A MAN ABOUT TOWN PAYS A DEBT
The people in the luxurious smoking-room of the great Palace Hotel saw a
pale, ascetic-looking and very distinguished man come in to the
comfortable place and sit down upon a lounge.
"Do you know who that is?" one man whispered to another, flicking the
ash off a cigar.
"No; who is he?" his companion answered.
"That's Sir William Gouldesbrough."
"Oh, the great scientific Johnny, you mean."
"Yes, they say that he is going to turn the world topsy-turvy before
he's done."
"The world's good enough for me," was the reply, "and if I'd my way,
these people who invent things should all be taken out and shot. I'm
tired of inventions, they make life move too quickly. The good old times
were best, when it took eight hours to get from Brighton to London, and
one could not have telegrams from one's office to worry one."
"Perhaps you're right," said the first man. "But still, people look at
things differently now-a-days. At any rate, Gouldesbrough is said to be
one of the leading men in England to-day."
"He doesn't look happy over it," replied his companion. "He looks like a
death's-head."
"Well, you know, he's mixed up in the Rathbone mystery in a sort of
way."
"Oh yes, of course; he was engaged to the girl who chucked him over for
the Johnny who has disappeared, wasn't he?"
"That's it. Just watch him, poor wretch; doesn't he look pipped?"
"Upon my word, the perspiration's standing out on his forehead in beads.
He seems as if----"
"As if he had been overworking and overeating. He wants a Turkish bath,
I expect. Now then, Jones, what do you really think about the fall in
South Africans? Will they recover in the next two months? That's what I
want to know; that's what I want to be certain of."
Sir William had just left the up-stairs apartments of the Pooles. He had
rung for the lift and entered, without a word to the attendant, who had
glanced fearfully at the tall, pale man with the flashing eyes and the
wet face. Once or twice the lift-man noticed that the visitor raised his
hand to his neck above the collar and seemed to press upon it, and it
may have been fancy on the lift-man's part--though he was not an
imaginative person--but he seemed to hear a sound like a drum beating
under a blanket, and he wondered if the gentleman was troubled with
heart-disease.
Gouldesbrough pressed the little electric bell upon the oak table in
front of him, and in a moment a waiter appeared.
"Bring me a large brandy and soda," he said in a quiet voice.
The waiter bowed and hurried away.
The waiter did not know, being a foreigner, and unacquainted with the
tittle-tattle of the day, that Sir William Gouldesbrough, the famous
scientist, was generally known to be a practical teetotaller, and one
who abhorred the general use of alcoholic beverages.
When the brandy came, amber in the electric lights of the smoking-room,
and with a piece of ice floating in the liquid, Sir William took a small
white tabloid from a bottle in his pocket and dropped it into the glass.
It fizzed, spluttered, and disappeared.
Then he raised the tumbler to his lips, and as he did so the floating
ice tinkled against the sides of the glass like a tiny alarum.
"Nerves gone," the stock-broking gentleman close by said to his friend,
with a wink.
In five minutes or so, after he had lit a cigarette, Gouldesbrough rose
and left the smoking-room. He put on his coat in the hall and went out
of the front door.
It was not yet late, and the huge crescent of electric lights, which
seemed to stretch right away beyond Hove to Worthing, gleamed like a
gigantic coronet.
It was a clear night. The air was searching and keen, and it seemed to
steady the scientist as he walked down the steps and came out from under
the hotel portico on to the pavement.
A huge round moon hung over the sea, which was moaning quietly. The
lights in front of the Alhambra Music Hall gleamed brightly, and on the
promenade by the side of the shore innumerable couples paced and
re-paced amid a subdued hum of talk and laughter.
The pier stretched away into the water like a jewelled snake. It was
Brighton at ten o'clock, bright, gay, and animated.
Sir William was staying at the Brighton Royal, the other great hotel
which towers up upon the front some quarter of a mile away from the
Palace, where Marjorie and Lady Poole were.
He strode through the crowds, seeing nothing of them, hearing nothing
but the beat of his own heart.
Even for a man so strong as he, the last hour had been terrible. Never
before in all his life, at the moment of realization when some great
scientific theory had materialized into stupendous fact, when first
Marjorie had promised to marry him--at any great crisis of his life--had
he undergone so furious a strain as this of the last hour.
He came out of the Palace Hotel, knowing that he had carried out his
intentions with the most consummate success. He came out of it,
realizing that not half-a-dozen men in England could have done what he
had done, and as the keen air smote upon his face like a blow from the
flat of a sword, he realized also that not six men in England, walking
the pleasant, happy streets of any town, were so unutterably stained and
immeasurably damned as he.
As he passed through the revolving glass doors of his own hotel, and the
hall-porters touched their caps, he exerted all the powers of his will.
He would no longer remember or realize what he had done and what it
meant to him. He would only rejoice in his achievement, and he banished
the fear that comes even to the most evil when they know they have
committed an almost unpardonable sin.
He did not use the lift to go to his sitting-room on the second floor;
he ran lightly up the stairs, wanting the exercise as a means of
banishing thought.
He entered his own room, switched on the electric light, took off his
coat, and stood in front of the fire, stretching his arms in pure
physical weariness.
Yes! That was over! Another step was taken. Once more he had progressed
a step towards his desire, in spite of the most adverse happenings and
the most forbidding aspects of fate.
The unaccustomed brandy at the Palace Hotel, and the bromide solution he
had dropped into it, had calmed his nerves, and suddenly he laughed
aloud in the rich, silent room, a laugh of pure triumph and excitement.
Even as the echoes of his voice died away, his eyes fell upon the table
and saw that there was a letter lying there addressed to him. The
address was written in a well-known handwriting. He took it up, tore
open the envelope and read the communication.
It was this--
"I have been down here for several days, trying to escape from
London and the thoughts which London gives me. But it has been
quite useless. I saw to-day, quite by chance, in the hotel
register, that you have arrived here. I did not think that we were
ever likely to meet again, except in the most casual way. I hope
not. Since I have been here, the torture of my life has increased a
thousand-fold, and I have come to the conclusion that my life must
stop. I am not fit to live. I don't blame you too much, because if
I hadn't been a scoundrel and a wastrel all my life, I should never
have put myself in your hands. As far as your lights go, you have
acted well to me. You have paid me generously for the years of
dirty work I have done at your bidding. For what I have done
lately, you have made me financially free, and I shall die owing no
man a penny, and with no man, save you only, knowing that I die
without hope--lost, degraded and despairing. Don't think I blame
you, William Gouldesbrough, because I don't. When I was at Eton, I
was always a pleasure-loving little scug. I was the same at Oxford.
I have been the same in all my life in town. I have never been any
good to myself, and I have disappointed all the hopes my people had
for me. It's all been my own fault. Then I became entangled with
you, and I was too weak to resist the money you were prepared to
pay me for the things I have done for you.
"But it's all over now. I have gone too far. I have helped you, and
am equally guilty with you, to commit a frightful crime. Lax as I
have always been, I can no longer feel I have any proper place
among men of my own sort. All I can say is that I am glad I shall
die without anybody knowing what I really am.
"I write this note after dinner, and, finding the number of your
room from the hotel clerk, I leave it here for you to see. I am
going to make an end of it all in an hour or two, when I have
written a few notes to acquaintances and so on. I can't go on
living, Gouldesbrough, because night and day, day and night, I am
haunted by the thought of that poor young man you have got in your
foul house in Regent's Park. What you are doing to him I don't
know. The end of your revenge I can only guess at. But it is all so
horrible that I am glad to be done with life. I wish you good-bye;
and I wish to God--if there is really a God--that I had never
crossed your path and never been your miserable tool.
"EUSTACE CHARLIEWOOD."
As Sir William Gouldesbrough read this letter, his whole tall figure
became rigid. He seemed to stiffen as a corpse stiffens.
Then, quite suddenly, he turned round and pushed the letter into the
depths of the glowing fire, pressing the paper down with the poker until
every vestige of it was consumed.
He strode to the door of the room, opened it, came out into the wide
carpeted corridor and hurried up to the lift.
He pressed the button and heard it ring far down below.
In a minute or two there came the clash of the shutting doors, the
"chunk" of the hydraulic mechanism, and he saw the shadow of the
lift-roof rising up towards him.
The attendant opened the door.
"Will you take me up to the fourth floor, please," he said, "to Mr.
Eustace Charliewood's room?"
"Mr. Charliewood, sir?" the man replied. "Oh, yes, I remember, number
408. Tall, clean-shaved gentleman."
"That's him," Sir William said. "I have only just learnt that he has
been staying in the hotel. He is an old friend, and I had no idea he was
here."
The iron doors clashed, the lift shot upward, and the attendant and Sir
William arrived at the fourth floor.
"Down the corridor, sir, and the first turning on the right," the
lift-man said. "But perhaps I'd better show you."
He ran the ironwork gates over their rollers and hurried down the
corridor with Sir William. They turned the corner, and the man pointed
to a door some fifteen yards away.
"That's it, sir," he said. "That's Mr. Charliewood's room."
Even as he spoke there was a sudden loud explosion which seemed to come
from the room to which he had pointed--a horrid crash in the warm,
richly-lit silence of the hotel.
The man turned to Sir William with a white face.
"Come on," he said, forgetting his politeness. "Something has happened.
Come, quick!"
When they burst into the room they found the man about town lying upon
the hearth-rug with a little blue circle edged with crimson in the
centre of his forehead. The hands were still moving feebly, but what had
been Eustace Charliewood was no longer there.