is not courage after all at the very bottom of all
+manly honour, of all sound honesty, all true self-respect? How shall a
+thief be other than a lurking cur, whose whole soul, such as it is,
+is bent to a mean suspicion that he is suspected, a continuous
+terror-stricken watchfulness, a sleeping and waking dread of an awful
+hand-clap on the shoulder? There are constitutional differences in
+thieves, no doubt, as there are in other people, but the key-note of the
+dishonest man’s whole thought is fear. When, after a day or two, young
+Mr. Barter had accustomed himself to speak of Bommaney and the lost
+eight thousand, and had often spoken of them, he began to look out
+for suggestions that might be useful to himselt He even led the way at
+times, and speaking to solicitors and barristers of extensive criminal
+experience, he asked often, for example, how could a scoundrel get rid
+of such a clumsy handful? Why didn’t the fool cash the notes, he would
+ask contemptuously, before he left town, and before he was suspected?
+Everybody knew of course that the notes had not been presented, and
+their numbers were advertised in all the daily papers. Now what could a
+fellow do who had them, by Jingo? What _could_ he do? There was no
+way open, so far as young Mr. Barter could see, and he was wonderfully
+engaging and innocent of the world’s wickeder ways as he talked thus
+with the ablest of his fellow professionals.
+
+The fellow professionals cited cases. There was Rosenthal, a noted
+receiver in his day, to whom a dishonest clerk had sold five thousand
+pounds for five hundred. Rosenthal had held the notes for six years, and
+had then put them cautiously on the Continental market. He was an old
+hand, was Rosenthal, and very clever and leary, but they had bowled him
+out. The clerk was wanted on another charge, and turned Queen’s
+evidence against the receiver. Almost all the stories had this kind of
+termination, because the legal gentlemen whom young Mr. Barter consulted
+remembered mainly cases in which they or their friends had been engaged,
+or cases which had resulted in criminal proceedings. Others there
+certainly were, but they were vague and necessarily without those
+guiding particulars which he desired.
+
+It has been already hinted that the young man was a gambler, and it is
+likely that most of the reasons which made the money seem so welcome to
+him had their sources at the gaming table. He belonged to one of those
+clubs which deserve to be numbered among the blessings of
+modern society--where men do not meet for social intercourse and
+good-fellowship, or for dining purposes, or for any of the common and
+amiable reasons which draw men into club-life, but simply and purely
+to the end that they may win one another’s money. It was a joint-stock
+swindling company to which young Mr. Barter belonged, and within its
+limits every man proposed to himself to get the better of every other
+man by such means as lay in his power. A pigeon got in amongst them
+every now and then, of course--came in well-feathered and went out
+plucked, but for the main part the rooks pecked hungrily at one another,
+and made but little of their time and pains. The one solitary advantage
+of these corporations is that they gather the depredatory birds
+together, and lead them to prey upon themselves instead of wandering
+abroad for the defeathering of the innocent and artless who abound
+even in these days. The well-constituted mind can hardly fail to take
+pleasure in the contemplation of these resorts, where Greek meets Greek
+(in the modern French sense as well as the old heroic)--where scoundrel
+encounters scoundrel, and learns that the pleasure of being cheated is
+by no means so great as that of cheating.
+
+There were people of widely ranging social position in this curious
+contingent. One or two men of title, and one or two of the highest
+social or commercial respectability, lent their names for some
+inconceivable reason to grace the front page of the neatly-bound little
+volume of rules which govern, or sometimes fail to govern, the conduct
+of the corporation. Mr. Barter rubbed shoulders with young men--very
+young men they were--who would one day have handles to their names, and
+enjoy the control of considerable estates. He sat at the same table with
+men whose birth and antecedents, like those of the immortal Jeames, were
+shrouded in a mystery. He met men of his own position, who like himself
+were desperately glad of being numbered in the same club society with
+men eminent on the turf, or familiar in the gilded saloons of the great.
+He liked to think of those gilded saloons; it might be interesting
+to know what he thought they resembled--most probably a somewhat
+old-fashioned earthly paradise of ormolu. He bragged indefatigably
+of his club and the people whom he met there. He dated all his private
+correspondence from it, and spent hundreds of daylight hours above the
+ivories and the pasteboard.
+
+At the time of that foolish and weak-willed Bommaney’s disaster there
+were two or three I.O.U.’s for sums much more considerable than he
+could afford to part with in the hands of his fellow-members. Law is a
+necessity to human society. Even a band of brigands can’t hang together
+without it. Debt, outside the club, was by no means a thing to be
+harshly spoken of, but debt to a fellow-member was a literal millstone
+round a man’s neck, and would sink him out of sight in no time.
+
+The elder Barter had gone over to the majority, despatched by that
+street accident, and if the old man had known nothing of the young man’s
+courses, he had had it in his power to make him well-to-do. But he had
+paid his debts once at least, and had more than once had occasion to
+grieve over the boy’s handling of the firm’s money, and so had made his
+will entirely in his wife’s favour, leaving his son dependent upon her
+good graces. The mother was disposed to be a little sterner than the
+father had been. Perhaps if young Barter had dreaded her less poor
+Bommaney’s fallen notes might have been returned to him.
+
+But, to get on with the story, the young man’s chief creditor at the
+club was one Steinberg, a gentleman whose time appeared to be absolutely
+at his own disposal, though he was known by some of his fellow-members
+to have an address in Hatton Garden, and to be more or less of a diamond
+merchant there. He often carried about with him, in a pocket-book, or
+in neat little packages of grocer’s gay paper, borne in the
+waistcoat-pocket, a collection of gems of considerable value, and would
+show them to his intimates with the _insouciance_ of a man who was
+accustomed to handling things of price. He never was without money, made
+little journeys at times, which rarely took him away from town for more
+than a day or two, and was, almost always, wholly unoccupied except for
+the cards.
+
+Now young Barter had a prodigious idea of this gentleman’s astuteness.
+He had no particular belief in his honesty, and he believed him, not
+altogether unreasonably as the sequel proved, to be initiated into most
+of the mysteries of modern rascality. This was merely a general notion,
+based upon statements made by Steinberg himself, and supported by the
+opinion of his intimates. Nobody spoke ill of Steinberg; it was only
+understood that there was no move upon the board with which he was not
+familiar. Young Barter, meeting him one evening at the club, whilst
+Bommaney’s disappearance was still a fresh topic of town conversation,
+spoke to him about it, with an assurance clearly begotten of practice.
+
+‘Now, look here, Steinberg,’ he said, in his open and engaging way.
+‘Suppose you’d nobbled those notes, what should you do with ‘em?’
+
+Perhaps Mr. Steinberg resented the form of this inquiry. But be that as
+it may, he responded with some tartness,
+
+‘Suppose you’d nobbled them?’
+
+At this chance thrust young Barter turned curiously red and white, and
+had some ado to recover that open smile of his.
+
+‘Hang it,’ he said, ‘you can’t suppose I meant it that way. But,’ with a
+half-hysteric courage, ‘suppose you had--suppose I had--suppose anybody
+had--what would he do? You, I, anybody?’
+
+Mr. Steinberg sipped at his lemon squash--he drank that inspiring
+liquid all the year round, and nothing else until cards for the day
+were over--and puffed at his cigar, and looking young Barter full in the
+face, nodded and smiled with an odd mingling of meaning and humour.
+
+‘Put him on to me,’ he said, with perfect affability. ‘I’ll put him up
+to it.’
+
+‘Rather dangerous, wouldn’t it be?’ said Barter, showing his white teeth
+in a somewhat forced and ghastly manner.
+
+‘Everything’s dangerous for an ass,’ said Steinberg.
+
+‘I shouldn’t have thought,’ laughed Barter, ‘that that was your line.’
+
+He spoke as jestingly as he could, but he knew that his laugh was
+forced, and that the voice in which he spoke was unlike his voice of
+every day, and he wished, with the whole of his quaking heart, that he
+had left the theme alone.
+
+‘Well, no,’ said Steinberg, ‘I suppose you wouldn’t.’ He sipped his
+liquor through a straw, and blew half a dozen rings of smoke from his
+lips with practised dexterity, and kept a glittering German-Jewish eye
+on Barter. Perhaps he meant something by the glance, perhaps he meant
+nothing. He was a rather Machiavelian and sinister-looking personage,
+was Mr. Steinberg, and there was something even in the calm expression
+of those perfectly-formed rings of smoke and in the very way in which,
+he sipped his liquor, and most of all in the observant glitter of his
+eye, which spoke of a penetration and shrewdness very far out of the
+common. More and more young Barter wished that he had not broached this
+theme with Steinberg.
+
+He could not help it for his soul. He could feel that his colour was
+coming and going with a dreadful fluttering alternation. He quailed
+before the Israelitish eye so shrewdly cocked at him, and when in a very
+spasm of despair he tried to meet it, he was so abjectly quelled by it
+that he felt his face a proclamation of his secret.
+
+Steinberg went on sipping and smoking, and said nothing; but when the
+young scoundrel, his companion, had somewhat recovered himself and dared
+again to look at him, there was the same shrewd and wary glint in his
+eyes.
+
+Young Barter had been unhappy enough before this, but after it the money
+became a burden hateful and horrible. He met Steinberg often, and
+forced himself to be noisy in his company. In his dread of seeming
+low-spirited, or ill at ease, he said things about his dead father which
+he would have left unsaid, had he consulted the little good that was
+left in him; and Steinberg seemed to watch him very closely.
+
+Young Barter put off his creditor with promises. He would have lots of
+money by and by. That seemed credible enough in the position of affairs,
+and Steinberg waited. In a while, however, he became exigent, and
+declined any longer to be satisfied with promises. One night the unhappy
+rascal, playing all the more because of his troubles, all the more
+wildly, and certainly all the worse, fell back upon his LO.U.’s.
+Steinberg followed him from the club. It was late, and the streets were
+very quiet.
+
+‘This won’t do, you know, Barter,’ said Steinberg, tapping him on the
+shoulder as they walked side by side.
+
+‘Begad it won’t,’ said young Barter, doing his best to make light of it.
+‘They’ve been cutting into me pretty freely this past week or two.’
+
+‘Well,’ said Steinberg, puffing at his eternal cigar, and looking askant
+at Barter under the light of a street-lamp which they happened to be
+nearing at the moment, ‘what you’ve got to do, you know, is to find the
+man who knows Mr. Bommaney.’
+
+The commotion which assailed Barter at this speech was like an inward
+earthquake.
+
+‘What--what do you mean?’ he panted.
+
+‘That’s what you’ve got to do,’ said Steinberg tranquilly.
+
+‘Do you mean to insinuate----’ Barter began to bluster; but the older,
+cooler, and more accomplished scoundrel stopped him contemptuously.
+
+‘You know where they are,’ he said ‘Why don’t you get at ‘em?’
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+About noon on the following day Mr. Steinberg, seated in a small
+inner chamber in Hatton Garden, leisurely answering his sole business
+correspondent of that morning, was in no way surprised when the boy he
+employed to open the door and receive visitors brought in a card bearing
+the name of ‘Mr. John Barter, jun.’
+
+‘Show him in,’ said Mr. Steinberg; and young Mr. Barter, hearing this
+in the outer room, came in with a pale-faced and excited alacrity. The
+diamond merchant dismissed the boy with a word.
+
+‘Well,’ he said, turning the tip of his cigar upwards by a protrusion of
+the under lip, ‘what is it?’
+
+‘About that little matter,’ said young Barter nervously, ‘we were
+talking of last night.’
+
+‘The little matter we were talking of last night?’ asked Steinberg idly,
+looking at him with half-shut eyes. ‘That hundred you owe me?’
+
+‘Well, perhaps that afterwards,’ said Barter with a frightened
+breathless laugh in his voice. ‘But about the other matter first.’
+
+‘The other matter?’ Steinberg asked, in a lazier manner than before.
+‘What other matter?’ He took up his pen, dipped it in the inkstand
+before him, and tracing a line or two of his correspondent’s
+communication with it, turned to his own unfinished letter.
+
+Young Barter was already sufficiently agitated, and this curious
+reception made him more embarrassed than ever.
+
+‘About that affair of Bommaney’s,’ he said, feeling as if a rapid wheel
+had been somehow started in his brain.
+
+‘Ah!’ said Steinberg, writing rapidly, and speaking in a voice which
+seemed to indicate that he neither understood nor cared to understand,
+‘that affair of Bommaney’s, eh?’
+
+This reception was nothing less than dreadful to the young criminal. He
+had reckoned on having his way made easy for him. Steinberg had actually
+offered to become his accomplice in crime, and had lured him to
+disclosure. He could have wished that the floor would open and let
+him through. He saw that he had already exposed his hand, and began to
+imagine all manner of consequences resulting from the exposure. Not one
+of the consequences he foresaw promised to be of a nature agreeable to
+himself, and for the moment the hatred with which Steinberg inspired him
+was of so mad a nature that there was nothing he would not have done to
+him if he had had the courage and the power.
+
+Steinberg wrote on, shaking his fist in what seemed to be an unusual
+alert, and even threatening, manner. There was a great deal of
+unnecessary motion in Steinberg’s hand, and Barter, looking at its swift
+and resolute movements, got a blind sort of impression of strength out
+of it, and nullified the feeling with which it inspired him. The letter
+written, enveloped, addressed, and stamped, Steinberg tossed it on one
+side, and leaning back in his arm-chair, turned an uninterested look
+once more upon his visitor.
+
+‘That affair of Bommaney’s,’ he said. ‘What was that?’
+
+Mr. Barter thought this inquiry altogether too barefaced, and responded,
+with a hectic flush of courage,
+
+‘Come, Steinberg, don’t play the fool with a fellow. You know jolly well
+what it was last night.’
+
+Mr. Steinberg’s keen and impassive face underwent no change.
+
+‘What did I know last night?’ he asked.
+
+‘You know,’ Barter began angrily; and then the hectic flush of courage
+died, and a dreadful chill of fear succeeded it. What had he known? He
+had only guessed--till now. But now, young Mr. Barter felt, to employ
+the expressive ideas of his set, that he had given himself away.
+Steinberg capped the question in his mind. What did I know last night?
+
+‘You haven’t come to waste your time or mine, I suppose? You’ve come to
+say something. Why not say it?’
+
+His guest, sitting in a terrible confusion, and feeling himself
+altogether betrayed and lost, Steinberg marched to the door, and
+addressing the boy in the outer room, bade him carry the letter to the
+post and return no more that day. Then, having locked the outer door, he
+returned and resumed his seat.
+
+‘Now, what is it?’ he asked.
+
+Barter, recognising the fact that his own purpose was already exposed,
+made a desperate dash.
+
+‘About those notes old Bommaney was supposed to have run away with. I
+think--I think, mind you, that if there was any way of using them, I
+could lay my hands upon them.’
+
+‘I remember,’ said Steinberg, ‘you said something of the kind last
+night. I shouldn’t advise you to touch ‘em. It’s a dangerous game.
+They’re very worthless, and the game isn’t worth the candle.’
+
+‘Worthless?’ echoed Barter. ‘They’re worth eight thousand pounds.’
+
+‘They’re worth eight thousand pounds,’ responded Steinberg, ‘to the man
+they belong to. They’re not worth eight hundred to anybody else.’
+
+Young Mr. Barter’s whole soul seemed to rise in protest against this
+abominable fallacy. When he had screwed up his courage so far as to
+induce himself to accept this older and more experienced scoundrel’s
+partnership, he had conceived the possibility of the partner crying out
+for halves. But that he should want so enormous a share of the spoil was
+quite intolerable.
+
+‘Not worth eight hundred?’ He could only gasp the questioning protest.
+
+‘If I had ‘em to sell,’ Steinberg answered calmly, flicking the waste
+from his cigar by a movement of his little finger, ‘I should think eight
+hundred an uncommon good price for ‘em. Later on and sold at second hand
+they might fetch a thousand. Later on and sold at third hand they might
+fetch fifteen hundred. One can hardly tell. Of course the value will go
+on mounting with distance from the original source of danger and with
+the lapse of time.’
+
+He said all this very calmly and reflectively, and young Barter,
+collecting his whirling wits as well as he could, tried a stroke of
+diplomacy, which, as he fondly hoped, would answer a double purpose.
+
+‘She’ll never let them go for that, or for anything like it.’
+
+‘She won’t, won’t she?’ asked Steinberg, smiling brightly, as if the
+statement amused him. ‘Then she’ll never let ‘em go at all, my friend.
+How did you come to find she had ‘em?’
+
+‘I made a little bit of a discovery,’ Barter answered.
+
+‘Ah! That was it, was it,’ said the elder rascal, falling back into his
+utter want of interest. ‘You’ll let me have that hundred.’
+
+‘I will in a day or two,’ answered Barter, _arréanti_.
+
+‘Well, as for a day or two,’ returned Steinberg, rubbing his forehead
+with the tips of his fingers, and looking very careless and composed,
+‘I’m really very much afraid I can’t let you have it. It’s been
+outstanding a goodish time, and to tell you the truth, old man, I want
+it very badly. If you’ll let me have it to-night I shall be obliged to
+you. I’ve been hit rather hard this last day or two. Shall we make that
+a bargain? To-night?’
+
+‘I--I’m afraid,’ Barter stammered, ‘it’s no use talking about to-night.’
+
+‘Well,’ said Steinberg, with a pitiless uninterested suavity, ‘you know
+the rules.’
+
+He drew a little book from his pocket, and tossed it over the table to
+his guest.
+
+‘You’ll find it on page five. Rule fourteen. It’s ticked in red ink, if
+you’ll take the trouble to look at it.’
+
+Barter opened the book and consulted its pages blindly for a while, and
+then the mist which seemed to obstruct brain and eyesight clearing away,
+he read the pages indicated. It set forth the principle that all moneys
+lost at games of skill or chance, or upon bets made within the limits
+of the club, were payable within four-and-twenty hours. It set forth
+further that debts not paid within that time might be brought under the
+notice of the Committee, who were empowered to act under Rule nine. Rule
+nine ordained the public posting of the defaulter’s name, his suspension
+in default of payment, and, in case of continued obduracy or poverty,
+his expulsion.
+
+‘First and last, Steinberg,’ said the wretched criminal, who began to
+find the way of the transgressor unreasonably hard and thorny, ‘first
+and last, you’ve had a pretty tidy handful of money out of me.’
+
+‘Well, yes,’ said Steinberg tangibly. ‘Pretty fair.’
+
+His very admission of this fact made Barter’s case seem hopeless to
+himself. If he had brow-beaten, or blustered, if he had shown anger or
+impatience, or had been querulous, there might have seemed to exist some
+slenderest chance for him. But Steinberg was so unmoved that he seemed
+immovable.
+
+‘You’d better persuade her,’ he said, with a scarcely perceptible grin.
+Looking at Barter, and observing that he sat with his eyes still bent
+upon the book of rules, and head dejected, he allowed the grin to
+broaden. Barter, suddenly looking up at him, saw him smiling like a
+gargoyle, with a look of infinitely relishing cruelty and cunning.
+
+‘You won’t find her hard to persuade, I’m sure,’ said Steinberg. ‘Come,
+now, I’ll talk business to you. I’ll take ten of ‘em for it, and cry
+quits, and I wouldn’t do that for anybody but a friend.’
+
+The frank admission of the value of his own friendship was plainly
+legible in that gargoyle smile, and the unhappy Barter read it clearly.
+
+‘I’ll--I’ll see what I can do with her,’ he said, with a face and voice
+of pure misery.
+
+‘Do, my boy,’ said Steinberg, rising, and swinging the key of his
+chambers upon his forefinger, ‘see what you can do with her. I shan’t
+send any notification to the Committee before nine o’clock, old chap.
+You can trust me for that. You go off at once, old fellow, and see what
+you can do for her.’
+
+The fraudulent possessor of the notes felt their burthen more than ever
+insupportable. He rose, and went his way with remorse and rage and the
+bitterness of baffled stratagem in his heart. His wounded mind soared to
+so lofty a height of egotism in its struggles that he positively found
+the impudence to curse Bom-maney for having dropped the notes in
+his office. Then he cursed himself for having taken them, and cursed
+Steinberg for robbing him, and so moved off in a condition quite
+pitiable to one who could find the understanding and the heart to pity
+him.
+
+Steinberg stopped behind, and smoked smilingly. He was the successful
+scoundrel, and found the transaction as sweet as the young Barter found
+it bitter.
+
+‘I don’t think hell have much trouble with her,’ he said to himself; and
+he enjoyed that little jest so much that he caught himself smiling at it
+a hundred times in the course of the afternoon and evening.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Old Brown, who was one of the sunniest-natured of men, went gloomy when
+the news of his old friend’s dreadful fall came to his ears. It does him
+no more than justice to say that he mourned Bommaney senior infinitely
+more than the money. He liked to trust people, and had all his life long
+been eager to find excuses for defaulters. He could find no excuse here.
+The theft was barefaced, insolent, dastardly. He puzzled over it, and
+grew more cynical and bitter in his thoughts of the world at large than
+he could have imagined himself. But then, when Bommaney junior came
+home, and insisted on the restoration of the missing eight thousand from
+his own small fortune, old Brown brightened up again. There was such
+a thing as honesty in the world, after all. The restoration warmed
+his heart anew. At first he fought against it, and would have none
+of it--the mere candid and honest offer of it was enough for him; but
+Philip was more resolute than himself, and the stronger man won. Phil
+should never have cause to repent his goodness, the old fellow declared
+to himself a thousand times. He should reap the proper reward of his own
+honour. Brown admired and loved Phil out of bounds for this little bit
+of natural honesty and justice. He thought there had never been a finer
+fellow in the world, and his heart warmed to him as if he had been a son
+of his own. As for that rascal of a father--and when he got so far in
+his thoughts he fumed so with wrath that he dared go no farther, and was
+compelled, for the sake of his own peace, to banish the friend of his
+schooldays from his mind a thousand times a week.
+
+It was about a year later than the disgrace of the house of Bommaney
+that old Brown, to his daughter’s perplexity and grief, began to show
+signs of trouble almost as marked as those he had displayed after his
+old friend’s defection. The old boy’s newspaper no longer interested him
+of a morning. He began to be lax about that morning ride which he had
+once regarded as being absolutely necessary to the preservation of
+health in London. He had been impassioned with the theatre, and had
+become a diligent attendant at first-night performances. Even these
+ceased to have any joy for him, and he neglected, in fine, all his old
+sources of amusement He went about sorrowful and grumpy, expressing the
+dolefullest opinions about everything. There was going to be war, stocks
+were going down, trade was crumbling, there was no virtue in man.
+
+Patty tried her best to coax him from these pessimistic moods, but
+the old boy was not to be persuaded. On fine evenings, when there was
+nothing better to be done, he had loved greatly, between the quiet
+old-fashioned tea and the quiet old-fashioned supper, to dress for out
+of doors, and with Patty on his arm to wander into Regent’s Park, and
+there inhale the best imitation of country atmosphere that London could
+afford. He dropped this amiable and affectionate habit, and took to
+rambling out alone, coming home late, and haggard, and not infrequently,
+at such times, staring at his daughter with an aspect so sorrowing and
+wretched that she knew not what to make of him.
+
+The girl, watching him with a constantly increasing solicitude, could at
+last endure this condition of affairs no longer. He came home one night,
+leaving neither his stick nor hat in the outer hall, and sat down in the
+dining-room, muffled and great-coated, the picture of dejection. Patty,
+kneeling before him, removed his hat, smoothed his hair, and began to
+unbutton his overcoat.
+
+‘Papa!’ she cried suddenly, ‘what _is_ the matter with you? Why are you
+so changed?’
+
+He breathed a great sigh, and laid his hand upon her head. Then he
+turned his face away from her--to hide his eyes, she fancied.
+
+‘You are in trouble,’ she went on. ‘It is not kind to keep it from me.
+Is it anything that I have done, or anything I could do.’
+
+‘No, no, my darling,’ he said softly, laying his hand upon her head
+again.
+
+‘Is it money, dear?’
+
+‘No, no. It isn’t money. Don’t talk about it, my dear. Don’t talk about
+it.’
+
+‘Now, papa, you make me think it very grave indeed.’
+
+‘There,’ he said, rising, ‘you shan’t see any more of it, and we’ll say
+no more about it Well be gay and bright again, and well hope that things
+will turn out for the best.’
+
+The attempt to be gay and bright again resulted in most mournful
+failure, and the girl grew frightened. She had nursed her fears for many
+days, and had hidden them.
+
+‘Papa!’ she said, trembling ever so little, ‘you must let me know what
+it is. Let us bear it together, dear. Whatever it may be it can’t matter
+very much if it leaves us two together--and----’
+
+‘Ah! ‘said old Brown, looking at her with a pitying smile.
+
+‘Is it anything----?’ She stopped short, and really found no courage to
+complete the question.
+
+‘My darling,’ he answered, folding her in his arms, and staring sadly
+over her shoulder. She felt the hands that embraced her quiver, and she
+knew he had understood her half-expressed query. This frightened her so
+much that it gave her boldness.
+
+‘There is something the matter with Phil,’ she said, pushing the old man
+away, and holding him at arm’s length. ‘Tell me what it is.’
+
+‘My dear,’ he answered, ‘you shouldn’t leap at conclusions in that way.’
+But the disclaimer was altogether too feeble to deceive her. Philip
+was the mysterious cause of her father’s trouble. Her wandering, pained
+eyes, her parted lips, the terror and inquiry in her face, frightened
+the old man. ‘No, no,’ he cried, ‘you must not think it too bad. I’m not
+sure of anything. I don’t suppose it’s at all a matter of consequence. I
+daresay he’s an old fool. I hope I am.’
+
+These hints and innuendoes were about the last thing in the world to
+satisfy a girl who had been made anxious about her lover.
+
+‘Tell me,’ she commanded. ‘I have a right to know. What has happened?’
+She was no more inclined to be jealous than girls who are in love
+commonly are. She had, indeed, a native fund of confidence, and her
+trust in Phil’s loyalty had been of the unquestioning sort, quite
+profound and settled. Yet for a moment there rose before her mental
+vision the dim picture of some possible rival, and at the mere hint of
+this she grew ashamed, and flamed into indignation against herself.
+
+‘Tell me,’ she said; ‘I insist on knowing.’
+
+‘Well, my dear,’ said the old man miserably and reluctantly, I’ve been
+told that his father hastened his own ruin with dice and cards.’ It
+was the first time he had mentioned Bommaney senior in his daughter’s
+hearing for a year. She looked at him with eyes still intent, but
+somehow milder and less alarmed. ‘Phil,’ the old boy continued, ‘I’m
+afraid that Phil is travelling in his father’s steps.’
+
+‘Phil a gambler!’ she said, with an honest scorn of conviction. ‘I know
+better. What makes you think it?’
+
+‘There are a lot of beastly clubs at the West End,’ said the old man,
+beginning to struggle with his overcoat, partly because he wished to
+avoid the girl’s look, and partly because the motion was a relief
+to him. ‘Gambling-places. Places where men meet for no other earthly
+purpose than to cheat one another. I’m as fond of a rubber at whist as
+anybody; but no honest man would put his head into one of those holes of
+infamy if he knew its character.’
+
+‘Are you speaking of Phil, papa?’ she asked. Her voice was low and
+tremulous, and there was almost a note of threatening in it. The
+gentlest creature will fight for her own--a fact for which some of us
+have reason to be grateful.
+
+‘Yes, my dear,’ her father answered with a kind of sullen sadness; ‘I’m
+talking about Phil. He’s a member of the vilest crowd of the whole
+lot, and he’s there night after night.’ He dashed his overcoat into an
+arm-chair with despairing anger, and went marching up and down the room.
+‘I saw him one night by accident as he was going in. I knew the place.
+You might have knocked me down with a feather. I’ve watched him there
+night after night. Don’t tell me I hadn’t the right to watch him. I had
+the right My little girl shan’t marry a gambler. I won’t have my fortune
+wasted by a gambler, and my child’s heart broken. I took a room,’ he
+pursued wrathfully, ‘opposite the place. I’ve sat there in the dark with
+the window open, and caught the d---- worst cold I ever had in my life
+watching for him. I’ve seen him go in again and again. He’s a lost man,
+I tell you,’ he cried in answer to his daughter’s look and gesture; ‘the
+man who has that vice in his blood is lost!’
+
+He was storming loudly, for he was one of those in whom emotion must
+have expression in noise, but a sudden loud peal at the bell cut short
+his harangue, and he and Patty stood in silence to know who it might be
+who called so late. As it happened, it was no other than the lost man
+himself. He was shown in according to wont and usage without previous
+announcement, and entered gay and smiling, elate and tender.
+
+As he looked from one to the other the expression of his face changed.
+He moved quickly towards Patty, and took her hands in his.
+
+‘There’s something the matter,’ he said gently. ‘You’re in trouble!’
+
+The old boy, glaring at him, growled, ‘We are,’ and snatching up his
+overcoat, threw it over his arm, and slipped his hat upon his head with
+a gesture which Philip took for one of defiance. As a matter of fact it
+expressed no more than wrathful grief, but then gesture and expression
+are hard to read unless you have the key to them.
+
+‘We’d better have it out, Phil,’ said the old man, ‘here and now. You’ve
+turned gambler, and I’ve found you out.’
+
+‘No,’ Phil answered, with an odd smile; ‘I haven’t turned gambler, I
+assure you. You’ve heard that I’ve joined the Pigeon Trap? That’s what
+they call it in the City. I prefer to call it the Hawks’ Roost. There
+are too few pigeons go there to be plucked to justify the other title,
+and I give you my word of honour, Mr. Brown, that I’m not one of them.’
+
+The young man’s air was candid and amused. There was an underlying
+gravity beneath the smile, and for people who had believed in him as
+devoutly as his two listeners it was hard to disbelieve him now.
+
+‘You’ve gone into the infernal hole,’ said old Brown, more than half
+abandoning suspicion, and yet inclined to leave it growlingly, as a dog
+might surrender a bone he conceived himself to have a right to. ‘What do
+you want there?’
+
+‘I want to do a very important stroke of business there, sir,’ Philip
+answered. The smile quite disappeared from his eyes at this moment, and
+he looked very grimly resolute. ‘I will tell you this much,’ he added,
+‘because you have a right to know it. I am in pursuit of a brace of
+scoundrels there. I think I’ve salted the tail of one of ‘em already.
+I believe with all my heart, sir, that I’m going to clear my father’s
+character, and I would go into worse places than the Pigeon Trap if I
+saw my way to doing that.’
+
+Patty of course was clinging to him without disguise by this time,
+anxious only to atone for having given an ear to any word against him,
+even for a moment. Phil put his arm about her waist and kissed her. He
+had never to his knowledge performed this act in the presence of a third
+person until now, but he got through it without embarrassment.
+
+‘You think you can clear your father’s character?’ asked his
+sweetheart’s father. There was a tinge of scepticism in his voice,
+though he tried to hide it.
+
+‘Yes, sir,’ said Phil, his head thrown back a little, and his eyes
+gleaming. Nobody had ever looked so handsome to Patty’s fancy as he did
+at that moment ‘I know already that there was no real stain upon his
+honour, and I’m surprised myself for thinking that there ever could have
+been, bad as things looked. My father never took wrongful possession of
+your money. He was robbed of it, and I think I can lay my hand upon the
+thief.’
+
+There was a prodigious excitement at this declaration, and the young man
+was overwhelmed with questions. He could name no names, of course,
+and give no clue, but he sketched the story. He contented himself by
+describing young Barter as Thief Number One, and he was satisfied to
+describe Steinberg as Probable Thief Number Two. He had learned, it
+appeared, that Thief Number One had succeeded on his father’s death to
+a carefully limited partnership in a business affair in the city. The
+guiding spirit in the concerns of Thief Number One had been his father’s
+managing clerk. The income of Thief Number One was strictly limited,
+and his actual control over the affairs of the firm was non-existent.
+Notwithstanding these facts, the young man was guilty of countless
+extravagances, and was a reckless gambler. Within the last twelve months
+he could hardly have paid away at the club less than a thousand pounds.
+He had been extremely hard up before the loss of the money, and it was
+in his offices that the roll of banknotes had been lost. As for Probable
+Thief Number Two, he played rook to Number One’s pigeon. He had a
+visible hold upon him; Number One trembled before him, and did what
+he was bidden to do. Number Two had plenty of money, and as shady a
+reputation as any man in London who was not among the known criminal
+classes. Phil’s belief was that Number Two was disposing of the notes
+for Number One, and that this simple fact accounted for his power over
+him.
+
+‘And I’m going to follow their track,’ said Phil, tapping the clenched
+knuckles of his right hand upon the open palm of his left with a quiet
+vehemence, ‘until I find out everything, if I follow it until I am
+gray.’
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+It would appear that a spider may be among the most daring, skilful, and
+predatory of his species, that he may be gifted with the most constant
+watchfulness and appetite, and yet, whether by the intrusion of
+an accidental walking-stick or broom (which would assuredly seem
+providential to the fly), or by stress of weather, or the desperate
+activity of a victim, may have his best laid schemes brought to
+nought, and his most mathematically laid web rent to tatters. In the
+entomological world a solitary interview between fly and spider is
+usually fatal to the one, and satisfactory to the other. But we of the
+higher developments, who model ourselves, or are modelled, upon the
+lines of myriads of remote ancestors, and far-away relatives, have
+refined upon their primitive proceedings, and have made their simple
+activities complex by development.
+
+In an absolutely primitive condition the Steinberg spider would have
+drained the Barter fly at a single orgie, and would have left him to
+wither on the lines. As things were, he came back to him with a constant
+gusto of appetite, tasting him on Monday, despatching him to buzz among
+his fellows until Saturday, and then tasting him again, the Barter fly
+seeming for a while--for quite a considerable time in fact--lusty and
+active and able-bodied, and looking as though this kind of thing might
+go on for ever without much damage to him, and the spider himself giving
+no sign of overtaxed digestive powers.
+
+Not to run this striking and original simile out of breath, the Barter
+fly endured for a round twelve months, without showing signs of anaemia
+so pronounced as to look dangerous to his constitution. At the end of
+that time, however, all the surplus blood had been drawn from his body,
+and the spider had grown so keen by the habit of constant recurrence to
+him that any prolonged connection between them began to look desperate.
+In plain English, the eight thousand pounds which had once so lightly
+passed from the hands of Mr. Brown to the hands of Mr. Bommaney had now
+passed, with just as little profit to the man who parted with them, from
+the hands of young Barter to the hands of Steinberg.
+
+It was just about the time when this lingering but inevitable
+transaction was completed that chance led young Barter to his encounter
+with the son of the man whose belongings he had appropriated. Everybody
+knows how apt newly-made acquaintances sometimes are to renew themselves
+again and again. You meet a man whom you have never seen before, see
+him just long enough to take a passing interest in him, and to know
+generally who and what he is, and you run against him on the morrow, and
+again on the morrow, and so on, until in a week he has grown as familiar
+to your thoughts as any other mere acquaintance of whose identity you
+may have been aware for years. This happened in the case of Philip
+Bommaney and younger Mr. Barter. They entered the Inn together, or left
+it together, or Philip ran upstairs or downstairs as Barter was in the
+very act of leaving or entering his chambers. Putting together a certain
+family resemblance which he thought he noticed, the identity of a rather
+uncommon name, and the curious frequency of these chance encounters,
+Barter found it hard to avoid the belief that his new-made acquaintance
+had a rather careful eye upon him. His nerve was a good deal shaken, and
+he was by no means the man he had been. To the unobservant stranger the
+frank gaiety of his laugh was as spontaneous as ever, but then that had
+never had much to do with Barter’s inward sensations. Perhaps he got the
+laugh in some remote fashion from an ancestor who really ought to have
+had it, and who may have been as dull and as little laughter-loving to
+look at as his successor was within. Philip rather took to the fellow
+at first sight, and was slow to suspect him, even when James Hornett
+had told his story. But the young Barter was not satisfied, as he
+should have been, with playing the part of one insect at a time. It
+was unwholesome enough, one might have thought, for him to play fly to
+Steinberg’s spider, and yet he must needs take to playing moth to Philip
+Bommaney’s candle, a light of danger to him, as he recognised almost
+from the first He was always polite to Phil, and always stopped him for
+a moment’s conversation at their chance encounters. Phil, having been
+inspired at least with a suspicion that this engaging young man was
+responsible for the actual disgrace which had fallen upon Bommaney
+senior, always bent a grave scrutiny upon him. Barter sometimes wondered
+whether his new-found acquaintance’s way of looking at him were habitual
+or particular, but he could never solve that problem. To Barter’s nerves
+the glance of dispassionate analysis always seemed to ask--Did you steal
+those notes? and whether his mind and nerves were at accord or no made
+but little difference to him. His mind rejected the idea of suspicion,
+but his nerves accepted it with trembling. He knew perfectly well that
+he could not endure the certainty of Phil Bommaney’s knowledge, but
+none the less he found the uncertainty tantalising and painful. This is
+perhaps one of the hardest things an undetected criminal has to endure,
+that he lives in a world of suspicion of his own making, where every
+imagination is real and as dreadful as the fact. In his own mind young
+Barter credited himself with courage when he made overtures for Philip’s
+companionship. In reality he made the overtures because he was a coward,
+and a braver scoundrel would have disdained them.
+
+Philip felt himself impelled to watch this young man, and was not
+altogether displeased that he found the opportunity thrust upon him.
+Almost facing the gateway of the old Inn there is an old-fashioned
+restaurant, deserted from its hour of opening until noon, and from then
+crowded inconveniently till two o’clock, deserted again till five, and
+once more inconveniently crowded till seven. Philip, having the power to
+choose his own time for meals, and frequenting this old house, sometimes
+met Barter in the act of coming away from it with the dregs of the
+stream of the late lunchers or diners. He fell into the habit of going
+a little earlier, and Barter would signal him to the table at which he
+sat, if by rare chance there happened to be a vacant seat at it. The
+young rascal’s tendency lay towards monologue, and since it was his cue
+to be open-hearted, and very unsuspicious of being suspected, he
+talked with much freedom of himself, his pursuits, and his affairs. The
+question which Barter’s nerves were always finding in Philip’s eyes was,
+as a matter of fact, not often absent from his mind. ‘Now, how did you
+steal those notes?’ was the one active query of his intelligence as he
+listened to Barter’s candid prattle.
+
+It was in the course of these confidences that Philip learned of the
+existence of that Pigeon Trap of which Mr. Barter was so proud to be an
+inhabitant. It was at Barter’s solicitation that he visited the place,
+and it was Barter who proposed him as a member.
+
+Being a member it was not long before he discovered the fact of
+Steinberg’s influence over the young solicitor. He noticed a terrified
+deference in Barter’s manner towards the other, a frightened alacrity of
+obedience to his suggestions. He noticed also that Steinberg and Barter
+played a good deal by themselves, and that Barter always lost.
+
+The men of Hawks’ Boost talked pretty freely about each other in the
+absence of such of their fellow clubmen as were under discussion. Barter
+was spoken of as Steinberg’s Mug, Berg’s Juggins, Stein’s Spoofmarker.
+It was generally admitted that Stein made a good thing out of him, and
+the wonder was where Barter got his money. There was a pretty general
+apprehension that the young man, at no very far future date, would come
+to grief. The contemplation of this probability affected the Boosters
+but little in an emotional way, but it made them keen to see that
+Mr. Barter paid up punctually, and though they were very shy of paper
+acceptances from their comrades as a general thing, they were shyer of
+his than of most men’s.
+
+These things Philip Bommaney junior attentively noted. At first the
+clubmen rather wondered at him. He was in their precincts often,
+and would smoke his pipe and watch whatever game might be going with
+tranquil interest, but he never played, and could not be induced to bet.
+_Que diable faisant-il dans cette gaière?_ the clubmen wanted to know.
+He never told them, and in a while they grew accustomed to him and
+his ways. He continued his quiet watch upon Mr. Barter, and included
+Steinberg in his field of observation. One evening, dining at the old
+restaurant, he marked Barter, melancholy and alone. He was sitting in an
+attitude of apparent dejection, tapping upon the table with a fork, and
+deep sunk in what seemed to be an uncomfortable contemplation. But when
+the moth saw his candle he brightened, and fluttered over to it.
+
+‘You might come over,’ said Barter, when they had sat together until the
+latest of the dining guests had gone away. ‘You might come over to my
+chambers and smoke a cigar if you’ve nothing else to do. I don’t care
+about going down to the club tonight.’
+
+The Steinberg spider was supposed to be waiting there, coldly patient
+and insatiable, and Barter dreaded him. Philip had never entered the
+rooms, but they had an attraction for him. He accepted his companion’s
+invitation, and they entered the chambers together. A fire lingered
+in the grate, and Barter replenished it, and, having produced a box of
+cigars and a bottle of cognac, proffered refreshment to his guest. The
+honest man began somewhat to recoil from himself and from his companion.
+What was he there for? The answer was pretty evident. There was nothing
+between this loud-babbling youth and himself which could have drawn them
+into even a momentary comradeship, if it had not been for the suspicion
+his father’s story had inspired in him. Frankly, he was there because he
+suspected the man, because he desired to watch him, because, if he found
+the chance, he was willing to set him in the dock. To smoke his tobacco
+and drink his liquor in those circumstances had undoubtedly an air of
+treachery. In a while he hardened himself, and closed his ears to all
+casuist pleadings, whether for or against the course he had adopted. He
+would clear his father if he could, and if there were any mere hope of
+doing it, he would watch this fellow as a cat watches a mouse, and would
+go on doing it until both of them were gray.
+
+‘By the way,’ said Barter innocently, ‘do you never take a hand at----’
+
+His supple fingers supplied the hiatus, dealing out an imaginary pack of
+cards with the flourishing dexterity native to them.
+
+‘That’s what I’m here for, is it?’ thought Philip in his own mind. ‘We
+shall see.’ He said aloud, ‘Sometimes,’ in an indifferent tone.
+
+‘There’s nothing worth seeing anywhere to-night,’ said young Barter.
+‘Suppose we try a hand. What do you say to a game at Napoleon?’
+
+Philip consented, and his host produced two packs of cards from the
+business safe.
+
+They fixed upon the points and they began to play. The points were not
+those for which Mr. Barter really cared to play; for he was one of those
+people who find no joy in cards unless they risk more than they can
+afford to lose. But little fish are sweet, and he thought he had
+secured a greenhorn. As it happened, the greenhorn, though he was
+but eight-and-twenty, had travelled the world all over, and had
+found himself compelled to survey mankind from China to Peru. He
+was, moreover, one of those men who like to know things, and those
+quietly-observant eyes of his had taken note of the proceedings of a
+hundred scoundrels in whose hands the redoubtable Steinberg himself
+would have had but poor chances. The Greek had been Philip’s standing
+joy, the dish best spiced to suit his intellectual palate. He had
+delighted over him aboard ship, on the monstrous dreary railway journey
+between Atlantic and Pacific, in the little towns which form the centre
+of scores of Texan ranches, in hells at the Cape and in California, in
+the free ports of China, and on the borders of the Bosphorus. In point
+of fact he was by experience as little fitted to be played upon by a
+gentleman of young Mr. Barter’s limited accomplishments as almost any
+man alive.
+
+Phil’s interest in the game had grown grimly observant in the first ten
+minutes. Young Mr. Barter had a knack, when he shuffled the cards,
+of slily inclining the painted sides upwards. He had another knack of
+leaving an honour at the bottom. He made a false cut with fair dexterity
+for an amateur. He could, when occasion seemed to make it profitable,
+discard with a fair air of unconsciousness. An ace dropped out of sight
+a hand or two earlier, was followed by a valueless card dropped openly.
+The ace was taken to supply its place with a perfect smiling effrontery.
+But Mr. Barter’s favourite trick came out when he had a weak hand. Then
+he smiled across at his opponent, breathed softly the words ‘six cards,’
+and dropped the worthless hand on the top of the pack, calling for a new
+deal All this Philip Bommaney watched with a complete seeming innocence
+and good temper. He lost his sixpences handsomely, made no protest, and
+looked unruffled.
+
+‘You play false for sixpences, do you?’ he said inwardly. ‘I suppose a
+scoundrel is a scoundrel all through, and that if you’ll sell your soul
+for so little, you could hardly object to driving a bargain for a larger
+sum.’
+
+He was often tempted in the course of a quarter of an hour to try Mr.
+Barter with a sudden challenge, and see what would come of it. Surveying
+his companion with that placid inquiry which Barter felt to be so
+excessively uncomfortable, he came to have but a poor opinion of his
+courage. He was one of those men who, even without knowing it, take
+profound observations of their fellow-creatures. The true observer of
+human nature is by no means a personage who is always on the strain
+after insight into character. He is, on the contrary, pretty generally
+an inward-looking man, who seems to notice little, and takes in his
+surroundings as the immortal Joey Ladle did his wine. Philip judged
+Barter to be a nervous man, and supposed him, even when strung to
+his bent, to have no great tenacity or continuance of courage. He had
+learned more and more to believe his father’s story, though he had
+perhaps too carefully guarded himself from his own eager desire to
+accept it Barter’s every action with the cards offered confirmation
+of the belief that he had taken possession of the lost notes. He
+was certainly a petty rascal, and there was obviously nothing but
+opportunity needed to make him bloom into a rascal on a larger scale. So
+the temptation to drop the cards upon the table, to look his companion
+in the face, and to ask simply, ‘How about that eight thousand pounds?’
+grew more and more upon him, and had to be more and more strenuously
+resisted. It seemed worth while to resist it To begin with, if young
+Barter should be innocent, the querist could evidently expect nothing
+else than to be taken for a madman. To continue, if his name and the
+likeness to his father had already set the thief upon his guard, and
+had prepared him for accusation, the question would only reveal his own
+suspicion, and thereby weaken the chances of discovery.
+
+Philip combated his inward desire, but could not quell it. There seemed
+a kind of intuition in it, a lurking certainty lay hidden behind all the
+doubts he saw, and pushed him forward.
+
+By and by young Mr. Barter tripped on the false cut, which he had
+hitherto executed with a fair amateur dexterity.
+
+‘Excuse me,’ said Phil, as he gathered the spilt cards together. ‘You
+should make the three separate motions look like one. Do the trick so.’
+
+He performed the trick slowly, looking Barter in the face, and then went
+through it swiftly.
+
+‘That is how the thing ought to be done, Mr. Barter,’ he said, with a
+placidity which his companion found singularly disquieting.
+
+And now, that same unhappy want of self-command which had given
+Steinberg so clear an insight into his young friend’s mind, fell once
+more upon Barter. He tried to look wondering, he tried to laugh. The
+result of that frightened contortion of the features was nothing less
+than ghastly. Unhappily for himself he knew it, and so he grew ghastlier
+yet, and for the life of him could not tell where to set his eyes.
+
+‘So you’re a sharper in a small way, are you, Mr. Barter?’ Philip
+inquired suavely.
+
+‘How dare you talk to me like that?’ the detected rascal stammered. ‘You
+come into a gentleman’s rooms, and lose an odd half-crown or two----’
+
+When he had got as far as this he ventured to look his companion in the
+face, and seeing there a very marked and readable prophecy of unpleasant
+things, he backed, and in the act of doing so, tripped, and fell into a
+chair. The intention in Phil’s mind became simply unconquerable. He cast
+rapidly about him for an instant, saw all the consequences of failure
+which might follow if he denounced the trembling wretch at once, and set
+him on his guard. And yet he could not help doing what he did, and could
+not restrain the words which rose to his lips. He took Barter by the
+collar, and lifted him to his feet with an unsuspected strength, and put
+the question to him quietly.
+
+‘How many of those stolen notes has Steinberg changed for you?’
+
+It was a bold thing to do, it was perhaps a foolish thing to do, and yet
+it was the game. Barter stared at him speechlessly. His lips moved, but
+he said nothing. Then his jaw fell as a dead man’s jaw falls, and being
+released at that instant, he dropped into the chair like a sack.
+
+‘Now the best thing for you to do,’ said Phil, sternly regarding him,
+‘will be to make a clean breast of it. I have been tracking you since
+the second day of our acquaintance.’
+
+Barter groaned, with a tremulous and hollow sound, but made no other
+answer.
+
+‘How many of those notes are in Steinberg’s hands?’ Phil asked.
+
+The rascal’s wits had begun to work again, if only a little, and he
+could by this time have answered if he would. But he knew that his
+own cowardice, if nothing else, had given away the game. After such a
+confession as his own terror had made, what was the use of bluster
+or pretence? He could not guess how much was known. He was completely
+cornered, and must fight or yield. His native instinct at any moment was
+ready to teach him how much discretion was the better part of valour,
+and now to fight seemed mere madness. In the very terror of the night
+which thus suddenly enveloped him he saw one gleam of hope. There was
+one stroke to be made which might save him, in part at least, from the
+consequences of his own misdeed.
+
+Philip gave these reflections but little time to grow distinct to
+Barter’s mind.
+
+‘How many of those notes?’ he asked slowly, emphasising almost every
+word by a tap of his knuckles upon the table, ‘have passed into
+Steinberg’s hands?’
+
+‘All,’ gasped Barter; ‘every one of them!’
+
+‘That will do for the present,’ said Philip, and at that instant there
+came a loud summons at the door, whereat the miserable Barter started,
+and clasped his hands in renewed terror. He fancied an officer of
+justice there, his arrival accurately timed.
+
+Philip, throwing a glance about the room, and assuring himself that
+there was no means of unobserved exit, answered the summons in person.
+He had until that moment kept perfect possession of himself except
+for his obedience to that overmastering intuition, but beholding Mr.
+Steinberg at the doorway he felt a great leap at his heart, and a sudden
+dryness in his throat. He examined these phenomena afterwards, and
+decided in his own mind that they were assignable to fear. He came to
+the belief which he cherishes until now, that he had to screw up his
+courage pretty tightly before he could face the idea of confronting the
+partners in rascality together. But here it may be observed in passing
+that this kind of self-depreciation is a favourite trick with men of
+unusual nerve, and is rarely resorted to by any but the most courageous.
+
+Steinberg recognised him by the light of the gas-lamp.
+
+‘Good-evening,’ he said, nodding. ‘Barter’s here, I suppose.’
+
+‘Sir,’ said Phil, with recovered coolness, a certain light of humour
+dawning in his mind, ‘Mr. Barter is within, and I have no doubt will be
+very happy to see you.’
+
+Steinberg cast a sidelong glance at him, and entered. Phil closed
+the door, and followed close upon his heels. Barter, with his pale
+complexion fallen to the tint of dead ashes, sat huddled in the
+arm-chair, staring white-eyed like a frightened madman. Steinberg stared
+back at him in sheer amazement at his looks, and Phil, closing the door,
+turned the key in the lock and pocketed it.
+
+‘Hillo!’ cried Steinberg, turning swiftly round at the click, ‘what’s
+this mean?’ He measured Philip with his eye--a very evil and wicked eye
+it was--and dropped back a step or two.
+
+‘What’s this mean?’ Steinberg asked again, his quick glance darting from
+one to the other.
+
+‘It means, sir,’ said Phil, with a glad tranquillity, ‘that your
+fellow-scoundrel, the courageous gentleman in the arm-chair there, is in
+the act of making his confession.’
+
+Steinberg sent one savage glance at Barter, and then dashed at him, and
+planting both hands within the collar of his shirt, so banged him to and
+fro that he would inevitably have done him a mischief of a serious
+sort but for Phil’s intervention. The method of intervention was
+less tranquil than Philip’s motion up to this time had been. He tore
+Steinberg from his grip of the betrayer with a force he had no time to
+measure, and hurled him across the room. He staggered at the door,
+and his head coming noisily in contact with it, he slipped down into a
+sitting posture with an expression suddenly changed from ferocity to a
+complete vacuity and indifference.
+
+Now Mr. Barter, scared as he had been, and shaken to his centre, had
+begun to think again, and when he saw that Steinberg’s chance in the
+enemy’s hands was less than nothing, that fact formed as it were the
+last necessary plank for the raft of safety he desired to construct. He
+got up from his place, animated by this great idea, and staggering to
+the helpless Steinberg, fell down beside him and gripped his hands.
+
+‘Tie him, Mr. Bommaney, tie him!’ gurgled Barter. ‘He’s been the ruin
+of me, curse him. I should have been an honest man if it hadn’t been for
+him. It’s him that led me into it, and he’s had every sixpence of the
+money. I’ve been his tool, his miserable tool. Tie him, Mr. Bommaney,
+before he comes round again. I’ll hold him for you.’
+
+One may get good advice from the most unexpected quarter, and
+whencesoever good advice may come it is worth while to follow it. Phil
+took a dandy scarf from Steinberg’s own neck, and tied him tightly,
+wrist to wrist Then he helped him to his feet, and set him in a chair.
+
+‘He came here to-night,’ Barter gurgled on, with tears of sincerest
+penitence, ‘to bleed me again. He’s got my I.O.U. for £82 he cheated me
+of last week. He’s had every penny of the money. I haven’t had so much
+as a single farthing of it myself. I’ll swear I haven’t.’
+
+‘That’s your lay, is it?’ said Steinberg, whose scattered wits were
+coming back to him. ‘You shall answer for this violence in the proper
+quarter, Bommaney.’
+
+‘I will answer for it in the proper quarter,’ Phil replied. ‘I will
+trouble you, Mr. Steinberg, to come to the proper quarter now.’
+
+‘You won’t forget,’ said Barter, ‘that I helped to capture him. You’ll
+speak a word for me, Mr. Bommaney?
+
+‘I’ve been that villain’s victim all along. I should never have gone
+wrong if it hadn’t been for him, and I’ve wanted to send the money back
+over and over again, but he got it into his own hands and wouldn’t
+listen to it, and after all I never took the money, Mr. Bommaney--I only
+found it. It was Steinberg kept it. He said I should be a fool to let it
+go.’
+
+What sentiments of contempt and rage inspired Mr. Steinberg’s bosom
+at this juncture must be imagined. He looked them all, but verbally
+expressed none of them.
+
+‘Get up,’ said Phil, addressing him. Steinberg obeyed. ‘Take a seat in
+that corner.’ Steinberg obeyed again. ‘Now you--’ to Barter, ‘take a
+place in that corner, behind the desk.’
+
+‘With pleasure, Mr. Bommaney,’ said Barter, ‘with the very greatest
+willingness. I desire to make no resistance to the law. I helped to
+capture the criminal Please remember that, Mr. Bommaney. Pray remember
+that.’
+
+He took hold of a heavy ruler which happened to be lying on the desk,
+and deeming that he and the other rascal were about to be left alone
+together, he showed it shakily to Steinberg, as a hint that he was not
+without means of protection against a man unarmed and bound.
+
+Phil unlocked the door, inserted the key on the other side, disappeared,
+and turned the lock anew. The two criminals heard his footstep sounding
+elate, triumphant, and threatening to their ears as he went along the
+boarded floor. They listened as the footstep crossed the square boulders
+of the courtyard, and listened still until their sound melted into the
+blended noises of the outer street. A minute later the step was heard
+returning, accompanied by another, solid and terrible. They knew it, and
+their hearts, low as they were already, sank at it. The door opened and
+Phil reappeared, followed by a policeman.
+
+‘I give these two in charge,’ the young man said, ‘the one as the thief,
+the other as the receiver of a bundle of bank-notes of the value of
+eight thousand pounds, the property of my father, Mr. Philip Bommaney of
+Coalporter’s Alley.’
+
+‘I’m quite willing to go without resistance,’ said Mr. Barter from
+behind the table. ‘I assisted in the capture, and I am ready to say
+anything.’
+
+‘That’s the first true word you’ve spoken,’ Steinberg snarled. ‘You can
+take this thing off,’ holding out his hands. ‘I’ll go quietly. I can get
+bail in an hour.’
+
+‘Don’t have it taken off, Mr. Bommaney, not if we’re to travel in the
+same vehicle. He threatened me while you were away. He said if they
+gave him fifty years he’d kill me when he came out again. He’ll do it,
+because I made a clean breast of it, didn’t I, Mr. Bommaney? I made a
+clean breast of it, officer. I’m ready to--tell everything. He’s ruined
+me, and now he says he’ll kill me because I’m ready to make a clean
+breast of it.’
+
+‘I choose to be taken separately, if you please. I myself will pay the
+fare. I won’t travel with that cackling idiot.’
+
+‘I will go with Mr. Bommaney with pleasure,’ said the penitent. ‘I’ll go
+with you with pleasure anywhere. I’d rather go with you a great deal.’
+
+It was hardly to be expected that Philip should feel very warmly towards
+either of his two companions, but of the two he misliked Steinberg the
+less. And, since it seemed humane and reasonable to choose, he chose
+Steinberg as his travelling companion. The officer set Steinberg’s hat
+upon his head, and the quartet set out. The sight of a man with his
+hands tightly bound with a scarlet muffler gathered a momentary little
+crowd at the Inn gate; but, a pair of hansoms being summoned, captives
+and captors were speedily relieved from vulgar observation. The station
+reached, it turned out that the communicative Mr. Barter, in the
+exuberance of his heart, had exposed to the officer _en route_ the
+whereabouts of the lost notes. He declared that to his knowledge they
+rested in a safe, the position of which he indicated, in Steinberg’s
+Hatton Garden office. The Inspector before whom the charge was made
+deemed this intelligence worthy of being acted on at once. The two
+prisoners were searched, and Mr. Barter was so good as to point out,
+among Steinberg’s keys, those which were necessary for the purposes of
+investigation. He even went so far as to offer his assistance as guide;
+but this was declined with a chilliness singularly at variance with the
+solicitous warmth of the proposal.
+
+‘I think, sir,’ said the Inspector, with an arctic disrespect which was
+so frozen as to be almost respectful, ‘that we can manage this without
+your assistance.’
+
+The Divisional Superintendent, being communicated with by telephone,
+arrived upon the scene. The matter in hand having been laid before him
+with curt official brevity, he asked for the keys, called to himself a
+constable, and was preparing to set out, when Philip begged permission
+to accompany him.
+
+‘The notes, sir,’ he said, ‘were left in my father’s trust by a dear
+old friend of his. My father himself was supposed to have made use of
+them--a thing of which he was incapable. If I can take to him the news
+that they are found, I can lift a load of undeserved disgrace from the
+mind of an honourable man.’
+
+‘I shall be pleased to have your company, Mr. Bommaney,’ the
+Superintendent answered, touched a little by the young man’s
+earnestness. So the three got into a four-wheeler, and bowled away to
+Hatton Garden, and there made entry into the chambers lately occupied by
+Mr. Steinberg. There was no gas here, but the constable’s dark lantern
+showed the way. It revealed the safe in the position the communicative
+criminal had assigned to it. It revealed the notes, snugly spread out in
+one crisp little heap, and arranged with business-like precision in the
+order of their numbers.
+
+This golden spectacle once seen, Phil dashed into the street, hailed a
+hansom, and drove pell-mell, exciting the cabman who conducted him by
+the promise of a double fare, to the residence of old Brown and old
+Brown’s daughter. There he told the glorious news, a little broken and
+halting in his speech. Patty threw her arms about him, and cried without
+concealment or restraint. Old Brown blew his nose with a suspicious
+frequency, and shook his adopted son-in-law by the hand at frequent
+intervals.
+
+‘Phil,’ he cried at last, ‘where’s your father? By God, sir, he never
+had any need to run away from me, because he happened to lose a handful
+of paltry money. What had he got to do but come and say, “Brown, it’s
+gone!” He hadn’t trust enough in me to think I’d believe him. Let’s get
+at him. Where is he?’
+
+The old boy tugged furiously at the bell-pull.
+
+‘Send Brenner round to the stable,’ he said to the servant. ‘Tell him
+to get the horses to, and bring the carriage round at once. Where’s your
+father, Phil?’
+
+‘He’s down Poplar way,’ said Phil. ‘Hornett, his old clerk, is living in
+the same house with him.’
+
+‘We’ll go down, and rouse him up,’ the old boy said, with a moist eye
+and trembling hand. ‘Phil, my lad,’ he went on, grasping the young
+fellow’s hand in his own, ‘I’m getting to be an old ‘un. You wouldn’t
+think it to look at me, because, thank God, I’ve always known how to
+take my trouble lightly, but I’ve seen a lot of it in my time, and you
+can take my word for this--there isn’t any trouble in the world that’s
+hardly so bitter as for an honest man to have to take another for a
+rogue.’
+
+So it came to pass that Bommaney senior, who after all, perhaps, hardly
+deserved to be made a hero of, was plenteously bedewed with the tears of
+three most honourable and high-minded people, and was, set up in their
+minds as a sort of live statue of undeserved martyrdom. They who learned
+the tale afterwards mourned his weakness, and supposed him to be the
+victim of a too sensitive organisation. He lives now with a genuine halo
+of sanctity about him, and seems in the minds of some to have suffered
+for the sake of a great principle, quite noble, but not quite definitely
+defined.
+
+Odd things happen every day in the world, and pass by unregarded. The
+worship of Bommaney senior’s sensibilities seems a trifle dull when all
+things are considered, though one has to be glad that an honest son can
+think of him with pity mixed with admiration. But perhaps the oddest
+thing of all in connection with this story may be looked for in the
+shorthand reporter’s notes of the Recorder’s speech at the Old Bailey,
+when the accusation against Messrs. Barter and Steinberg came to be
+heard.
+
+‘You, Barter,’ said the learned Recorder, ‘appear to have been drawn
+into this by the influence of an intelligence stronger and abler than
+your own. You appear, in a moment of weakness, to have been led away
+by that stronger intelligence from the paths of rectitude. But you have
+displayed so clear a sense of the enormity of your conduct, and have,
+by your complete disclosures of the crime committed by you and your
+companion, and, by your evidence in Court to-day, shown so complete a
+repentance for it, that I do not think that it would be politic or just
+to lay a severe term of imprisonment upon you. Nevertheless, the law of
+the land must be justified, and I feel a pleasure in believing that in
+justifying the law I am affording you an opportunity for reflection, for
+the formation of good resolutions for the future, and for a confirmation
+of those better desires which I believe--in spite of your association
+with this criminal enterprise--to animate your mind.’
+
+Now, to my fancy, this has a distinct element of comedy in it; but the
+learned Recorder resembled some of his unlearned brethren, in respect to
+the fact that he could not be expected to know everything.
+
+Mr. Barter thrives again, but he is even now awaiting, with the
+uneasiest sensations, the liberation of the man who betrayed him into
+crime.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Young Mr. Barter’s Repentance, by
+David Christie Murray
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