A half-hour later Charley Steele sat in his office alone with Billy
Wantage, his brother-in-law, a tall, shapely fellow of twenty-four.
Billy had been drinking, his face was flushed, and his whole manner was
indolently careless and irresponsible. In spite of this, however, his
grey eyes were nervously fixed on Charley, and his voice was shaky as
he said, in reply to a question as to his finances: “That’s my own
business, Charley.”
Charley took a long swallow from the tumbler of whiskey and soda beside
him, and, as he drew some papers towards him, answered quietly: “I must
make it mine, Billy, without a doubt.”
The tall youth shifted in his chair and essayed to laugh.
“You’ve never been particular about your own business. Pshaw, what’s the
use of preaching to me!”
Charley pushed his chair back, and his look had just a touch of
surprise, a hint of embarrassment. This youth, then, thought him
something of a fool: read him by virtue of his ornamentations, his outer
idiosyncrasy! This boy, whose iniquity was under his finger on that
table, despised him for his follies, and believed in him less than his
wife--two people who had lived closer to him than any others in the
world. Before he answered he lifted the glass beside him and drank to
the last drop, then slowly set it down and said, with a dangerous smile:
“I have always been particular about other people’s finances, and the
statement that you haven’t isn’t preaching, it’s an indictment--so it
is, Billy.”
“An indictment!” Billy bit his finger-nails now, and his voice shook.
“That’s what the jury would say, and the judge would do the preaching.
You have stolen twenty-five thousand dollars of trust-moneys!”
For a moment there was absolute silence in the room. From outside in the
square came the Marche-t’en! of a driver, and the loud cackling laugh of
some loafer at the corner. Charley’s look imprisoned his brother-in-law,
and Billy’s eyes were fixed in a helpless stare on Charley’s finger,
which held like a nail the record of his infamy.
Billy drew himself back with a jerk of recovery, and said with bravado,
but with fear in look and motion: “Don’t stare like that. The thing’s
done, and you can’t undo it, and that’s all there is about it.” Charley
had been staring at the youth-staring and not seeing him really, but
seeing his wife and watching her lips say again: “You are ruining
Billy!” He was not sober, but his mind was alert, his eccentric soul was
getting kaleidoscopic glances at strange facts of life as they rushed
past his mind into a painful red obscurity.
“Oh yes, it can be undone, and it’s not all there is about it!” he
answered quietly.
He got up suddenly, went to the door, locked it, put the key in his
pocket, and, coming back, sat down again beside the table.
Billy watched him with shrewd, hunted eyes. What did Charley mean to
do? To give him in charge? To send him to jail? To shut him out from the
world where he had enjoyed himself so much for years and years? Never to
go forth free among his fellows! Never to play the gallant with all the
pretty girls he knew! Never to have any sports, or games, or tobacco,
or good meals, or canoeing in summer, or tobogganing in winter, or
moose-hunting, or any sort of philandering!
The thoughts that filled his mind now were not those of regret for his
crime, but the fears of the materialist and sentimentalist, who revolted
at punishment and all the shame and deprivation it would involve.
“What did you do with the money?” said Charley, after a minute’s
silence, in which two minds had travelled far.
“I put it into mines.”
“What mines?”
“Out on Lake Superior.”
“What sort of mines?”
“Arsenic.”
Charley’s eye-glass dropped, and rattled against the gold button of his
white waistcoat.
“In arsenic-mines!” He put the monocle to his eye again. “On whose
advice?”
“John Brown’s.”
“John Brown’s!” Charley Steele’s ideas were suddenly shaken and
scattered by a man’s name, as a bolting horse will crumple into
confusion a crowd of people. So this was the way his John Brown had come
home to roost. He lifted the empty whiskey-glass to his lips and drained
air. He was terribly thirsty; he needed something to pull himself
together. Five years of dissipation had not robbed him of his splendid
native ability, but it had, as it were, broken the continuity of his
will and the sequence of his intellect.
“It was not investment?” he asked, his tongue thick and hot in his
mouth.
“No. What would have been the good?”
“Of course. Speculation--you bought heavily to sell on an expected
rise?”
“Yes.”
There was something so even in Charley’s manner and tone that Billy
misinterpreted it. It seemed hopeful that Charley was going to make the
best of a bad job.
“You see,” Billy said eagerly, “it seemed dead certain. He showed me the
way the thing was being done, the way the company was being floated, how
the market in New York was catching hold. It looked splendid. I thought
I could use the money for a week or so, then put it back, and have
a nice little scoop, at no one’s cost. I thought it was a dead-sure
thing--and I was hard up, and Kathleen wouldn’t lend me any more. If
Kathleen had only done the decent thing--”
A sudden flush of anger swept over Charley’s face--never before in his
life had that face been so sensitive, never even as a child. Something
had waked in the odd soul of Beauty Steele.
“Don’t be a sweep--leave Kathleen out of it!” he said, in a sharp,
querulous voice--a voice unnatural to himself, suggestive of little use,
as though he were learning to speak, using strange words stumblingly
through a melee of the emotions. It was not the voice of Charley Steele
the fop, the poseur, the idlest man in the world.
“What part of the twenty-five thousand went into the arsenic?” he said,
after a pause. There was no feeling in the voice now; it was again even
and inquiring.
“Nearly all.”
“Don’t lie. You’ve been living freely. Tell the truth, or--or I’ll know
the reason why, Billy.”
“About two-thirds-that’s the truth. I had debts, and I paid them.”
“And you bet on the races?”
“Yes.”
“And lost?”
“Yes. See here, Charley; it was the most awful luck--”
“Yes, for the fatherless children and widows, and all that are
oppressed!”
Charley’s look again went through and beyond the culprit, and he
recalled his wife’s words and his own reply. A quick contempt and a sort
of meditative sarcasm were in the tone. It was curious, too, that he
could smile, but the smile did not encourage Billy Wantage now.
“It’s all gone, I suppose?” he added.
“All but about a hundred dollars.”
“Well, you have had your game; now you must pay for it.”
Billy had imagination, and he was melodramatic. He felt danger ahead.
“I’ll go and shoot myself!” he said, banging the table with his fist so
that the whiskey-tumbler shook.
He was hardly prepared for what followed. Charley’s nerves had been
irritated; his teeth were on edge. This threat, made in such a cheap,
insincere way, was the last thing in the world he could bear to hear.
He knew that Billy lied; that if there was one thing Billy would not
do, shooting himself was that one thing. His own life was very sweet to
Billy Wantage. Charley hated him the more at that moment because he was
Kathleen’s brother. For if there was one thing he knew of Kathleen, it
was that she could not do a mean thing. Cold, unsympathetic she might
be, cruel at a pinch perhaps, but dishonourable--never! This weak,
cowardly youth was her brother! No one had ever seen such a look on
Charley Steele’s face as came upon it now--malicious, vindictive. He
stooped over Billy in a fury.
“You think I’m a fool and an ass--you ignorant, brainless, lying
cub! You make me a thief before all the world by forging my name, and
stealing the money for which I am responsible, and then you rate me
so low that you think you’ll bamboozle me by threats of suicide. You
haven’t the courage to shoot yourself--drunk or sober. And what do you
think would be gained by it? Eh, what do you think would be gained? You
can’t see that you’d insult your sister as well as--as rob me.”
Billy Wantage cowered. This was not the Charley Steele he had known,
not like the man he had seen since a child. There was something almost
uncouth in this harsh high voice, these gauche words, this raw accent;
but it was powerful and vengeful, and it was full of purpose. Billy
quivered, yet his adroit senses caught at a straw in the words, “as rob
me!” Charley was counting it a robbery of himself, not of the widows and
orphans! That gave him a ray of hope. In a paroxysm of fear, joined to
emotional excitement, he fell upon his knees, and pleaded for mercy--for
the sake of one chance in life, for the family name, for Kathleen’s
sake, for the sake of everything he had ruthlessly dishonoured. Tears
came readily to his eyes, real tears--of excitement; but he could
measure, too, the strength of his appeal.
“If you’ll stand by me in this, I’ll pay you back every cent, Charley,”
he cried. “I will, upon my soul and honour! You shan’t lose a penny, if
you’ll only see me through. I’ll work my fingers off to pay it back till
the last hour of my life. I’ll be straight till the day I die--so help
me God!”
Charley’s eyes wandered to the cupboard where the liqueurs were. If
he could only decently take a drink! But how could he with this boy
kneeling before him? His breath scorched his throat.
“Get up!” he said shortly. “I’ll see what I can do--to-morrow. Go away
home. Don’t go out again to-night. And come here at ten o’clock in the
morning.”
Billy took up his hat, straightened his tie, carefully brushed the dust
from his knees, and, seizing Charley’s hand, said: “You’re the best
fellow in the world, Charley.” He went towards the door, dusting his
face of emotion as he had dusted his knees. The old selfish, shrewd
look was again in his eyes. Charley’s gaze followed him gloomily. Billy
turned the handle of the door. It was locked.
Charley came forward and unlocked it. As Billy passed through, Charley,
looking sharply in his face, said hoarsely: “By Heaven, I believe you’re
not worth it!” Then he shut the door again and locked it.
He almost ran back and opened the cupboard. Taking out the bottle of
liqueur, he filled a glass and drank it off. Three times he did this,
then seated himself at the table with a sigh of relief and no emotion in
his face.