IV

Furnival's Inn, Holborn, with its parallelogram of dusty or

rain-washed cobblestones unrelieved by any patch of railed-in grass

plot, where sooty lilacs and rusty hawthorns make a show of putting

forth green leaves in Spring, and plane-trees shed their bark, as

boa-constrictors doff their skins, at the approach of

Winter--Furnival's Inn, even in the year of stress of 1870, impressed

itself upon the casual visitor as a dismal spot in wet weather and a

dusty one in dry. But that an immortal genius wrote a deathless work

of humor in its cheerless precincts, one would have said that nothing

young or gay or natural could ever flourish there.

At nine o'clock upon the morning of a day heavily fraught with Fate

for the protagonist of this unpretending life-drama, recent puddles

testified to overnight's rain, and gray clouds rushing north-westward

across a monochromatic parallelogram of sky, framed in by the

bilious-hued, grimy-windowed, decrepit-looking Inn buildings,

predicted more presently.

Punctually upon the stroke of the hour you might have seen a shaggy

young man in a red-hot hurry plunge under the round-topped carriage

archway, eschewing the smaller side-entrance intended for

pedestrians. Whereat the upper half of a porter, crowned with a

tarred chimney-pot hat, and wearing a brown livery with copper-gilt

buttons, appeared at the wicket of his lodge-door, and the

fresh-faced, shaggy-haired boy in the battered felt wideawake and

well-worn frieze overcoat, had felt an eye boring hard into his back,

as, after one doubtful glance about him, he dived between the gouty

Corinthian columns of the fourth portico on the left-hand side, and

rang the first-floor bell.

"I'd ring if I was you!" the porter had soliloquized, noting the

masterful tug given by the early visitor to the dingy brass

bell-handle--third of a row of six sticking out like organ-stops on

the right of the heavy, low-browed outer door. "And again! ... Don't

be shy!" said the porter, who was something of a cynic: "Break the

bell-wire, and then you won't have done no good to

yourself!--supposing you to be a client or a creditor of Mustey and

Son--though you're over-young to be the first and over-cheerful to be

the second, it strikes me! Good-day, Mr. Chown!" And the porter

touched his hat to a lean, mild-looking, elderly man in black, who

turned in at that moment beneath the smaller archway. "You're not

the first this morning, early as you are. There's a young chap who

don't seem in the mind to take no answer--has been ringing ten

minutes without stopping at Mr. Mustey's bell."

"Pressing business, I suppose, to bring him out so early!" said the

person addressed.

A glance of intelligence may have been exchanged between Mr. Chown

and the porter, but there were no further words. Mr. Chown passed

on, and joined the younger man on the doorstep under the fourth

portico on the left side, as he prepared to fulfill the porter's

prophecy about breaking the bell-wire; and said, shifting his

umbrella to the hand that held a shiny bag of legal appearance, and

drawing a shabby latchkey from the pocket of his vest:

"Excuse me, but if it is a business appointment with Mr. Mustey

Junior,"--he tapped the key upon the tarnished brass door-handle as

though to knock some grains of dust out of the words, and went on,

punctuating his utterances with more tapping--"I happen to

know"--_tap-tap-tap_--"that he won't be here to-day." He added, as

he took a brief, comprehensive survey of the healthy,

square-shouldered, well-built youngster of some five feet eight (with

a hopeful promise of more inches in the breadth of the shoulders, and

the depth of the chest), buttoned up in the rough frieze garment that

had seen hard wear. "But possibly it is the head of the Firm"

(_tap-tap_) "you want, and not Son? ... In which case I'm afraid

you'll have to wait some time, as the old gentleman stayed very late

at work yesterday. I should mention that I am employed in the

capacity of head-clerk by" (_tap_) "a firm of solicitors who have

offices on the ground-floor immediately underneath Mustey and Son"

(_tap_), "and----"

Mr. Chown, still industriously tapping, nodded at the lowest of a

series of legends in letters of black paint, flanking the right-hand

row of bells, and setting forth the titles of "Wotherspoon and

Cadderby, Attorneys and Commissioners of Oaths." He continued: "And

though I was detained myself, and did not leave till eight-thirty, I

noticed particularly--when I shut the front-door behind me, that the

gas in Mr. Mustey Senior's private room was burning still."

"For the matter of that, it's burning now!" said the strange young

man, whose head was plentifully covered with a crop of decidedly red

and obstinately curly hair, crowned with the battered gray felt

wideawake previously mentioned; and whose square, blunt-featured,

fresh-colored, rather freckled face was illuminated with a pair of

very clear and intelligent eyes of a good gray, curiously flecked

with yellow. He indicated with a knotty vine-stick he carried two

dingy, wire-blinded windows on the first floor, and Messrs.

Wotherspoon and Cadderby's head-clerk, with an irrepressible start of

consternation, saw that the darkness of the room behind them was

thrown into relief by a greenish patch of radiance that indicated the

position of a paper-shaded gas reading-lamp which to his knowledge

hung over the heavy writing-table that occupied the middle of the

elder Mustey's private room.

"God bless my soul, so it is!"

The speaker, with a tallowy change in his complexion, stepped

backward from the doorstep to the pavement, conveyed himself in the

same crab-like fashion to the center of the quadrangle of ancient

buildings constituting the Inn, and so stood, staring up at the

window with the yellow-green flare behind the dusty brown

wire-blinds, and tapping his latchkey on his chin as he had tapped it

on the door-knob. Then he rejoined the other to say, with rather a

perturbed and dubious air:

"If your business could wait half an hour or so, and you--being a

stranger, as I take it?--and new to the sights of London--were to

indulge in a little walk along Holborn--say as far as Bloomsbury

Street--and drop in at the British Museum, and have a look at the

Elgin Marbles or the Assyrian Bulls,--or the--the Mummies in the

Egyptian Department,--and then come back again,--you might stand a

better chance of getting the bell answered." The speaker added,

meeting a look of decided obstinacy, quite in keeping with the

pouting, deeply-cut lips and the square chin with a cleft in it:

"Unless you can suggest a better idea, you know...."

"My idea is to stop here and ring until the bell _is_ answered. But

I am obliged to you all the same!" said the young man.

"You've waited long enough, you think?" hesitated Messrs. Wotherspoon

and Cadderby's head-clerk.

The answer came with a flash of strong white teeth in the

fresh-colored countenance that was dusted with dark brown freckles.

"Just twenty-three years," said the shaggy-haired young man.

"Lord bless me!" said Mr. Chown, "you must have begun waiting in your

cradle! But time flies and business presses, and----"

"My view exactly!" returned the freckled young man, as the head-clerk

inserted his latchkey into the heavy door and it swung slowly

backward, revealing a bare and gloomy hall wainscoted with grimy oak

and hung with mildewed flock-paper. "_Donnerwetter!_ how you smell

here!" he commented, having taken in a chestful of the medium that

served the inhabitants of the Inn buildings for air. "But I suppose

you're used to it!"

"Comparing our atmosphere with that of other London offices, I should

be inclined to call us rather fresh than otherwise," said Mr. Chown,

who had dropped his latchkey and was groping for it on the dirty

floor by the oblong of daylight admitted by the open hall-door. "But

I suppose--as some of the gentlemen who rent chambers here are still

away on their vacations--the place might seem--to a stranger from the

country--a trifle close."

"Stuffy!" corrected the young man, whose expression of disgust was

highly uncomplimentary. "Drainy, black-beetly, mousey, dusty,

cellary. With a tinge of escaped gas and a something else that

I----" He sniffed and said, puckering a sagacious nose: "Why, it's

gunpowder! The place is chock-full of the fumes of burnt

gunpowder.... Here! Hallo! What the devil are you trying to do?

What do you mean?"

For the other, who had risen to his feet with a reversion to the

sallow change of countenance previously observed in him, had caught

him by the arm, as his eager foot had touched a dilapidated mat that

lay as a snare for the unwary at the foot of the uncarpeted

staircase, and with unexpected strength and quickness had swung him

to the hall-door, and was endeavoring to push him over the threshold.

"I mean----" Mr. Chown was of middle age and evidently quite unused

to wrestling: and as he strove with the shaggy young man upon the

threshold of the dingy hall, it was evident that he would very soon

give in. "I mean..." he panted, "... that you ... can't you be

sensible?"

"I should be a fool if I couldn't see that you're hiding something.

Let go!" said the red-haired young man, not at all malevolently, "or

I shall have to hurt you! I'm going upstairs, and you can't stop me!

What harm do you think I am going to do to the white-haired old man

who's lying fast asleep across his table? I shan't go in without

knocking, if that's what you're thinking of! And what harm do you

suppose he's going to do to me?"

A sullen bang answered, for Mr. Chown had reached out a wary hand

behind his own respectable back, and grabbed at the dim brass knob

and slammed the heavy door upon himself and his antagonist. There

were circles round his eyes, and he puffed and panted heavily.

"You young--_puff_--idiot!" he gasped, "I'm

not--_whoof!_--considering you--for--a--_whuff!_--moment. It's

him,"--he pulled out a colored handkerchief and mopped his face--"him

that I've known since I was first articled, and had many a kindly

word from, and many a liberal present. And now that this has

happened--I may say I've seen it coming, and many a night I've stayed

here--knowing him busy over his accounts above, and many a time I've

been on the point of going up and knocking and offering a word of

sympathy. But--it wasn't to be done! ... You could never take a

liberty with him, alive--and no one shall if I can stop 'em--now that

he isn't!"

"Now that he--why, man!--you don't mean to say----"

They confronted each other on the doorstep, and the shaggy, obstinate

young man had now flushed to ripe tomato-color as he stammered:

"You don't mean he's dead? It isn't possible!"

"I say nothing and I mean nothing. There's no third party present,"

asserted Mr. Chown, with professional caution, "to testify to what I

said or didn't say. But his son has to be looked for, and brought

here if they can find him--and if Mr. William can't be found--and

without prejudice I think that's more than likely!--some one he knew

and trusted must be the first to go into that room. His housekeeper

I've heard is a good creature. He's often dropped a word in praise

of her to me, I know.... We'll telegraph--I know his address!

Number Three----"