"Send her a wire! I'll pay!" Mr. Chown plucked a shilling from his
waistcoat pocket and agitatedly pressed it on the stranger. "There's
a telegraph office at Snow Hill!"
"Where is Snow Hill? I'm a stranger in London. As it happens, I
came from Schwärz-Brettingen--it's a University town in North
Germany--to keep a business appointment with Messrs. Mustey and Son."
The shaggy-haired young man pointed to those first-floor windows....
adding: "The elder gentleman is chief trustee of my mother's
fortune--his son, who you say's missing, is the other--that is, he
has been since the death of a great-uncle of mine.... For I didn't
come of age, according to my mother's settlement, until my
twenty-third birthday. And as it happens, I'm twenty-three to-day!"
"I see! He was to have paid the money over! ... Good Lord! Good
Lord!" groaned the head-clerk, "what a world it is!--what a world it
is!"
"And all this while we're swopping talk, the old fellow upstairs may
be dying for help that we could give him!" snarled the younger man,
and caught the head-clerk by the shoulder in a grip that struck him
as unpleasantly powerful. "Look here!--where is your key?"
"Just inside in the hall there.... I'd dropped it, don't you
remember--I was looking for it when you--when you--said you smelt
gunpowder," explained the attorney's clerk, "and then it all rushed
on me."
"You did on me!--and I thought you'd gone crazy. Look here----" the
other began.
"To be at all effective I had to take you suddenly," said Mr. Chown,
adding, with a mild gleam of pride, "and you must add--I was
effective! And if you've got it into your head that there's life in
the poor old man yet--put it out again! For he shot himself last
night just on the stroke of nine--and I could take my oath of it! I
heard what must have been the--the noise--as I passed out at the
gate, and the porter he said to me: 'A gas explosion somewhere in the
neighborhood, Mr. Chown, or else it was a thunderclap.' And I
thought it might have been thunder--for the weather observations in
the newspapers had mentioned storms as prevailing in South and
South-Eastern England--and the winds have been blowing from south and
south-east. And my wife has headaches when electricity's in the
atmosphere--and she has been bad three days past."
"But let's do something--not stand here with our hands in our
pockets!" urged the red-haired young man with eagerness. "I'm a
surgeon--not diplomaed, worse luck! but enough of a one to give aid
in such a case as you've hinted at."
"My key's inside the house--as I've told you!" retorted Mr. Chown,
"and unless we were to break down the door--which would bring the
police upon us before they're wanted--or one of us could climb like a
cat--so as to look in at that window and make certain----"
"_Donnerwetter_! Good idea!" said the shaggy young man, in whose
conversation mingled interjectional scraps and snatches of a language
not comprehended by Mr. Chown, but dimly conjectured to be German.
In the same instant he had pulled off his frieze overcoat, revealing
the unsuspected fact that he wore no jacket under it--had thrown it
upon the area-railings close to the row of bells that resembled
organ-stops, and mounted upon it, shirt-sleeved, vigorous, ready and
purposeful. An iron torch-extinguisher, a rusted relic of the days
when respectable citizens went forth o' nights attended by linkmen,
jutted from the wall immediately above his head. He made a long arm
and grasped it--and to the dazzled observation of the head-clerk
appeared to walk up the wall like a housefly. But in reality he had
wedged a toe in an ornamental border of sooty masonry of the
brick-in-and-brick-out description, that outlined the doors and
windows of the Inn buildings; and with a degree of skill and
suppleness that testified to no small degree of practice, hoisted
himself up. Directly afterward he was observed to be in the act of
getting over the sooty balustrading that edged a narrow ledge of
stone running before those first-floor windows, and the head-clerk,
holding his breath, saw him stoop and peer in over a wire blind.
Directly afterward, as it seemed, he withdrew his head and looked
down into Mr. Chown's pale face, and his own had lost its ruddy
color. Then, coming down as he had gone up, much to the astonishment
and curiosity of Mr. Chown's two juniors and several legal-looking
personages who had arrived upon the scene and gathered in quite a
little crowd upon the cobblestones--he said in a low tone, as he drew
the former gentleman apart:
"You were right. Whether it was done last night or more recently, it
has been done, and thoroughly. With a new-looking revolver. He has
it in his hand!"
"Poor old gentleman, I could swear that what he did he has been
driven to do, through despair and debt and misery.... 'Mr. William
will be my ruin, Chown!' he said to me only three days ago. And he
has been his ruin, sir!" said Mr. Chown, blowing his nose with a
flourish, and wiping his eyes furtively. "His ruin, Mr. William has
been.... You may depend upon that!"
Said the young man from North Germany, pulling on his shabby overcoat:
"The table is covered with papers, and the safe facing the window is
open.... Do you think----"
"I don't think--I know! He had a kind of swooning fit a week back,
when the crash came, and a Receiving Order in Bankruptcy was made
against him on the petition of his creditors. He was a long time
coming round--and I stayed by him while the caretaker went to fetch a
hackney-cab--for I'd been called, being a sort of favorite with him,
and having known him for years. He'd been robbed and plundered then,
because he groaned it out to me; and he pointed to that safe, and
told me that it had been gutted by means of false keys--the Bramah he
always wore on his watch-riband having been got at and copied. 'All
the cash I had left in the world, Chown, besides seven thousand in
Trust Securities! ... It's my punishment for having been near and
hard to others that I might be generous to him!' Are you going!"
The shaggy young man, crimson to the lining-edge of the old gray
wideawake he had pulled over his brows after buttoning his overcoat,
made an incoherent sound in his throat, and swung abruptly round upon
his heel. The reflection had occurred to him: "He'd have been
generous to me if he'd waited to have seen me--and blown out my
brains before scattering his own; _pfui!_--over that table and all
the papers!" But he did not voice it aloud.
"Leave me your address," said the kindly-hearted Mr. Chown,
"and--it's not business to say you may trust me!--but I'll undertake
to bring your name before the Official Receiver--for you're one of
the principal creditors--provided what you've told me can be
proved...."
"I suppose you know that--dead man's writing when you see it?" said
the other, swinging round on Mr. Chown with no very pleasant look.
"As well as I know my own!" retorted Mr. Chown, nodding back.
"If so--and not because I admit you've any right!--but because I
choose to show it you--you may read this!" went on the late Mr.
Mustey's chief creditor, pulling a rather worn and crumpled oblong
envelope out of his pocket and exhibiting the direction written on it
in a flowing, old-fashioned, legal hand.
"'P. C. Breagh, Esq., care of Frau Busch, Jaeger Strasse,
Schwärz-Brettingen, N. Germany.' ... But I really shouldn't have
dreamed--" began Mr. Chown.
"Read it!" said the owner of the letter, savagely thrusting it upon
him, and the head-clerk with another protest, nipped in mid-utterance
by another order to read it, mastered the contents.
The writer acknowledged the receipt of Mr. P. C. Breagh's letter, and
begged to remind him that he was quite well acquainted with the terms
of his late mother's Marriage Settlement. He congratulated his young
friend on having so nearly attained the age of discretion decided
under the provisions of the instrument referred to; and appointed the
hour of nine o'clock upon the morning of the 3d of January, to
discharge his trust and hand over the cash, deposit-notes, and
securities....
"While all the time he knew--none better, except his precious
partner!--that I should leave his office as poor as I'd come there.
It would have been decent," snarled Patrick Carolan Breagh, "to have
owned the truth."
"And accused his own son!--And now I look at the date of this it was
written on the day before that affair of the false Bramah.... Do him
justice, Mr. Breagh! ... Try to think he meant fair by you. Wherever
he's gone..." Mr. Chown looked vaguely up at the monochromatic
sky--now darkening as though it meant to rain in earnest--and then
down at the cobblestones, "he'll be no worse for that, and you'll be
the better here, I dare to say! You'll give me your address, sir? I
don't know but that as you were the first to discover the body,
you'll be expected to give evidence before the Coroner."
"Damn the Coroner!" said P. C. Breagh. "Whether he wants it or not I
haven't an address to give. I paid my bill at a thundering beastly
cheap hotel in the Euston Road by handing over my trunks of clothes,
and books and instruments to the landlord.... He promised to keep
them for three weeks--to give me a chance to redeem them!--and he
grunted when I said I'd be back with money enough to buy his
bug-ridden lodging-house before two days were over his head. And I
pawned my coat for dinner yesterday and a coffee-house bed last
night.... That's why you saw shirt-sleeves when I pulled off this
old wrap-rascal.... But I'll look in here again to-morrow--unless
I--change my mind!"
He had passed under the archway and was gone before Mr. Chown had
recovered himself sufficiently to call after him. To follow would
have been no use. So the head-clerk went sorrowfully back to write
and dispatch those urgent telegraphic messages.
And Carolan, shouldering through the double torrent of pedestrian
humanity rolling east and west along the worn pavements of Holborn,
plunged through the roaring traffic of the cobblestoned roadway, and
with his chin well down upon his chest, and his hands rammed deep
into his pockets, turned down Fetter Lane, knowing that he, who had
been heir to a goodly sum in thousands, was, by this sudden turn of
Fortune's wheel, a beggar.
V
As a dog will skulk dejectedly from the spot where a bone previously
buried has failed to reward the snuffing nose and the digging paw, so
P. C. Breagh, on the long-expected twenty-third birthday that was to
have made him master of dead Milly's fortune, slouched down Fetter
Lane, humming and vibrant with the vicinity of great printing-works,
and redolent of glue and treacle, tar, printers' ink, engine-oil, and
size.
A double stream of carts and trucks, heavily laden with five-mile
rollers of yellow-white paper for the revolving vertical
type-cylinders of the Applegarth steam printing-machine--then in its
heyday--bales of tow, forms of type and piles of wood-blocks, choked
the narrow thoroughfare. The smells from the cheaper
eating-houses--where sausages frizzled in metal trays, and tea and
coffee steamed in huge tapped boilers, and piles of doubtful-looking
eggs, and curly rashers of streaky bacon were to be had by people
with money to pay for breakfast--even the sight of compositors in
clean shirt-sleeves and machine-men steeped in ink and oil to the
eyebrows eating snacks of bread and cheese and saveloy, and drinking
porter out of pewter on the doorsteps of great buildings roaring with
machinery--sickened P. C. Breagh with vain desire.
His world was all in ruins about him. He was conscious of a painful
sense of stricture in the throat, and a tight pain as though a
knotted rope were bound about his temples. His hand did not shake,
though, when he thrust it out under his eyes and looked at it
curiously. But he shouldered his way so clumsily along the narrow,
crowded sidewalk that he found himself every now and then in
collision with some more or less incensed pedestrian, such as the
printer's devil, who cried, "Now then, Snobby, where are yer a-comin'
to?" or the stout red-faced matron in black, displaying a row of
bootlaces and a paper of small-tooth combs for sale--who emerged from
the swing-doors of a public-house as P. C. Breagh charged past them,
and wanted to know whether he called himself a young man or a mad
bull? A well-dressed, elderly gentleman, carrying a calf-skin bag
and a gold-mounted umbrella, confounded him for a bungling,
blundering, blackguardly! ... and was left reveling in alliteratives
as the provoker of his wrath swung out of the Lane and found himself
upon the reported Tom Tiddler's ground of Fleet Street. And then a
curious swirling giddiness overtook him, and he dropped down upon
some stone steps under the Gothic doorway of a church with a lofty
tower, and sat there with hunched shoulders and drooped head, staring
dully at the pavement between his muddy boots.
He was conscious of a dull resentment at his lot, but no base hatred
of that old man with the shattered skull, lying prone among the
bloody litter of his office-table, mingled with it. All his life,
since that sixth birthday when he had learned the meaning of Death,
and the potential value of Money, the attainment of his twenty-third
year had been the goal toward which he had striven; and every third
of January crossed off the almanac "_brings me nearer,_" he had said
to himself, "_to the money that will be mine to spend as I shall
choose!_"
And now ... without a profession--for he had failed to obtain his
degrees in Medicine and Surgery--without funds, for a reason that did
him no dishonor--without books or belongings of any kind except the
clothes upon his back; without hope--for who can be hopeful on an
empty and craving stomach?--without work to occupy those strong young
hands and the sound, capable brain behind those gray, amber-flecked
eyes, the unlucky young man who had been reared on expectations sat
under St. Dunstan's Tower; and heard St. Dunstan's clock and St.
Paul's, and all the other City churches answer the boom of Big Ben of
Westminster, solemnly striking the hour of ten.
His prospects had been blighted and ruined, his young hopes lay dead:
he felt bruised and battered by the experiences and discoveries of
that birthday morning, as though the pair of wooden clock-giants that
some forty years back had figured among the City sights from their
vantage in the ancient steeple of St. Dunstan's, had beaten out the
hour with their mallets on his head.
His stepmother had always resented the monetary independence of her
husband's son by Milly Fermeroy. Well! she and her vulgarities, her
resentments and jealousies, had long been laid to rest, poor soul!
In that bloody June of the Mutiny of '57 she and her two youngest
children had perished at Cawnpore. A fortnight later Major Breagh,
previously wounded in the head by a shell-splinter in the defense of
the entrenchments, was bayoneted by a Sepoy infantryman during a
desperate sortie.
Carolan had remained as a boarder at the Preparatory School of the
Marist Fathers at Rockhampton where he had previously been placed,
thanks to the "interference," as Mrs. Breagh had phrased it, of the
regimental chaplain. Father Haygarty. And, owing to the same
influence, Monica, Carolan's junior by two years, had--after the
double stroke of Fate that left the children orphaned--been sent to
the Sisters of the Annunciation in London, the charges of her support
and education being defrayed out of the interest of Carolan's seven
thousand, and the compassionate allowance of twenty-five pounds
granted her by Government as the orphan daughter of an officer killed
in war.