James Hornett was less changed than his old employer, but it was evident
that he too had fallen upon evil times. For a mere second the familiar
tones of his voice were no more than familiar to Bommaney, whose mind
was confused by long misery and hunger and sleeplessness, and the shock
of his late encounter. But when he turned and saw Hornett’s long thumb
and finger scraping at his stubbly jaws, the gesture and the attitude
of apology brought him back to mind at once. Hornett’s coat sleeve was
torn, and showed his arm half way down to the elbow, but revealed no
hint of linen, The collar of his frock-coat was buttoned tightly about
his neck, and there was a sparkling metallic rime upon his cheeks and
chin and upper lip. Bommaney was ashamed before him, and afraid of him,
and only some faint reminder of self-respect and the pride of earlier
days held him back from the impulse to run away.
‘You’re not afraid of me, sir?’ said James Hornett. He had always
smiled, and was smiling even now. The smile was no more than a
contortion of the muscles of the face, which made a long mirthless
crease on either cheek, and left the eyes untouched by the least light
of sympathy. It gave him a propitiatory dog-like look, and there was a
hint of fawning in his attitude which matched it perfectly and carried
out the likeness. ‘You remember me, sir?’ he went on, for Bommaney
stared at him so wildly that there seemed room for reasonable doubt
on that point. ‘Hornett, sir. James Hornett Your faithful servant for
thirty years, sir.’ Bommaney looked at him with haggard watering eyes,
and said nothing as yet ‘It’s a bit of a surprise, sir, at first, isn’t
it?’ Hornett went on, with his unchanging smile. There was a good deal
of hunger and even triumph in his small soul, but they found no other
outward expression, and his attitude and voice were as apologetic
and retiring as of old. ‘It was rather a surprise to me, sir, when I
recognised you. Isn’t it a little dangerous for you to be here, Mr.
Bommaney?’
They both started, and each looked about him at this mention of the
fugitive’s name.
‘Hush!’ said Bommaney. ‘Don’t call me by that name. Come away from
here.’
A policeman strolled along the street, with an echoing tread, and as
the two slunk past him he turned a casual glance upon them. The glance
touched them like a galvanic shock, and they would have run if they had
had courage for such an indiscretion.
‘What do you want with me?’ asked Bommaney, when the policeman was
out of sight and hearing; Hornett walking beside him, with his lean,
propitiatory fingers at his chin, looked up with hesitating meekness.
‘Well, you see, sir,’ he responded, ‘your fall was mine, sir; I was
supposed’--he coughed behind his hand here to indicate apology for
the introduction of a theme so necessarily disagreeable to the other’s
feelings--’ I was supposed, sir, to have been in your confidence. I made
many applications for employment, and nobody would employ me. Young Mr.
Weatherall, sir, promised, personally, that if I called again, he’d kick
me down the steps.’
Bommaney groaned.
‘What do you want with me?’ he asked again.
They were standing by this time outside the doors of a public-house, and
the wind-driven rain was pelting down heavily.
‘I thought, sir----’ said Hornett; ‘I’m very hard pressed, sir.’ The
dog-like, propitiatory smile never varied. ‘I was following Mr. Phil
myself, sir, in the hope that his kindness might run to a trifle.’
‘Come in,’ said Bommaney; and Hornett eagerly accepting the invitation,
they entered the house together. There was an odour of frying in the
room, and a hissing noise proceeded from a soft of metal caldron which
stood over a row of gas-jets on the pewter counter. A printed legend,
‘Sausage and Mashed, 3d.’ was pasted on the wooden partition at the
side of the box they entered, and on the mirror which faced them, and
displayed their own squalid misery to themselves. A year ago the fare
would have seemed uninviting to either at his hungriest moment, but now
Bommaney called for it with a dreadful suppressed eagerness, and, the
barman serving them with a tantalising leisure, they watched every
movement with the eyes of famine.
‘I’ve got a little place, sir, of my own,’ whispered Hornett, when the
pangs of hunger were appeased. ‘It’s very humble, but you could put up
for the night there.’ Bommaney made no answer, but the two set out again
together through the rain, and, pausing once only for the purchase of a
flat pint bottle of whisky, made straight for Fleeter’s Rents.
All that nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand of the many
thousands who pass it every day could tell you of Fleeter’s Rents
is that it makes a narrow black gash in the walls of the great
thoroughfare, and that it neighbours Gable Inn. It is slimy in its very
atmosphere all winter through, and its air in summer time is made of
dust and grit and shadow. The old Inn elbows it disdainfully on one
side, and on the other a great modern stuccoed pile overtops it with
a parvenu insolence. It is the home naturally of the very poor; for
no hermit or hater of the world, however disposed to shun his fellows,
would hide in its dingy solitudes whilst he had but a mere shilling a
day for lodging and bodily sustenance elsewhere.
Hornett led the way up a set of narrow and broken stairs, and having
reached the uppermost story of the house, pushed open a broken door,
which, depending from a single hinge, scratched, noisily upon the uneven
flooring of the room. His guest stood shivering in the doorway until a
match sputtered and fizzed in Hornett’s fingers. Then, guided by that
precarious light, he advanced. Hornett lit a candle which adhered by its
own grease to the filthy wall and had already made a great cone of smoke
with a tremulous outline there. There was a small grate, with a mere
double-handful of shavings, chips, and coal behind its rusty bars.
Hornett applied the match to the shavings, and, as the fire leapt up,
the two men knelt together, coughing and choking in the smoke, and
bathing their chilled hands in the flame. Bommaney drew the flat bottle
from a pocket hidden somewhere in his multitudinous rags, and drank.
Hornett watched him greedily, with hands involuntarily and unconsciously
extended. Then when he had drunk in turn, they each shivered over
the fire again, stealing furtive glances at each other, each mightily
disconcerted when he met the other’s eye. Bommaney had aged dreadfully
during his year of hiding, and Hornett, who had drunk his employer’s
health upon his birthdays often enough to know his age to a day, could
yet scarce believe that the dreadful spectre who knelt beside him
numbered less than fourscore years.
One question perplexed Hornett’s mind. How came it, he asked himself
over and over again, that in the space of a mere twelvemonths a man who
started with at least eight thousand pounds could have fallen into such
a depth of poverty? Eight thousand pounds, if absolutely nothing were
done with it for its own increase, meant royal living for a score
of years for an unencumbered man. Hornett longed to satisfy his own
curiosity upon this point, and felt as if he dared not ask the question
for his life. He framed a score of ways by which he might approach
it, with a road of retreat behind him, and at last, as if in spite of
himself, he said, with apologetic impudence,
‘You don’t seem to have made the money last long, sir.’
‘The money,’ cried Bommaney, turning furiously upon him. ‘What money?’
Hornett edged away upon his knees, and his thumb and fingers traced the
creases of his smile up and down his stubbly cheeks.
‘Do you think,’ the old man demanded passionately, ‘that I took away a
penny?’
Hornett was afraid to rise. There was such a despair and so much fury in
the other’s looks that he could do nothing but crouch at his feet with
his mean meek face turned fearfully towards Bommaney, and his body
cowering.
‘You think I took that eight thousand pounds?’ Bommaney quavered, with a
voice of bitter disdain.
He had never in his life regretted anything so profoundly as he had
regretted his resistance of that temptation. To have had all the blame
and shame, and to endure all the miseries a convicted thief might earn
for himself, to have been an outcast and a pauper, only because he
had been resolute against temptation! It is easy enough for a man whom
circumstances keep honest to think himself honourable beyond the chance
of temptation. But misery has the virtue of Ithuriel’s spear, with a
difference. As the one touched the beast and transformed him to the
seeming of a high intelligence, so will the other touch a seemingly
impregnable armour of bright honour, and turn it into tinder, leaving
the poor beast revealed and unprotected from his own base natural
longings. The poor Bommaney was maddened to think he had not done what
the other’s thoughts charged him with, even though he passionately
rebelled against the accusation.
‘When did you ever know me to be a rogue, James Hornett?’ he asked, with
an air and voice to which his passion lent something like dignity. ‘When
did you ever know me defraud a man of a farthing?’
‘Never, sir, I’m sure,’ Hornett responded, not doubting in his own mind
that Bommaney was guilty. ‘But----’
‘But what?’ cried Bommaney. ‘My own son, my own flesh and blood, would
hardly shake hands with me. My clerk--I took him out of the gutter,
_you_ know that, Hornett! I took you out of the gutter and made a man
of you, and lavished kindness on you. Nobody has a minute’s trust in
me--nobody thinks of misfortune or disaster. I was right to run away and
hide myself, for nobody would have believed me if I had stayed and told
the truth.’
Hornett looked more frightened than before after this outburst, but
Bommaney read incredulity in his face, and answered it with an added
passion.
‘What good would it do me to tell lies to you? Suppose I made you
believe me, am I such a fool as to, think your pity could set me on my
legs again?’
He turned away, moved by his own wrath and anguish, and Hornett, rising,
made himself as small as he could in the corner beside the grate.
Bommaney, in his pitiful broken boots, went shuffling up and down the
room.
‘What became of the money, sir?’ the clerk asked with a shaky voice.
He was ready to run for his life, and he was more than half afraid that
the old man was mad--his eyes blazed so, and his voice and gestures were
so tempestuous.
‘It was lost,’ said Bommaney. ‘I lost it, Heaven knows how. I’ve thought
a thousand times,’ he said, through his clenched teeth, ‘that that young
Barter must have had it.’
‘Young Barter, sir?’ said Hornett.
Then Bommaney told all he knew of the story of his own loss, and at a
certain point in the narrative Hornett started and made a step forward.
He remembered the night well enough--he had reason to remember it. An
appointment for the theatre that evening had led him to call upon a
brother clerk in Gable Inn, and he had seen young Mr. Barter leaving his
chambers in what had struck him at the time as being an odd and stealthy
fashion. He had remarked it for the moment, and had forgotten it
afterwards, as men forget a thousand things of the sort which have
no interest personal to themselves. But now he saw young Mr. Barter’s
figure with a singular distinctness, and the face turned round in the
gaslight was again as visible as it had been at the moment. He thought
he read a meaning in it now. But for this slight confirmation of
his employer’s story he would probably have disbelieved it, but the
accidental character of the clue weighed with him, an apparent touch of
romance in it gave it a value beyond its merits.
‘Could you tell me, sir,’ he asked, ‘exactly what time it was when you
left Mr. Barter’s office?’
‘No,’ said Bommaney, suddenly weary after his outburst of
self-exculpation, ‘I don’t know. It was after banking hours. It was
dark; he had to light the gas. What if I could? What would that have to
do with it?’
‘Well, you see, sir,’ Hornett answered, ‘I’m not likely to forget that
evening. Of all the evenings of my life, sir, I made a call at Gable Inn
myself, sir, at Number One. If young Mr. Barter had found the notes
he wouldn’t care to face you again, and he mightn’t have answered your
knock at the door, though he might have heard it.’
‘Any fool could tell me that,’ said Bommaney roughly. ‘What do you
mean?’
‘I’ve noticed, sir,’ said Hornett, with marked humility, as if he
apologised for having said anything, ‘that young Mr. Barter is a
gentleman who goes about in rather a large way, and noisy way, sir. He’s
a biggish man, as it is, and to look at him at first you’d fancy that he
was bigger than he is. He talks very loud and cheery, sir, and he bangs
things about a good deal.’
‘Well?’ said Bommaney, irritated by these slow preliminaries, ‘what
about it all?’
He could see that his late clerk was leading to a point of some sort,
and listened with a growing impatience.
‘He was leaving his rooms that night, sir,’ said Hornett, ‘as sly as a
cat. I was just on the ground-floor of Number One as he was locking
the door behind him. Locking it, don’t you see, sir,’ said Hornett,
beginning to be fired by his imagination, and speaking eagerly, ‘so as
not to make a noise in pulling it to behind him. I suppose I made some
sort of a noise in going behind him, but any way, he looked up at me--I
can see him now!’ he cried, with a swift conviction, ‘as if he was here
at this very minute, white and cowardly. That’s what he was, sir. White
and cowardly, I can see him now.’
Bommaney grasped him by the wrist.
‘Do you remember the time?’ he asked, passing one hand confusedly
through the tumbled and disgraceful old locks of his hair. ‘Do you
remember when I left the office? Do you remember when you left it?’
‘Almost directly, sir, after you. But you drove, sir, and I walked. I
stopped, and had a little conversation with a friend, and just a social
glass that might have kept me back five minutes, sir. I was going to
dine with Mr. Marshall (White and Fielding’s Mr. Marshall, sir) before
the theatre.’
Bommaney released his wrist, and dropping on his knees before the fire
again, warmed his hands absently and stared into the blaze.
‘The notes were all hundreds, James,’ he said, after a pause. ‘They
were stopped at the Bank, I know, because I saw the advertisement. It
wouldn’t be easy to get rid of them.’
‘There are ways and means, sir,’ said Hornett. ‘They’d have to be
disposed of at a loss, of course--a heavy loss--and kept quiet for a
considerable time.’
‘Have you heard of any of them coming into circulation?’ asked Bommaney.
‘I haven’t been in the way to hear of anything, sir,’ the clerk answered
mournfully, ‘but,’ with a sidelong look at his old employer, ‘if I could
only get to look a bit respectable, I could make inquiries in an hour. I
have no doubt I could find out, sir.’
‘My boy believes I’m guilty, like the rest,’ said the old man, moaning
and shivering and coughing again. The passion of his protest and the
warmth of heart which Hornett’s returning confidence had taught him
had all died away, and he was his bankrupt, disgraced, and broken self
again, old and maudlin, and strickenly conscious of his miseries.
‘Phil might help me,’ he said shakily. ‘He ‘could, but he won’t. He’s
got plenty of money. If I’d been a rogue, James Hornett,’ and there he
flashed up again, ever so little, ‘I could have robbed my own flesh and
blood with safety. A rogue would have done it. I was his sole trustee,
and I could have had nine thousand by a stroke of the pen at any
minute.’
‘Mr. Phil, sir,’ said Hornett ‘Mr. Phil hasn’t got much money left’
‘Why not?’ the old man asked, staring round at him with his watery eyes.
‘He paid Mr. Brown the eight thousand in full, sir, and divided the
rest, as far as it would go, amongst the poorest of the creditors.’
Bommaney turned back towards the fire, and drooped there. He seemed very
impassive under this intelligence, but he was deeply moved by it all
the same. The sense of his son’s high feeling of honour gave him a
keen throb of pride, and then he thought bitterly that his own ill-luck
pursued his offspring.
The loss was double. It had disgraced and ruined him, and had robbed his
son of his inheritance.
‘Hornett,’ he said, ‘James Hornett.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I was brought up,’ the old man said, in a muffled voice, advancing and
retiring his hands before the fire, and chafing them automatically, ‘I
was brought up by Christian parents. I never did a dishonourable act in
all my days. I have been a God-fearing man and a--a steady church-goer.
I give it all up. I renounce it. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe
in religion. I don’t believe in being honest. It’s a--it’s a vile wicked
world, Hornett, and it’s my belief the devil rules it.’
‘Oh, sir,’ cried Hornett,’ you mustn’t talk like this, sir. You must
excuse me speaking free, sir, but I can’t stand by and hear you talk
like that. I can’t listen to it, sir--I can’t really. I’ve never said
a disrespectful word to you, Mr. Bommaney, but I really must speak out
now, sir. It isn’t respectable, sir, to talk like that.’
After this there was a long silence, and Bommaney, who had repouched the
bottle after his last application to it, consulted it again, and handed
it wordlessly to Hornett, without looking at him.
‘Phil might,’ he murmured in a while--’ he might be brought to believe
me. He’s an honest man himself, James--a very honest high-minded man
indeed. I must look where he lives,’ he murmured, seeking for the
envelope his son had given him. ‘He gave me his address.’
‘His address, sir,’ said Hornett. ‘You could almost lay your hand on
him. He lives there. That’s his window with the light in it.’ Bommaney
moved to the window, and followed with his glance the direction of
Hornett’s outstretched finger. There was a window a few feet higher than
the one at which he stood, and half-hidden from observation by a stone
parapet. A shadow obscured the light, and moved about the ceiling,
visible from below.
‘I saw him there to-night, sir,’ said Hornett ‘I saw his face at the
window. He put a glass of flowers outside. That’s his shadow moving
about there now.’
‘Phil!’ groaned the wretched father, straining his dirty wasted hands
together. ‘Phil!’
‘I’m not the figure, sir,’ said Hornett, ‘to call upon a gentleman like
Mr. Phil; nor yet are you, sir, if you’ll excuse my saying so. But if
you’d let me go, sir, and put the case to him, he might come and see
you here, sir, and you might set yourself straight with him, sir, which
would at least,’ the seedy man added, somewhat moved by the old man’s
tears and tremblings, ‘be an advantage to a father’s heart.’
Bommaney stood in silence, looking upward. The moving shadow settled
itself upon the ceiling in a huge silhouette, distinctly traceable.
There was no doubting it was Phil’s dear head that threw the shadow,
himself invisible, so near, so far. The foolish outcast’s heart ached
bitterly, and he stretched both hands towards the shadow, not knowing
that he moved.
‘Shall I venture, sir?’ asked Mr. Hornett, more moved than ever, and
coughing to clear a little huskiness in the throat. ‘Shall I venture,
sir, to look in on Mr. Phil in the morning?’
‘Yes, go, James,’ said Bommaney, sobbing outright by this time.
‘Perhaps--perhaps he may believe me.’
V
When young Mr. Barter took time to think about things, he began,
for more reasons than one, to be sorry. It is necessary for the due
development of this history to go back a little, and to take up Mr.
Barter on the day following the commission of his crime. The young man
felt that he was unable to afford candour, and discreetly avoided the
naming of his own action. Eight thousand pounds is a sum which most
people would find tempting. Young Mr. Barter would never have found it
tempting in the criminal way (though, if he had given his mind to
the consideration, he could at any time have seen how enviable its
unencumbered possessor might be) if he had not at the moment felt
himself under considerable pressure. Mr. Barter’s fleshy and well-formed
fingers were somewhat too familiar with the feel of cards. These fingers
of his were peculiarly dexterous to look at, and had even an unnecessary
braggadocio air of dexterity when he was engaged in his favourite
occupation. Experienced people watched his shuffling and dealing with
great care. In Mr. Barter’s frank and engaging countenance, and in that
ready smile in which the faultless teeth shone so conspicuously, there
was no hint of danger to the most unwary. Even the wariest, listening
to his genial mellow laughter, and seeing the jolly shoulders shake with
mirth, were inclined to think him a loyal honest-hearted fellow. His
loud swagger, his frank rollicking gait, his hail-good-fellow-well-met
shake of the hand, the other hand clapped upon the shoulder, the noisy
greeting, and that unfailing smile, not merely disarmed suspicion, but
made the mere fancy of it impossibly absurd. But young Mr. Barter had
accustomed himself to associate with people whose experiences had forced
them to be observant, and to these the dexterous caressing fingers with
which he manipulated all instruments employed in games of chance seemed
to justify a fairly constant watchfulness. The fingers handled the cards
as if they loved them, as if they had been accustomed to them from the
cradle. The tips turned back a good deal, and the nails hooked a little
forward. There were little bulbs of tact at every tip, the hands were
made for a gambler, and could by no possibility have belonged to anybody
else.
The chief ground for the young man’s sorrow may be very easily and
briefly stated. The packet which the unfortunate cruelly-tempted
Bommaney had let fall in his half-drunken abstraction on the floor of
young Mr. Barter’s private room was made up exclusively, as we know
already, of notes for one hundred pounds.
Now Bank of England notes for one hundred pounds, though valuable, and
easily enough employed in all civilised countries when honestly come by,
are only to be got rid of when dishonestly acquired at great risk and
loss. A note for a mere five pounds may pass through scores of hands
before being stopped at the bank. Tens, so the experienced in such
matters will tell you, are a little difficult. Twenties are inquired
into rather carefully. Fifties are positively dangerous to handle
in this way. Hundreds are, except after great lapse of time, almost
impossible; and as for a thousand, a man might almost as well steal a
white elephant as a bank-note of that value, except that it will cost
him nothing for keep, unless you count the tremor of soul and nerve,
which is surely worth something, in which a man criminally possessed of
another’s property is almost certain to live.
Mr. Barter, then, had eight thousand pounds in ready money, was liable,
if discovered, to penal servitude, and was unable to touch a farthing
of his ill-got gains. There are many men in the world, the world’s
experience proves it hourly, who set so small a price upon their
self-respect, that they will sell it for a shilling, for a drink, for
a word. But there is hardly any man so lost to the natural human desire
for self-approval that he will actually give away his self-respect for
nothing. Now this absurd transaction young Mr. Barter, when he took time
to think about things, appeared to himself to have made.
He was not, and never had been, a great reader; he gave up his mind to
pursuits which he found more attractive than the tranquil fields and
lanes of literature. Yet he remembered, in a dim sort of way, either
that he had read somewhere in his schoolboy days, or that a fanciful old
nurse had told him, a story of a person somewhere, who, being possessed
of a great chest of money, went one day to look at it, and found
that his hard cash had changed to withered leaves. Precisely such a
transformation had overtaken that eight thousand pounds, at the moment
when it had fallen from the hands of a man who might have made an honest
use of it. The fable was, and was not, true, so far as he remembered,
and his fancy dwelt curiously about the history. There was no
possibility of turning back the withered leaves to gold, and making them
jingle and glitter again as only one’s own ready money can jingle and
glitter. But, useless as these crisp and rustling leaves of paper were
to him, they held still all their old potentialities, and in the hands
of honest men or courageous rascals each leaf might still transmute
itself into a hundred golden emblems of sovereignty and power. He was
neither that honest man nor that courageous rascal, and the money grew
to be a sort of devilish tantalising fetish to him. Before he had owned
it a fortnight, he had felt a hundred times he could have burned it out
of the exasperation of mere spite against it.
He heard, of course, of Bommaney’s flight, and of the failure of the
old-established business house. People talked about these things a
good deal for a time, and he himself listened to and took part in many
speculations as to Bommaney’s whereabouts, and the means he would take
to get rid of the notes and make them available for his own purposes.
He found it at first a little trying to the nerves. There was nothing,
since Bommaney had accepted his own disgrace and run away, to connect
young Mr. Barter with the lost eight thousand pounds, yet it took much
courage, and a considerable amount of inward spurring, to bring himself
to talk about the business. When a man carries a secret of a quite
harmless nature, it happens often, as almost everybody knows, that
casual words and quite innocent glances startle him with hints of
understanding and participation. What is it when the detection of the
secret involves open shame and penal servitude? Can a man of genuine
courage be a thief? Is not courage after all at the very bottom of all
manly honour, of all sound honesty, all true self-respect? How shall a
thief be other than a lurking cur, whose whole soul, such as it is,
is bent to a mean suspicion that he is suspected, a continuous
terror-stricken watchfulness, a sleeping and waking dread of an awful
hand-clap on the shoulder? There are constitutional differences in
thieves, no doubt, as there are in other people, but the key-note of the
dishonest man’s whole thought is fear. When, after a day or two, young
Mr. Barter had accustomed himself to speak of Bommaney and the lost
eight thousand, and had often spoken of them, he began to look out
for suggestions that might be useful to himselt He even led the way at
times, and speaking to solicitors and barristers of extensive criminal
experience, he asked often, for example, how could a scoundrel get rid
of such a clumsy handful? Why didn’t the fool cash the notes, he would
ask contemptuously, before he left town, and before he was suspected?
Everybody knew of course that the notes had not been presented, and
their numbers were advertised in all the daily papers. Now what could a
fellow do who had them, by Jingo? What _could_ he do? There was no
way open, so far as young Mr. Barter could see, and he was wonderfully
engaging and innocent of the world’s wickeder ways as he talked thus
with the ablest of his fellow professionals.
The fellow professionals cited cases. There was Rosenthal, a noted
receiver in his day, to whom a dishonest clerk had sold five thousand
pounds for five hundred. Rosenthal had held the notes for six years, and
had then put them cautiously on the Continental market. He was an old
hand, was Rosenthal, and very clever and leary, but they had bowled him
out. The clerk was wanted on another charge, and turned Queen’s
evidence against the receiver. Almost all the stories had this kind of
termination, because the legal gentlemen whom young Mr. Barter consulted
remembered mainly cases in which they or their friends had been engaged,
or cases which had resulted in criminal proceedings. Others there
certainly were, but they were vague and necessarily without those
guiding particulars which he desired.
It has been already hinted that the young man was a gambler, and it is
likely that most of the reasons which made the money seem so welcome to
him had their sources at the gaming table. He belonged to one of those
clubs which deserve to be numbered among the blessings of
modern society--where men do not meet for social intercourse and
good-fellowship, or for dining purposes, or for any of the common and
amiable reasons which draw men into club-life, but simply and purely
to the end that they may win one another’s money. It was a joint-stock
swindling company to which young Mr. Barter belonged, and within its
limits every man proposed to himself to get the better of every other
man by such means as lay in his power. A pigeon got in amongst them
every now and then, of course--came in well-feathered and went out
plucked, but for the main part the rooks pecked hungrily at one another,
and made but little of their time and pains. The one solitary advantage
of these corporations is that they gather the depredatory birds
together, and lead them to prey upon themselves instead of wandering
abroad for the defeathering of the innocent and artless who abound
even in these days. The well-constituted mind can hardly fail to take
pleasure in the contemplation of these resorts, where Greek meets Greek
(in the modern French sense as well as the old heroic)--where scoundrel
encounters scoundrel, and learns that the pleasure of being cheated is
by no means so great as that of cheating.
There were people of widely ranging social position in this curious
contingent. One or two men of title, and one or two of the highest
social or commercial respectability, lent their names for some
inconceivable reason to grace the front page of the neatly-bound little
volume of rules which govern, or sometimes fail to govern, the conduct
of the corporation. Mr. Barter rubbed shoulders with young men--very
young men they were--who would one day have handles to their names, and
enjoy the control of considerable estates. He sat at the same table with
men whose birth and antecedents, like those of the immortal Jeames, were
shrouded in a mystery. He met men of his own position, who like himself
were desperately glad of being numbered in the same club society with
men eminent on the turf, or familiar in the gilded saloons of the great.
He liked to think of those gilded saloons; it might be interesting
to know what he thought they resembled--most probably a somewhat
old-fashioned earthly paradise of ormolu. He bragged indefatigably
of his club and the people whom he met there. He dated all his private
correspondence from it, and spent hundreds of daylight hours above the
ivories and the pasteboard.
At the time of that foolish and weak-willed Bommaney’s disaster there
were two or three I.O.U.’s for sums much more considerable than he
could afford to part with in the hands of his fellow-members. Law is a
necessity to human society. Even a band of brigands can’t hang together
without it. Debt, outside the club, was by no means a thing to be
harshly spoken of, but debt to a fellow-member was a literal millstone
round a man’s neck, and would sink him out of sight in no time.
The elder Barter had gone over to the majority, despatched by that
street accident, and if the old man had known nothing of the young man’s
courses, he had had it in his power to make him well-to-do. But he had
paid his debts once at least, and had more than once had occasion to
grieve over the boy’s handling of the firm’s money, and so had made his
will entirely in his wife’s favour, leaving his son dependent upon her
good graces. The mother was disposed to be a little sterner than the
father had been. Perhaps if young Barter had dreaded her less poor
Bommaney’s fallen notes might have been returned to him.
But, to get on with the story, the young man’s chief creditor at the
club was one Steinberg, a gentleman whose time appeared to be absolutely
at his own disposal, though he was known by some of his fellow-members
to have an address in Hatton Garden, and to be more or less of a diamond
merchant there. He often carried about with him, in a pocket-book, or
in neat little packages of grocer’s gay paper, borne in the
waistcoat-pocket, a collection of gems of considerable value, and would
show them to his intimates with the _insouciance_ of a man who was
accustomed to handling things of price. He never was without money, made
little journeys at times, which rarely took him away from town for more
than a day or two, and was, almost always, wholly unoccupied except for
the cards.
Now young Barter had a prodigious idea of this gentleman’s astuteness.
He had no particular belief in his honesty, and he believed him, not
altogether unreasonably as the sequel proved, to be initiated into most
of the mysteries of modern rascality. This was merely a general notion,
based upon statements made by Steinberg himself, and supported by the
opinion of his intimates. Nobody spoke ill of Steinberg; it was only
understood that there was no move upon the board with which he was not
familiar. Young Barter, meeting him one evening at the club, whilst
Bommaney’s disappearance was still a fresh topic of town conversation,
spoke to him about it, with an assurance clearly begotten of practice.
‘Now, look here, Steinberg,’ he said, in his open and engaging way.
‘Suppose you’d nobbled those notes, what should you do with ‘em?’
Perhaps Mr. Steinberg resented the form of this inquiry. But be that as
it may, he responded with some tartness,
‘Suppose you’d nobbled them?’
At this chance thrust young Barter turned curiously red and white, and
had some ado to recover that open smile of his.
‘Hang it,’ he said, ‘you can’t suppose I meant it that way. But,’ with a
half-hysteric courage, ‘suppose you had--suppose I had--suppose anybody
had--what would he do? You, I, anybody?’
Mr. Steinberg sipped at his lemon squash--he drank that inspiring
liquid all the year round, and nothing else until cards for the day
were over--and puffed at his cigar, and looking young Barter full in the
face, nodded and smiled with an odd mingling of meaning and humour.
‘Put him on to me,’ he said, with perfect affability. ‘I’ll put him up
to it.’
‘Rather dangerous, wouldn’t it be?’ said Barter, showing his white teeth
in a somewhat forced and ghastly manner.
‘Everything’s dangerous for an ass,’ said Steinberg.
‘I shouldn’t have thought,’ laughed Barter, ‘that that was your line.’
He spoke as jestingly as he could, but he knew that his laugh was
forced, and that the voice in which he spoke was unlike his voice of
every day, and he wished, with the whole of his quaking heart, that he
had left the theme alone.
‘Well, no,’ said Steinberg, ‘I suppose you wouldn’t.’ He sipped his
liquor through a straw, and blew half a dozen rings of smoke from his
lips with practised dexterity, and kept a glittering German-Jewish eye
on Barter. Perhaps he meant something by the glance, perhaps he meant
nothing. He was a rather Machiavelian and sinister-looking personage,
was Mr. Steinberg, and there was something even in the calm expression
of those perfectly-formed rings of smoke and in the very way in which,
he sipped his liquor, and most of all in the observant glitter of his
eye, which spoke of a penetration and shrewdness very far out of the
common. More and more young Barter wished that he had not broached this
theme with Steinberg.
He could not help it for his soul. He could feel that his colour was
coming and going with a dreadful fluttering alternation. He quailed
before the Israelitish eye so shrewdly cocked at him, and when in a very
spasm of despair he tried to meet it, he was so abjectly quelled by it
that he felt his face a proclamation of his secret.
Steinberg went on sipping and smoking, and said nothing; but when the
young scoundrel, his companion, had somewhat recovered himself and dared
again to look at him, there was the same shrewd and wary glint in his
eyes.
Young Barter had been unhappy enough before this, but after it the money
became a burden hateful and horrible. He met Steinberg often, and
forced himself to be noisy in his company. In his dread of seeming
low-spirited, or ill at ease, he said things about his dead father which
he would have left unsaid, had he consulted the little good that was
left in him; and Steinberg seemed to watch him very closely.
Young Barter put off his creditor with promises. He would have lots of
money by and by. That seemed credible enough in the position of affairs,
and Steinberg waited. In a while, however, he became exigent, and
declined any longer to be satisfied with promises. One night the unhappy
rascal, playing all the more because of his troubles, all the more
wildly, and certainly all the worse, fell back upon his LO.U.’s.
Steinberg followed him from the club. It was late, and the streets were
very quiet.
‘This won’t do, you know, Barter,’ said Steinberg, tapping him on the
shoulder as they walked side by side.
‘Begad it won’t,’ said young Barter, doing his best to make light of it.
‘They’ve been cutting into me pretty freely this past week or two.’
‘Well,’ said Steinberg, puffing at his eternal cigar, and looking askant
at Barter under the light of a street-lamp which they happened to be
nearing at the moment, ‘what you’ve got to do, you know, is to find the
man who knows Mr. Bommaney.’
The commotion which assailed Barter at this speech was like an inward
earthquake.
‘What--what do you mean?’ he panted.
‘That’s what you’ve got to do,’ said Steinberg tranquilly.
‘Do you mean to insinuate----’ Barter began to bluster; but the older,
cooler, and more accomplished scoundrel stopped him contemptuously.
‘You know where they are,’ he said ‘Why don’t you get at ‘em?’