By Gosh! the thing had happened, and would have to be made the best
of. The boy would come round, by-and-by. Thompson Jowell folded the
newspaper, and walked down the alley to his office, and rolled in
amongst the pale-faced clerks, who did not dare to lift their heads
from their ledgers, knowing what they knew already, and went in silence
to his private room.
And Chobley, the Manager, peeping out of his own little glass-case,
said to himself that it would be better to leave his employer to
himself for a little. Hence we may gather that Chobley had peeped into
the Admiralty telegram that lay waiting on the blotting-pad.
Jowell opened it, sitting at his table. It briefly conveyed the news,
and condoled with him on the irreparable loss of his gallant son. He
did not collapse as on a previous occasion. He sat very still after
he had read the message, with his ghastly face hidden in his thick,
shaking hands.
His son, for whom he had saved, and planned, and plotted, and swindled,
who was to become a Titled Nob and found a race of Nobs that should
carry down into remote posterity the glories of the paternal name, had
repudiated the name, and cast off his father, and gone down to death,
defying and disowning him.
He lifted his livid face and rolled his bloodshot eyes about the
office, and the sentences of the letter he had burned seemed written
on the dingy wall-paper and woven into the dirty carpet on the floor.
An organ in the street was grinding out a popular air, and they
fitted themselves to it, were jarred out over and over in maddening
repetition. He knew that he must soon go mad if this sort of thing went
on.
* * * * *
There was courage in the man. He took pen and paper and wrote a letter
to the firm of underwriters who had insured _The Realm_, making it
clear that he would accord no grace in the matter of the great sum they
would have to pay. His name was Peter Prompt in such matters, he added,
and had always been. And then he penned an additional sentence or so
that made the Senior Partner open his eyes.
His letter directed, sealed and stamped, he pulled himself out of his
chair, took his umbrella from its usual corner, and went about his City
business in the usual way. Save that his eyes were bloodshot, and that
he wore no hat, there was nothing out of the common in his appearance.
Yet, wherever he went, by something that, unknown to him, kept cropping
up in his conversation--he left the impression that grief had turned
his brain.
He became conscious ere long that he was bareheaded, and supplied
himself with the needed article--with the latest thing in mourning
bands upon it--at his hatter’s in Cornhill. Leaving the shop, he
blundered into the capacious waistcoat of Sowell, who was walking
arm-in-arm with Powell and Cowell. And they wrung his hands and
tenderly condoled with him, lengthening their faces that were expanded
in irrepressible smiles of happiness, and squeezing tears into eyes
that were twinkling with relief and joy.
For the wreck of _The Realm_ had saved the credit of the Army
Contractors. The quills of Tussell of _The Thunderbolt_ and those
other War Correspondents who told barbed truths were robbed of their
venom. They were to be feared no more. Henceforth everything that was
lacking to the health and comfort of the British Eastern Expedition
would be proved to have been contained in that capacious scapegoat.
There would be no end to the possibilities of the transport--safe at
the bottom of Balaklava Bay.
And the sacrifice of young Mortimer had wreathed the crime of Jowell
with a halo of impeccability. Sowell, Cowell, Powell and Co. could
hardly refrain from chuckling, and digging him in the ribs. And they
bore him off to lunch with them in a private room at a well-known
City tavern, where Bowell, Dowell, Crowell, Shoell, and others of
the fraternity were to meet them by appointment. And they plied the
bereaved parent with meats and wines, and flattered and cockered him.
After the cloth was drawn, their exultation bubbled over. There were
toasts and speeches, full of allusions of the sly and subtle kind.
And the health of their idol being drunk with acclamations, he got up
heavily out of his chair to make a speech.
“Gentlemen...” he began.
There were protestations. Cowell would rather have heard the words
“_My friends_” from the lips of a man so endeared to those present
by long years of business association and successful enterprise, as his
honored friend, Thompson Jowell. There were cries of “Hear, hear!” at
this.
“By Gosh! You shall have your way!” said Jowell thickly, beating his
big knuckles heavily on the shiny mahogany. Then he cleared his throat
and began:
“My friends, if you do this thing that you have planned to do I will
never come home again or call myself by your name, or take another
sixpence of your money. Don’t do it, Governor! Don’t do it, for God’s
sake! He might forgive you! I never should, I know!”
He smiled upon the sickened faces round the table, waiting for the
applause that should have greeted the shoddy sentiment he had intended
to dish up for them.... He did not know that he had repeated the
words of his dead son’s last letter; or that he had wound up his
communication to the underwriters by quoting them.
He must have left the confederates staring, for he found himself in the
street, walking Westwards at a great rate.... It was now dark, and very
wet--and the people who passed him were for the most part sheltered by
umbrellas, and omitted to notice the stout man in the mourning hatband
and flaring waistcoat, who walked with his coat unbuttoned heedless of
the pouring rain.... But it seemed to Jowell that eyes followed him,
and fingers pointed at him--and that the sentences of Mortimer’s last
letter flared at him from every hoarding, and were written in fiery
characters upon the pavement under his feet.
He let himself into the great house in Hanover Square, shut up and
blinded and looked after, in his absence from town--by a housekeeper
and an under-butler. He was expected, and preparations had been made
to receive him. But, explaining to the curtseying housekeeper that he
would want no dinner, he passed into his sumptuous library and locked
the door. Nobody ventured to disturb him, and when he came out it was
nearly midnight. To the under-butler, who was waiting up to valet him,
he spoke quite gently, bidding him fasten up the house and go to rest.
And then he took his candlestick from the hall-table and passed up the
wide, shallow-stepped, softly-carpeted staircase and went into the
splendid suite of rooms he had furnished for his boy....
* * * * *
Evidences of the young man’s sporting tastes were not lacking in the
driving-whips and fishing-rods, single-sticks, fencing-foils and
boxing-gloves that--in conjunction with divers brilliantly-colored
pictorial representations of Stars of the Ballet, and Beauties of the
Harem, yachts winning cups, favorite racers winning the Derby, and Pets
of the Prize-Ring winning Championships--decorated the walls.
The costly inlaid banjo, upon which the hope of the House of Jowell
had been wont to thrum out the accompaniment to “Villikins and His
Dinah,” lay upon a cedar cigar-cabinet, beside an Oriental divan
stood the gilded _huqua_ that had never failed to make its owner
deadly sick. A Turkish dressing-gown lay over a chair--an embroidered
smoking-cap hung upon the corner of a gilded reading-stand.... Upon a
table stood the Ensign’s library, consisting of an English Dictionary,
a Bible presented by his mother on his tenth birthday; some Manuals
of Infantry Drill and Musketry; sundry lives of celebrated pugilists,
Ruff’s _Guide to the Turf_, the _Stud Book_, _Stonehenge on
the Horse_, _Hoyle on Whist_, and the _Sporting Almanac_.
It had been the father’s whim that Mortimer’s rooms should be kept
exactly as Mortimer had left them, and that nothing the Ensign had
forgotten should be moved, or put away. There was a pair of doeskin
military gloves he had worn, lying upon the toilet-table in the
bedroom. And a strap that had formed part of a sword-belt lay forgotten
upon the Brussels carpet near the foot of the bed.
Thompson Jowell picked up the strap, and as he set down his
candlestick, he ran it between his fingers, remembering that it had
belonged to his son, who, rather than be defiled by the golden mud that
every roll in the gutter crusted more thickly upon him, had cast him
off and chosen to die.
“I’m piling it up for you, Morty, my boy,” he heard himself saying,
as he laid himself down heavily into the armchair by the huge carved
four-poster, and sat there staring, and drumming heavily with his fists
upon his knees.
* * * * *
He had throughout his life been a man destitute of imagination. Now, at
this final hour, the gift was born in him. He heard thousands of voices
cursing him. He saw thousands of blackened hands pointing at him. He
knew himself a murderer. He realized that the millions he had gained by
fraud and trickery had bought him estate in Hell.
* * * * *
“My name’s Done Brown--that’s what it is,” he muttered, thickly.
He lifted a shaking hand to wipe the cold sweat from his forehead,
and started as the strap of the sword-belt dangled before his eyes.
He lowered his hand and looked intently at the narrow band of tough,
doubled buff-leather; pipeclayed, and having a solid gilt-brass ring
stitched and riveted in the loop at either end. As he turned it
musingly about in his fingers, he found that, doubled, and pushed
through one of the gilt rings, it made a slip-noose. Then Imagination
suggested the thing that he might do. No thought of the dowdy woman
weeping for her son in the lonely house at Market Drowsing came to stay
him. She had never been anything to Thompson Jowell but the mother of
his son....
The thought of Mortimer spurred him to the act of desperation. He
got up and went to the door that led from the bedroom into the
luxuriously-furnished apartment adjoining, where the Stars of the
Ballet and the Beauties of the Harem simpered from the walls. He
measured its height with his eye--rolled an ottoman, worked in Berlin
wools by Mortimer’s mother, to the right position--got heavily upon
it--threw an end of the buff strap over the top of the door--shut the
door, and put the noose about his short, thick neck. Then, supporting
himself by the wooden molding of the upper framework--he drove the
ottoman from him with a clumsy kick and flourish of his stumpy legs....
Lights danced before his eyes that might have been the fires of a
distant camp. There were explosions in his ears that might have been
the thirty-four pounders speaking from the batteries. There was a
hissing as of steam from flooded engine-furnaces--and a crying and
shouting as of men packed and crowded together upon the bursting decks
of a great transport that was going down....
And then there was nothing but the dead body of a gross stout man in
shiny broadcloth--hanging behind the door of the bedroom--waiting to
scare the life out of the housekeeper when she looked in at seven upon
a bright November morning to pull up the window-blinds.
* * * * *
The decision of the Coroner’s jury was that grief for the death of his
son had temporarily unhinged the mind of the great Contractor, and
there were many expressions of sympathy for the widow, and there was a
pompous Funeral.
Cowell, Sowell, and the rest of the fraternity attended the solemnity.
They shook their heads regretfully, and the water stood in their eyes.
They said that he had been the very devil, sir! and that there never
had been a man like him, and that there might never be another; and
added that they were surprised he had left as little as three millions
behind him--considering his opportunities!--and that they shouldn’t
wonder if the gross amount turned out to be a great deal more!
It did; much to the benefit of the various charities among which the
great fortune was divided by his widow, carrying out the expressed
wishes of the son who would never have been his heir.
But even from the grave, his gross and greedy hand bore heavily
upon the Army; nor has his spirit been altogether exorcised up
to the present day. A Jowell was mixed up in the Forage and
Remount scandals--which occupied the attention of a Commission of
Inquiry--subsequently to the close of the most recent South African War.
It was a Neapolitan descendant of his--one Thompsono Jowelli--who
washed the oats destined for the Artillery horses of the Italian Army
in Tripoli, who filled up the Commissariat cattle with dry hay and
coarse salt--drove them to the weighing-machines past those water-tanks
in the Via Angioina--kept back part of the shipments of coffee and
sugar intended for the troops--carried it back to its original
starting-point, and re-sold it to the Government. And of these, as in
the case of their distinguished forerunner, the inevitable lesson must
be learned in the long-run.
No man can plunder and defraud the community without injuring and
despoiling himself.