II

Mr. Bommaney was alone again, and if it had not been for the actual

presence of the bundle of bank-notes upon the table, he could well have

thought that the whole episode had been no more than a dreadful and

disturbing dream. It was very hard, he thought complainingly, that a man

should come and put so horrible a temptation in his way. He would not

yield to it--of course he would not yield to it. He had been an honest

and honourable man all his life long, and had never so much as felt a

monetary temptation until now. It was humiliating to feel it now--it

was horrible to have his fingers itching for another man’s money, and

his heart coveting it, and his brain, in spite of himself, devising

countless means of use for it. It was quite unbearable to know that

the money _might_ tide him over his troubles and land him in prosperity

again, if he could only dare to use it, and risk engulfing it with the

lost wreckage of his own fortunes.

But no, no, no. He had never meant to use it. His only reason for

accepting it had been that he had not found the courage to declare his

true position to his old friend and school companion. Perhaps, he told

himself (trying to silence and cajole that inward monitor and accuser

who would not be silenced or cajoled), perhaps if Brown had been less

confident and truthful--if he had had less faith in his old companion’s

powers as a man of business--it would have come easier to tell the

truth. And how futile a thing it was to stave off discovery for a single

day! How doubly ashamed he would have to feel after that poor pretence

of responsible solidity! If he had only been disposed to be tempted at

all--here surely was an added reason for yielding to temptation.

Obviously the first, and, indeed, the only thing to be done, was to

bank this money in Brown’s name, and so have done with it; and yet

any feeling of haste in that respect would seem to imply a fear of

temptation, which he was, of course, quite resolute not to feel. He was

not going any more to run away from his own suspicion of himself than

he would have run from another man’s. So, in and out, and up and down,

contradicting himself at every turning, with an underlying surety in his

mind so fast rooted and so dreadful that he did not dare to look at it.

When the adieux were being said between the old friends, Mr. James

Hornett had slid noiselessly downstairs, his mind inflated by pride.

He was not proud of having played the eavesdropper, for even in Mr.

Hornett’s economy of things, that was an act to be proud of; but he was

very proud, indeed, to be associated with a gentleman so magnificently

respected as Mr. Bommaney. There were not so very many people, he

told himself, even in the City of London, which was full of wealth and

probity, into whose hands so large a sum would be placed with so little

a sense of the necessity of precaution. He felt as if he himself had

been treated in this majestic manner, and the feeling warmed his heart.

He bowed Mr. Brown from the office door with an _empressement_ which he

feared a moment later might almost have betrayed him, and he went about

his duties for the rest of the day in a mood of unusual contentment. The

earlier memory of his employer’s disturbance crossed him sometimes, and

always excited his curiosity; but the later feeling dominated him. He

was delighted by his association with a concern so eminently respectable

as that of Bommaney, Waite, and Co.

Meanwhile Mr. Hornett’s employer, with that dreadful rooted secret in

his mind, which he did not dare to look at, sat alone, looking with

staring eyes before him, and drumming in a regular tune upon the topmost

note of the terrible little pile. He had locked the notes away before

Brown’s departure, but they had seemed to draw him to the safe with

almost a physical compulsion, and he had brought them out again to look

at them, to handle them, to count them, to resolve in his own mind that

he did not hanker after them, and was honourable to the core. It was so

new a thing to be tempted, that at times his own self-deception was made

easy to him. It did not occur to him to reflect that the need and the

means had never so presented themselves together until now, or that his

life-long honour had depended upon their absence.

When he had sat in silence for a while he awoke to the fact that the

interview had been nothing but a succession of shocks to him, and that

he was bodily exhausted. He rose, and, walking feebly to the inner room,

applied himself anew to the brandy bottle he kept there. He had gone

much too often to that deceptive solace lately, and he knew it; but each

successive visit carried its own excuses with it, and it had never in

any individual instance been worth while to resist a habit which it was

always easy to condemn in the main.

The brandy enlightened him and opened new sluices of emotion. Perhaps

for the moment he was a better man because of it. He seemed to wake to a

more determined sense of the enormity of the temptation which lay before

him. He thought of his own son, and a shadow took him from head to

foot as, in a brandified nervous vision, he beheld some shadowy

supposititious creature in the act of telling the tale to Phil. The vice

of drink has had the creation of many other vices laid to its charge,

but for once in the world’s history the obfuscated vision was clearer

than the natural, and Philip drunk a better man, and a more righteous

and honourable, than Philip sober.

At bottom, Philip Bommaney knew himself too well to be at all sure that

this phase of feeling would endure with him; and in a half-conscious

dread of the return of that baser self, whose first appearance in

his history had so affrighted him, he hurriedly attired himself for

out-of-doors, crammed the bundle of notes into an inner pocket of his

overcoat, and, after a final appeal to the decanter, left his room with

a somewhat hysteric sense of courage and self-approval. He had been

tempted--he was ready to recognise that the temptation was over, that he

had well-nigh succumbed to it--but he had triumphed! He was a man again.

He had been weighed in the balances and not found wanting. There were

some tears in his eyes compounded of brandy and nerves and affections

and remorses as he hurried into the street. Phil should never be ashamed

of his father. Old Brown, who had trusted him like a brother, should

never learn to shun and hate him. He had to go under--the thing was

inevitable, unescapable, but he would at least go under like a man. His

heart beat to the tune of the ‘Conquering Hero,’ where it might have

beat to the ‘Rogue’s March,’ but for that friendly nip of brandy and the

all-covering mercies of Heaven.

Quickly as his resolution had been taken, he had fully arranged for the

details of the task which lay before him. With the notes he had thrust

into his pocket a little handful of business papers involving a knotty

and delicate point of business, and he intended that the discussion of

the point they raised should act as the prelude to the disclosure and

the restitution he desired to make. He could not, even in his newfound

heroism, and with whatever hysteric hardihood he was prepared to meet

the stroke of fate, he could not as yet encounter Brown, and lay bare

before him the plot of the melancholy farce he had played an hour ago.

But there was an old friend of his, and an old friend of Brown’s into

the bargain, a solicitor, keen as a needle and kindly as sunshine, one

Barter, whose business chambers were in Gable Inn, and who was of all

men the man he could confide in with least shame and best hope of help.

He hailed a cab, and bade the driver drive his fastest. Gable Inn lay

tranquil, the afternoon shadows already settling deeper on the little

quadrangle than on the broad and roaring thoroughfare without. There

was no light in the windows of the rooms in which Messrs. Fellowship,

Freemantle, and Barter had done business and received their clients

fifty years ago, and in which the sole surviving member of the

firm still maintained its old-established reputation for honour and

astuteness.

Bommaney was chilled by the silence and darkness of the rooms, and he

shivered to see the temptation he had conquered looming again before

him. He knocked loudly with a trembling hand, and the noise of iron

on iron went rolling and echoing up the staircase and came back in a

hollow, lonely, sounding murmur from the rooms within. His heart

sank, and a horrible fear of himself got hold of him. He had actually

conquered, and here was the fight to be fought over again with almost

a certainty of defeat at the end of it. Indeed, the defeat in that bare

moment of time had grown so certain, that he was conscious of a distinct

state of disappointment when a sudden footstep within the rooms answered

his noisy summons.

The door opened, and a young man stood before him, peering at him with

half-closed uncertain eyes through the dark. He was a young man of the

fleshly school, something too stout for his years, very pallid, and more

than commonly personable, with a fine broad forehead, fine frank eyes,

and features modelled with an engaging regularity. When he recognised

his visitor his pale and handsome face glittered with a sudden smile

of welcome, teeth and eyes gleaming quite brightly, and the whole face

lighting up in the pleasantest and friendliest fashion conceivable.

This agreeable expression faded into one of almost mechanical dolor, and

the personable young man shook hands with Mr. Bommaney sadly, and sighed

as if he suddenly recalled an idea that sighing was a duty.

‘Come in, Mr. Bommaney,’ he said. ‘Come in, sir. I have sent home all

the clerks, and was just about to lock up for the night. To what do I

owe the pleasure of this visit? Let me light the gas.’

Bommaney, the door being closed behind him, stumbled along the darkened

passage after the more assured and accustomed steps of young Mr. Barter,

and the inner office being gained, and the gas being lighted, allowed

himself to be motioned to a chair. What with having been too much

agitated by the contemplation of his troubles to be able to eat at all

that day, and what with the fight he had had with his temptations, and

the too frequent applications he had made to the brandy, it happened

that for the moment he was by no means certain of his purpose. He sat

for a little while wondering rather hazily what had brought him there.

As often happens with absent-minded people, his hands remembered what

had been required of them before his brain began to act again, and by

and by the fact that he had unbuttoned his overcoat, and had taken a

bundle of papers from his pocket, recalled him to his purpose.

‘I wanted,’ he said, emerging from his haze, and holding the bundle of

papers nervously in both hands, ‘I wanted to see your father upon very

special and urgent business.’

‘My father?’ the young man answered, with a look and accent of pained

surprise. ‘Do you mean to say, sir, that you haven’t heard the news?’

‘The news?’ cried Bommaney, feeling blindly as if some new misfortune

threatened him. ‘What news?’

‘My father, sir,’ said young Mr. Barter, with a certain blending of

professional airs, something of a legal impress mingled with something

of the manner of a medical man conveying mournful intelligence to the

relatives of a patient, ‘my father, sir, was struck down by an omnibus

in the street this morning. He is terribly injured, and not expected to

recover.’

‘God bless my soul!’ Bommaney cried out. His chin fell upon his breast,

and his eyes stared at the floor, seeing nothing. He felt like a man

upon a raft, who sees the bindings of the frail thing break apart.

Shipwrecked already, and now the last hope gone! He hardly knew, if he

could have asked himself the question clearly, why he so particularly

desired to see Barter. He hardly knew what Barter could have done for

him, except to listen to his troubles and take charge of the eight

thousand pounds which tempted him, and yet the disappointment seemed as

heavy and as hard to bear as anything he had hitherto endured. He sat

staring forlornly before him, with tears in his eyes, and young Mr.

Barter, in much astonishment at his susceptibility and tenderness, sat

watching him. Something slid from Bommaney’s hands with a rustle, and

dropped upon the floor. Young Mr. Barter made a mere hint or beginning

of a movement, as if he would have picked it up for him. Bommaney

made no movement at all, but stared before him with his blue-gray eyes

filling more and more with tears, until two or three brimmed over and

trickled down his cheeks. He said, ‘God bless my soul!’ once more,

mechanically, and restored what remained of his bundle of papers to his

pocket. Young Mr. Barter looked with one swift and vivid glance from the

fallen bundle to his guest’s face, then back again. Bommaney rose from

his seat, buttoned his overcoat with awkward and lingering fingers, and

put on his hat. He was evidently unconscious of his own tears, and made

no attempt to disguise them, or to wipe them away. He said, ‘God bless

my soul!’ a third time, and then, shaking young Mr. Barter by the hand,

murmured that he was sorry, very sorry, and so went stupidly away.

Young Mr. Barter accompanied him to the door, casting a strange backward

glance at the papers as he left the room, and was curiously voluble in

his dismissal of his visitor. Anything he could do--Mr. Bommaney might

rest perfectly assured--the clerks would be back to-morrow in any

case--he would advise Mr. Bommaney of his father’s condition by that

night’s post--he himself was naturally most profoundly anxious. In this

wise he talked Bommaney from the chambers, and when once he had closed

the door behind him, went back along the dark little corridor with

an unnecessarily catlike tread. He could hardly have been other than

certain that he was alone, yet when he reached the inner room he looked

about him with a keen quick darting suspicion, and for half a minute

ignored the fallen papers on the floor.

‘Dear me!’ he said, when at length he suffered his eyes to rest upon

them. ‘What can that be? How did that come here?’

He stooped, picked up the papers, laid them upon his desk, and smoothed

them out, making a fold lengthways to counteract the creases into which

they had already fallen. He saw a crisp clean Bank of England note for a

hundred pounds, and, lifting it, found another. Then he lifted half the

bundle, and, finding a note of the same value, gave an inward gasp, and

expelled his breath slowly after it. Then he looked at the last note

of all, and sat down with the whole bundle in his hands. His pale and

fleshy features had taken an unusual colour, and his breathing was a

good deal disturbed. A watcher might have guessed that he was profoundly

agitated from the swift unintermittent rustle the paper made in his

hands. He seemed to sit as steady as a rock, and yet the crisp paper

rustled noisily.

Mr. Brown’s bank-notes had been a fruitful source of emotion that day

already, and, in Bommaney’s mind at least, had raised very dreadful

doubts and perplexities. There were doubts and perplexities in the mind

of young Mr. Barter, but they were altogether of another order. Young

Mr. Barter was perfectly aware that he was being tempted, and felt that,

in its way, the temptation wets a kind of godsend. He even said as much

in a low murmur to himself. His perplexities related to other things

than the fear of any fall from honour. Bommaney had evidently been very

queer. Bommaney had been horribly cut up about something, even before

he heard the news the young solicitor had to give him. But was he

so disturbed as to be likely to forget where he had last secured so

considerable a sum of money? This mental inquiry naturally set young Mr.

Barter to work to discover how considerable the sum of money actually

was. He laid the notes upon the table, and tried to wet his thumb upon

his lips. There was no moisture there, and his mouth was as dry as

touchwood. He drank a little water, and then began to count the notes.

He made them eighty-one at first; and then, recounting, made them

seventy-nine. Counting them a third time, he made them eighty.

‘Damn it all!’ said young Mr. Barter, ‘can’t I count? I suppose the old

buffer will come back for them.’ He tried a fourth time, and confirmed

his third counting. ‘They’ll get stopped at the Bank,’ he said. ‘They’ll

be no use to anybody.’ He sat for a while thinking, with his eyes

half-closed, drumming out a tune upon the table with the tips of his

fat white fingers, then he folded the notes with great precision

and delicacy, put them into his pocket, found his hat, overcoat, and

walking-stick, and made ready for the streets. In the quiet of these

legal chambers many chance noises from without had from time to time

been clearly audible. He heard now a hurrying step upon the pavement of

the quadrangle, and, with a palpitation at the heart, he moved swiftly

to put out the light, and listened. The step stumbled at the entrance to

the staircase, at the foot of which the outer door stood closed. Young

Mr. Barter’s heart beat, if possible, faster than before; and the veins

in his head so throbbed, that only the confining rim of his hat seemed

to keep his head itself from bursting. There came an eager summons at

the door, an imperative rapping with the head of a stout walking-stick.

He set his teeth, and, drawing back his lips with a horrible smile

in the dark, breathed noiselessly. The rapping grew more and more

imperative and urgent, and then came a preternatural silence, with an

undercurrent of distant sound in it, and the sudden blare of a cornet in

the street, which sounded to his nerves like the trumpet of the herald

of the day of judgment He heard the hurrying feet plunge down the steps

again, and cross the quadrangle, and listened until their sound merged

into the dull noises of the London night. He stood in the dark after

this for what seemed a long time, learning that his features twitched,

and teaching himself to control them. Then he left his chambers with

great secrecy, and broke into a cold sweat to think, as he stood half

through the doorway, how narrowly he had escaped from slamming the

door behind him. This was an act which might have been suicidal in

its stupidity; for to give any sign of his presence there after that

thundering summons at the door would have been to betray himself beyond

redemption. He inserted his latch-key noiselessly, and, crouching to

escape imagined observers, drew the door gently after him, and turned

the key slowly in the lock. As he did this he heard a footstep and a

cough together close at hand, and, turning with a start, beheld a pale

and slender man of brief stature, who scraped his lantern jaws with

apologetic thumb and finger, and looking at him with a startled

meekness, as if he would fain propitiate anger for a possible intrusion,

sidled to the foot of the stairs, mounted the stairway with a backward

glance and a second cough of apology, and so disappeared.

Young Mr. Barter, with his nerves already shaken by this small episode,

walked into the main thoroughfare and merged with the crowd, bearing

Mr. Bommaney’s eight thousand pounds with him. When he had walked for a

while he hailed a cab, and was driven home. He had, or prided himself on

having, an exceptional eye for horseflesh, but it was not his faculty

in this direction which had led him to choose a cab horsed by a brute

of unusual symmetry and swiftness. This was an accident, but, like other

accidents in this perplexed world, it served its purpose. It landed him

at the paternal door in Harley Street almost at the instant at which

Bommaney arrived there in pursuit of him.

Now, although young Mr. Barter had not calculated on meeting Bommaney

so soon, and although the meeting was naturally something of a shock to

him, he had already schooled himself for interview and inquiry. He went

a little paler than common as he grasped his father’s old friend by the

hand for the third time that evening, and trembled ever so little as he

spoke.

‘I half expected to find you here,’ he said. ‘I could see how moved you

were by the news of my father’s illness.’ The door stood open, and the

old-fashioned man-servant within had been in the act of closing it upon

Bommaney’s retreating figure when cab number two had driven up, and the

young master of the house had alighted from it. ‘Is the news worse

or better?’ He laid both hands upon Bommaney’s arms as he put this

question.

The elderly servitor, who had never had reason given to him to believe

that young Mr. Barter was above the reasonable attached to his father,

was a little surprised to see the young man so moved. He drew the door

gently after him, and came out upon the steps.

‘I’m afraid, Mr. John,’ he murmured sympathetically, ‘that it’s

practically all over, sir. The poor gentleman’s quite unconscious, and

the doctor don’t expect him to last till morning.’

Young Mr. Barter’s mind was active, and accustomed to rapid movement. He

knew at once that the old servant read the signs of disturbance in

his face and manner, and how far he misread them. So, to insure the

misreading, he took out his handkerchief, and groaned at this melancholy

intelligence.

‘I----,’ began Bommaney, stammering and speaking a little thickly, ‘I

didn’t come to ask about your father.’ Young Barter’s heart at

this, though he was perfectly prepared for it, began to beat like a

sledgehammer. ‘I’ve had a dreadful loss. I have called nowhere but at

your office since I left my own, and I have lost eight thousand pounds.

I am convinced that I must have left it there.’

‘I can’t think so, Mr. Bommaney,’ said Barter, with a face of

innocence.’ We can go back together, if you like, and look for it.’

Bommaney’s driver lingered for him; the other cabman was already

jingling leisurely down the street.

‘Johnson,’ said young Barter, addressing the domestic, ‘you hear what

Mr. Bommaney says. This is a matter of the most urgent importance, and

must be looked into at once. Tell my mother that I have been home, and

that I have been called suddenly back on urgent business.’ Bommaney

stood in a kind of stupid trance, and the young man, taking him by the

arm, had some ado to secure his attention. ‘Come! Come, sir,’ he said;

‘we will look into this at once. You must not remain in suspense about

such a matter.’

They rustled together through the straw which had been laid down upon

the roadway, and had been scattered by the feet of passers-by upon the

pavement, and, mounting the cab, drove in a ghastly silence for a score

of yards, and then, with a clatter which made conversation difficult,

Bommaney, rousing himself at intervals, shouted his certainty that

the notes would prove to have been left at Barter’s chambers. Barter,

growing curiously inured to the circumstances of the case, shouted back

that he dared to say they would be; that it was very likely; that he

really did not see where else Mr. Bommaney could possibly have left

them, furtively pressing the notes against his breast meanwhile, and

once, at a quiet interval, when Bommaney had sunk into his former

stupor, venturing to steal a hand to the pocket in which the stolen

money lay, caressing the edges of the notes with the tips of his

fingers.

‘I’m sure,’ said Bommaney, as the cab pulled up at the gate of the

quadrangle, ‘that we shall find them here.’ He spoke with a tremulous

uncertainty, and so obviously appealed for a confirmation of his hope,

that Barter felt constrained to answer,

‘Oh, we are bound to find them.’

The striking of a wax vesta at the door of the chambers, the shaky hunt

for the key, the well-known obstinacy of the lock, the opening of

the door, the fevered working of Bommaney’s fingers, and the flushed

eagerness of his face, were all memorable to young Barter for many and

many a day. They entered together the room in which their interview had

taken place; and Barter, nursing the remnant of the flaming vesta, lit

the gas with it, and then, dropping it on the floor, set his foot upon

it, and looked at his companion.

‘Where do you think you left the notes, sir?’ he asked. ‘Have you any

idea? I think you took out some papers here. You wanted to consult my

father about them, I fancy, and, if I remember, you returned them to

your pocket.’

Bommaney stood looking about him on the floor, trailing the point of

his walking-cane purposelessly hither and thither; and it was at this

moment, seeing how confused and broken his victim seemed, that young Mr.

Barter tasted the first flavour of safety.

‘I don’t see anything,’ he said.

‘Did you,’ Bommaney asked him, with both trembling hands grasping the

knob of his walking-cane, and shaking in appeal before the unsuspected

thief--’ did you lock any papers away before you left?’

As a matter of fact, young Barter had not had any papers to lock away

that evening after Bommaney’s departure; but he thought the trick worth

playing, and, producing his keys again, opened the heavy iron safe which

stood against the wall.

‘Yes,’ he said, with an air of hopeful alacrity. ‘By Jove, I did!’ He

stood aside, with an outstretched hand, and motioned Bommaney to examine

the contents of the safe. There was a parchment there, there were half

a dozen bundles of documents tied in pink tape and docketed; but there

were no bank-notes.

‘You know,’ said Bommaney, with a fretful wail, ‘I must have left them

here; I couldn’t have left them anywhere else. I put it to you--could

I?’

Barter looked at him mournfully, with raised eyebrows. There was just a

hint of expostulation in his raised eyebrows, and in the expression of

his voice.

‘You see, sir,’ he said, waving his white hands--’ you see for yourself,

there’s nothing here.’

Bommaney walked to a chair, and, sitting down there, lifted up his voice

and wept. ‘I’ve been an honest man, by God! all my life long; and now

I’m not merely ruined, but I shall be taken for a thief.’ He cried

bitterly after this outburst, with his head between his hands. His hat

fell off, and his walking-stick tumbled noisily to the floor. Mr. Barter

picked them up, and, having set them on the table, looked at the shaking

shoulders, and listened to the ruined man’s sobs and wailings. It was a

pity--of course it was a pity--but young Mr. Barter really did not see

how it was in his power to help it.