It was late that evening when O'Malley left Lavirotte. The doctor gave
instructions that if the delirium increased he was to be called. In
the case of the Frenchman, two things puzzled the energetic little
doctor. Although unquestionably the patient was raving mad, his pulse
was normal, and his skin moist.
When the nurse came up to the sick room, she could find no sign
whatever of delirium. Lavirotte seemed as calm and collected as any
judge on the bench. He asked was the doctor gone, and receiving an
answer in the affirmative, said to the nurse: "Bring me a pencil and
some paper. I want to write a couple of short notes."
"Are you not afraid it would be too much for you, sir?" remonstrated
the nurse.
"No, no," said the other, decisively. "There is something on my mind,
and I cannot sleep unless I get rid of it, so the sooner you get me
what I want the better."
The woman left the room, and in a few moments returned with what he
required. Then, on the back of a book, he wrote the two following
notes:
"My Dear Mr. Crawford,
"Since I saw you last I have thought of a matter which makes it of
vital consequence we should not lose an hour in realising your great
hope. I therefore beg of you to do all you can in furtherance of the
scheme. Let me hear from you by return of post. The moment I am able
to move I shall follow you to London.
"Give my dearest love to Dora; say I am very sorry they would not let
me see her when she was so near to me, and that to-morrow I will write
her as long a letter as my strength will allow.
"Yours, most devotedly,
"Dominique Lavirotte."
The second was to this effect:
"Dear Mr. O'Donnell,
"I am too weak to write you a long letter. I hope you will take the
will for the deed. I cannot tell you how sorry I am for all that has
lately occurred, and how deeply I sympathise with you in the business
troubles which, because of no fault of your own, have come upon you.
"You know, of course, that Eugene and I are the greatest friends on
earth. From news which I received to-day, and which I had little
expectation of ever hearing, I have reason, good reason, to hope that
within a very short time I am likely to come into possession of an
enormous fortune--a fortune so large that it will make me one of the
richest men in the kingdom. You are a man of business. To be precise,
I expect about half a million. Need I tell you what my first, my
greatest pleasure, will be in this? It will be to place the whole of
it absolutely at the disposal of my best friend's father, so that he
may be led carefully out of the present storm into the calm waters of
prosperous trade, in which his honour and his industry have already
made his name a household word in Ireland.
"This note has run out much longer than I expected. Good-night, my
dear Mr. O'Donnell. God bless you.
"Dominique Lavirotte."
When he had finished his two letters he enclosed them in envelopes,
directing the latter first.
Then suddenly he thought of what at first sight seemed an insuperable
difficulty.
How was he to address Crawford's letter? If he wrote on the envelope,
"St. Prisca's Tower, Porter Street," there was little doubt that in
due time the letter would be returned to him through the dead-letter
office.
Yet St. Prisca's Tower was the only address he knew for Crawford in
London. How stupid it was of him not to have asked for an address. At
the time, he had thought Dora or the old man should write to him
first. Since they had left, this idea had occurred to him, and now he
felt himself hopeless of communicating it to Crawford for the present.
No postman would in his senses think of knocking at the massive door
of that solitary tower, and if a postman, touched with lunacy, did
knock with his knuckles, he would never receive a reply.
He was fairly beaten. In this matter every hour was of value, of the
highest value; and here he was paralysed by an unpardonable stupidity
of his own.
"Will you ask Mr. Maher," he said to the nurse, "if he would be good
enough to step this way? I want a word with him."
When the landlord entered, Lavirotte said:
"Mr. Crawford, who was here last night, left for London without giving
me his address. Can you think of any means by which I might be able to
find it out at once? The matter is of very great importance."
The landlord looked with a keen glance at the sallow face and bandaged
head of the prone foreigner. Before Crawford left, he had made a
confidant of Maher to the extent that all would yet be well between
Lavirotte and his grand-daughter, and he had bound Maher, as an
honourable man, to silence. He had, moreover, tried to persuade Maher
that Lavirotte might not be quite so black as circumstances
represented him. Still the other could not help regarding Lavirotte
with a feeling the reverse of cordial. There could, however, be no
harm, he thought, in helping Lavirotte in this matter. He said: "Mr.
Crawford came first-class."
"Yes."
"From Euston?"
"From Euston."
"Then telegraph to Euston, address Mr. Crawford, first-class passenger
Irish mail, Euston."
The difficulty was solved, and in a few minutes Lavirotte had
forwarded the telegram, asking to what address he should send a letter
to him in London. At the same time he posted his letter to Mr.
O'Donnell.
There was little or no chance of his receiving a reply that night, as
the Glengowra office would, in all likelihood, be shut before it could
be forwarded there.
Next morning the answer came:
"Address letter to the Cygnet Hotel, Porter Street, E.C."
Lavirotte's letter to Mr. O'Donnell was delivered the morning after it
was written. He put it aside as the work of a man not responsible for
his actions; and yet, since it contained the first suggestion that it
was possible his business might be saved, he felt a slight tenderness
towards it, as a man, whose powers are altogether small, out of
proportion to his ambition, feels a tenderness towards the one person
who believes in his strength.
Immediately after it became generally known that Vernon and Son had
stopped payment, Mr. O'Donnell had asked a few of his best friends to
come and advise him as to his position. He explained to them that as
far as the business in Rathclare was concerned, he was perfectly
solvent and capable of carrying it on, but that, as he understood the
affairs of Vernon and Son were in a desperate and disgraceful way, and
as the company was unlimited, he should be certainly ruined by the
"calls."
He would, he told them, be quite content to lose all the money he had
invested in Vernon and Son, if he might only keep on the Rathclare
business as it was going; but that, of course, he was liable to the
creditors of the bank up to the very last penny he had, and the
chances were a thousand to one that, when Vernon and Son were
completely wound up, he would find himself as poor as the poorest man
in the parish.
Then he asked what they would recommend him to do with respect to the
business.
They tried to persuade him that things were sure to turn out much
better than he anticipated, and they advised him to keep the business
running exactly as it now was.
He had adopted their advice, but his heart was no longer in his work,
and he wandered about the place which he had reared from the
foundation to the roof, and he looked at the trade which he had
created, with a faltering step and a lack-lustre eye.
The evening of the day he got Lavirotte's letter was that following
Dr. O'Malley's call. Mrs. O'Donnell had, in the few days between
Eugene's hurt and this, tried to induce the father to go out to
Glengowra and see their son. But he had declined, saying: "It would do
neither him nor me any good. I can be of no use whatever to him now,
after all my big promises to him. The boy's prospects are ruined, and,
of course, for the girl's sake, that marriage must be broken off."
This evening the mother felt more than ever anxious to see her son,
and she made a strong appeal to the old man to take the train and run
down to Glengowra for an hour.
"No," he said, wearily. "Let me be, let me be. The very sight of the
boy would be a reproach to me. He must see I was a fool to venture all
my money, all my credit, with Vernon and Son."
"Don't say that, James. You know he is the best and kindest son that
ever lived. Besides, don't you see, as I told you before, it has all
been kept from him?"
"Then it will be all the worse to hear him talk about his marriage and
his prospects. I could not stand it, Mary. I should go mad. I should
let it all out to him, and kill him. My poor boy!"
"Well," said the mother, "come down to Glengowra, and don't see him at
all. He need not know you are there. Come with me--just for company."
The poor woman was torn between devotion to her husband and affection
for her son. She durst not leave the old man alone at home, and her
heart was breaking to see her only son, her only child, the infinity
of her maternity.
At this suggestion of his wife's, that he might go to Glengowra
without seeing his son, the old man looked up.
"Wait a moment," he said, and lifted a paper-weight off some letters
of the morning. He took up Lavirotte's and read it over carefully once
more, then thrust it into his pocket, and said: "Very well, Mary. Come
along." He uttered these words more brightly and briskly than any he
had spoken since the great crash had come upon him.
When the old couple arrived at Glengowra, they went straight to the
hotel. The mother ascended to her son's room. The father sent his card
up to Lavirotte.
He was requested to walk upstairs.
When he entered the room Lavirotte asked the woman to retire.
"Mr. Lavirotte, I got your letter this morning, and I am extremely
obliged to you for your kind words and for your offer of such enormous
help. I most sincerely hope you may get your fortune; for, from all I
have heard from Eugene, no one in the world could deserve better. I
have come especially to thank you for your kind offer; but, of course,
Mr. Lavirotte, you know I could never accept it. I am a doomed man."
"You shall, you must accept it," cried the prostrate man,
energetically. "I should care no more for all the money in the world
than for a handful of pebbles on the beach below. With the money in my
possession, should I see my friends wanting it? Besides, the sum I am
to come into will be so great that even largely as you have suffered
through that bank, I shall be able to spare you what you want to make
good the breach, and still leave myself in absolute affluence."
The manner of the Frenchman was one of utter self-possession, and it
confounded Mr. O'Donnell to find one so apparently sane talking such
trash. "May I ask you," said the old man, "if it is a fair question,
from what source you expect to acquire this fortune?"
"I am under an oath of secrecy in the matter, and cannot tell you. But
since I have been hurt, the person who is working the affair for me,
or rather on our joint behalf, has paid me a visit, and assured me
there is not the least prospect of failure or miscarriage, and that at
the end of six, and certainly in less than eighteen months from this,
I should be in possession of my share, not less than half a million
sterling."
The figures six and eighteen months appealed to certain possible
exigencies in the mind of Mr. O'Donnell, and carried his mind away
from the main prospect of the consideration to the details.
"I suppose," he thought, "they will make the first 'calls' light, so
as to get all they can out of the poorer shareholders. Then they will
go on increasing the sums of the 'calls' as the poorer ones drop off,
and this they cannot do under a certain time. Of course, I can pay the
'calls' up to a certain point, but when they reach the end of the
poorer shareholders, and have to fall back on the five or six men of
large means, I shall certainly be ruined. But I do not think they can
reach the point at which I should be left absolutely penniless before
eighteen months."
Lavirotte and Mr. O'Donnell talked on for half-an-hour in the same
strain. The Frenchman was careful to adhere strictly to his vow to
Crawford, and yet to say such things to the merchant as in the end
convinced him there was at least something in the statements made by
his son's friend.
At last he looked at his watch, and saw there was no time to lose if
they would catch the last train to Rathclare.
After a cordial parting with the Frenchman he went down, and found his
wife waiting for him.
By this time both were radiant. One had firm faith in the recovery of
her son, the other full assurance of the salvation of his position.