V.

IT tormented him so the next morning that after threshing it out a little

further he felt he had something of a grievance. Mrs. Ryves’s

intervention had made him acutely uncomfortable, for she had taken the

attitude of exerting pressure without, it appeared, recognising on his

part an equal right. She had imposed herself as an influence, yet she

held herself aloof as a participant; there were things she looked to him

to do for her, yet she could tell him of no good that would come to him

from the doing. She should either have had less to say or have been

willing to say more, and he asked himself why he should be the sport of

her moods and her mysteries. He perceived her knack of punctual

interference to be striking, but it was just this apparent infallibility

that he resented. Why didn’t she set up at once as a professional

clairvoyant and eke out her little income more successfully? In purely

private life such a gift was disconcerting; her divinations, her evasions

disturbed at any rate his own tranquillity.

What disturbed it still further was that he received early in the day a

visit from Mr. Locket, who, leaving him under no illusion as to the

grounds of such an honour, remarked as soon as he had got into the room

or rather while he still panted on the second flight and the smudged

little slavey held open Baron’s door, that he had taken up his young

friend’s invitation to look at Sir Dominick Ferrand’s letters for

himself. Peter drew them forth with a promptitude intended to show that

he recognised the commercial character of the call and without

attenuating the inconsequence of this departure from the last

determination he had expressed to Mr. Locket. He showed his visitor the

davenport and the hidden recess, and he smoked a cigarette, humming

softly, with a sense of unwonted advantage and triumph, while the

cautious editor sat silent and handled the papers. For all his caution

Mr. Locket was unable to keep a warmer light out of his judicial eye as

he said to Baron at last with sociable brevity—a tone that took many

things for granted: “I’ll take them home with me—they require much

attention.”

The young man looked at him a moment. “Do you think they’re genuine?”

He didn’t mean to be mocking, he meant not to be; but the words sounded

so to his own ear, and he could see that they produced that effect on Mr.

Locket.

“I can’t in the least determine. I shall have to go into them at my

leisure, and that’s why I ask you to lend them to me.”

He had shuffled the papers together with a movement charged, while he

spoke, with the air of being preliminary to that of thrusting them into a

little black bag which he had brought with him and which, resting on the

shelf of the davenport, struck Peter, who viewed it askance, as an object

darkly editorial. It made our young man, somehow, suddenly apprehensive;

the advantage of which he had just been conscious was about to be

transferred by a quiet process of legerdemain to a person who already had

advantages enough. Baron, in short, felt a deep pang of anxiety; he

couldn’t have said why. Mr. Locket took decidedly too many things for

granted, and the explorer of Sir Dominick Ferrand’s irregularities

remembered afresh how clear he had been after all about his indisposition

to traffic in them. He asked his visitor to what end he wished to remove

the letters, since on the one hand there was no question now of the

article in the Promiscuous which was to reveal their existence, and on

the other he himself, as their owner, had a thousand insurmountable

scruples about putting them into circulation.

Mr. Locket looked over his spectacles as over the battlements of a

fortress. “I’m not thinking of the end—I’m thinking of the beginning. A

few glances have assured me that such documents ought to be submitted to

some competent eye.”

“Oh, you mustn’t show them to anyone!” Baron exclaimed.

“You may think me presumptuous, but the eye that I venture to allude to

in those terms—”

“Is the eye now fixed so terribly on _me_?” Peter laughingly interrupted.

“Oh, it would be interesting, I confess, to know how they strike a man of

your acuteness!” It had occurred to him that by such a concession he

might endear himself to a literary umpire hitherto implacable. There

would be no question of his publishing Sir Dominick Ferrand, but he

might, in due acknowledgment of services rendered, form the habit of

publishing Peter Baron. “How long would it be your idea to retain them?”

he inquired, in a manner which, he immediately became aware, was what

incited Mr. Locket to begin stuffing the papers into his bag. With this

perception he came quickly closer and, laying his hand on the gaping

receptacle, lightly drew its two lips together. In this way the two men

stood for a few seconds, touching, almost in the attitude of combat,

looking hard into each other’s eyes.

The tension was quickly relieved however by the surprised flush which

mantled on Mr. Locket’s brow. He fell back a few steps with an injured

dignity that might have been a protest against physical violence.

“Really, my dear young sir, your attitude is tantamount to an accusation

of intended bad faith. Do you think I want to steal the confounded

things?” In reply to such a challenge Peter could only hastily declare

that he was guilty of no discourteous suspicion—he only wanted a limit

named, a pledge of every precaution against accident. Mr. Locket

admitted the justice of the demand, assured him he would restore the

property within three days, and completed, with Peter’s assistance, his

little arrangements for removing it discreetly. When he was ready, his

treacherous reticule distended with its treasures, he gave a lingering

look at the inscrutable davenport. “It’s how they ever got into that

thing that puzzles one’s brain!”

“There was some concatenation of circumstances that would doubtless seem

natural enough if it were explained, but that one would have to remount

the stream of time to ascertain. To one course I have definitely made up

my mind: not to make any statement or any inquiry at the shop. I simply

accept the mystery,” said Peter, rather grandly.

“That would be thought a cheap escape if you were to put it into a

story,” Mr. Locket smiled.

“Yes, I shouldn’t offer the story to _you_. I shall be impatient till I

see my papers again,” the young man called out, as his visitor hurried

downstairs.

That evening, by the last delivery, he received, under the Dover

postmark, a letter that was not from Miss Teagle. It was a slightly

confused but altogether friendly note, written that morning after

breakfast, the ostensible purpose of which was to thank him for the

amiability of his visit, to express regret at any appearance the writer

might have had of meddling with what didn’t concern her, and to let him

know that the evening before, after he had left her, she had in a moment

of inspiration got hold of the tail of a really musical idea—a perfect

accompaniment for the song he had so kindly given her. She had scrawled,

as a specimen, a few bars at the end of her note, mystic, mocking musical

signs which had no sense for her correspondent. The whole letter

testified to a restless but rather pointless desire to remain in

communication with him. In answering her, however, which he did that

night before going to bed, it was on this bright possibility of their

collaboration, its advantages for the future of each of them, that Baron

principally expatiated. He spoke of this future with an eloquence of

which he would have defended the sincerity, and drew of it a picture

extravagantly rich. The next morning, as he was about to settle himself

to tasks for some time terribly neglected, with a sense that after all it

was rather a relief not to be sitting so close to Sir Dominick Ferrand,

who had become dreadfully distracting; at the very moment at which he

habitually addressed his preliminary invocation to the muse, he was

agitated by the arrival of a telegram which proved to be an urgent

request from Mr. Locket that he would immediately come down and see him.

This represented, for poor Baron, whose funds were very low, another

morning sacrificed, but somehow it didn’t even occur to him that he might

impose his own time upon the editor of the Promiscuous, the keeper of the

keys of renown. He had some of the plasticity of the raw contributor.

He gave the muse another holiday, feeling she was really ashamed to take

it, and in course of time found himself in Mr. Locket’s own chair at Mr.

Locket’s own table—so much nobler an expanse than the slippery slope of

the davenport—considering with quick intensity, in the white flash of

certain words just brought out by his host, the quantity of happiness, of

emancipation that might reside in a hundred pounds.

Yes, that was what it meant: Mr. Locket, in the twenty-four hours, had

discovered so much in Sir Dominick’s literary remains that his visitor

found him primed with an offer. A hundred pounds would be paid him that

day, that minute, and no questions would be either asked or answered. “I

take all the risks, I take all the risks,” the editor of the Promiscuous

repeated. The letters were out on the table, Mr. Locket was on the

hearthrug, like an orator on a platform, and Peter, under the influence

of his sudden ultimatum, had dropped, rather weakly, into the seat which

happened to be nearest and which, as he became conscious it moved on a

pivot, he whirled round so as to enable himself to look at his tempter

with an eye intended to be cold. What surprised him most was to find Mr.

Locket taking exactly the line about the expediency of publication which

he would have expected Mr. Locket not to take. “Hush it all up; a barren

scandal, an offence that can’t be remedied, is the thing in the world

that least justifies an airing—” some such line as that was the line he

would have thought natural to a man whose life was spent in weighing

questions of propriety and who had only the other day objected, in the

light of this virtue, to a work of the most disinterested art. But the

author of that incorruptible masterpiece had put his finger on the place

in saying to his interlocutor on the occasion of his last visit that, if

given to the world in the pages of the Promiscuous, Sir Dominick’s

aberrations would sell the edition. It was not necessary for Mr. Locket

to reiterate to his young friend his phrase about their making a

sensation. If he wished to purchase the “rights,” as theatrical people

said, it was not to protect a celebrated name or to lock them up in a

cupboard. That formula of Baron’s covered all the ground, and one

edition was a low estimate of the probable performance of the magazine.

Peter left the letters behind him and, on withdrawing from the editorial

presence, took a long walk on the Embankment. His impressions were at

war with each other—he was flurried by possibilities of which he yet

denied the existence. He had consented to trust Mr. Locket with the

papers a day or two longer, till he should have thought out the terms on

which he might—in the event of certain occurrences—be induced to dispose

of them. A hundred pounds were not this gentleman’s last word, nor

perhaps was mere unreasoning intractability Peter’s own. He sighed as he

took no note of the pictures made by barges—sighed because it all might

mean money. He needed money bitterly; he owed it in disquieting

quarters. Mr. Locket had put it before him that he had a high

responsibility—that he might vindicate the disfigured truth, contribute a

chapter to the history of England. “You haven’t a right to suppress such

momentous facts,” the hungry little editor had declared, thinking how the

series (he would spread it into three numbers) would be the talk of the

town. If Peter had money he might treat himself to ardour, to bliss.

Mr. Locket had said, no doubt justly enough, that there were ever so many

questions one would have to meet should one venture to play so daring a

game. These questions, embarrassments, dangers—the danger, for instance,

of the cropping-up of some lurking litigious relative—he would take over

unreservedly and bear the brunt of dealing with. It was to be remembered

that the papers were discredited, vitiated by their childish pedigree;

such a preposterous origin, suggesting, as he had hinted before, the

feeble ingenuity of a third-rate novelist, was a thing he should have to

place himself at the positive disadvantage of being silent about. He

would rather give no account of the matter at all than expose himself to

the ridicule that such a story would infallibly excite. Couldn’t one see

them in advance, the clever, taunting things the daily and weekly papers

would say? Peter Baron had his guileless side, but he felt, as he

worried with a stick that betrayed him the granite parapets of the

Thames, that he was not such a fool as not to know how Mr. Locket would

“work” the mystery of his marvellous find. Nothing could help it on

better with the public than the impenetrability of the secret attached to

it. If Mr. Locket should only be able to kick up dust enough over the

circumstances that had guided his hand his fortune would literally be

made. Peter thought a hundred pounds a low bid, yet he wondered how the

Promiscuous could bring itself to offer such a sum—so large it loomed in

the light of literary remuneration as hitherto revealed to our young man.

The explanation of this anomaly was of course that the editor shrewdly

saw a dozen ways of getting his money back. There would be in the

“sensation,” at a later stage, the making of a book in large type—the

book of the hour; and the profits of this scandalous volume or, if one

preferred the name, this reconstruction, before an impartial posterity,

of a great historical humbug, the sum “down,” in other words, that any

lively publisher would give for it, figured vividly in Mr. Locket’s

calculations. It was therefore altogether an opportunity of dealing at

first hand with the lively publisher that Peter was invited to forego.

Peter gave a masterful laugh, rejoicing in his heart that, on the spot,

in the _repaire_ he had lately quitted, he had not been tempted by a

figure that would have approximately represented the value of his

property. It was a good job, he mentally added as he turned his face

homeward, that there was so little likelihood of his having to struggle

with that particular pressure.