XCVIII
Upon the morning that saw the wreck ofThe Realmin Balaklava Bay, Thompson Jowell traveled up to London, big with the determination that what he had planned should not be carried out. It would be difficult to arrest the hand of his hired Fate, but with tact and promptitude it could be managed. He eased his mind by saying that it could, as the London Express carried him to Paddington at the Providence-defying speed of thirty miles an hour.
Even as he composed his cautiously-worded cablegram a wire from the Admiralty was lying on his office-desk. But he felt happier than he had done for months, and correspondingly virtuous as he chartered a hackney cab and drove to the City—and got out at the paved entrance to the narrow alley of squalid houses in the shade of the Banking House of Lubbock and Son.
It was a moist, foggy November forenoon, and the yellow gas-jets made islands of light in the prevailing murkiness.... Broadsheets papered the gutters, advertising the Latest Intelligence from the Crimea. Fate had arranged that Jowell’s newspaper should not be delivered at his country seat that morning, and that—absorbed in the composition of his message—he should have omitted to buy one at the railway station. It occurred to him that he would buy one now.
He thrust his big hand in his trousers-pocket and wagged his umbrella at a scudding newsboy. The boy darted on, and Jowell condemned him for a young fool. Then a coatless, shivering misery, with wild eyes staring through a tangle of matted hair—padded up on blue and naked feet and thrust a paper under the nose of the Contractor, saying:
“Buy it, sir! It’s the last I have!”
“Give it here!” snorted Jowell, grabbing it and fumbling for a penny. As he dropped the copper in the dirty hand, he knew that he and the sea-green Standish had met again. The ex-clerk laughed huskily as he recognized his old tyrant, and said, in a voice that shook and wobbled with some strange emotion:
“Keep your damned money! I’ll make you a present of the paper! I’ve prayed for a chance like this ever since my wife died!”
With a shrill, crazy laugh he shoved the penny back into the stout hairy hand with the big showy rings upon it, and was swallowed up in the moving crowd and blotted out. And Jowell damned him for an impudent hound, and pitched the coin angrily after him. And a guttersnipe pounced on it, turned a Catherine-wheel with a flourish of dirty heels, and vanished. And Jowell, standing under the gas-lamp at the head of the alley, tucked his umbrella under his arm, and opened the newspaper. These headlines caught his eye:
“GREAT GALE IN BALAKLAVA BAY.DAMAGE TO ALLIED FLEETS’ WAR-SHIPS.FOUNDERING OF ‘THE REALM’ TRANSPORTWITH ALL HANDS.Heroic Conduct of Young British OfficerMeets Death in Effort to Save Shipwrecked Men.”
By Gosh! the thing had happened, and would have to be made the best of. The boy would come round, by-and-by. Thompson Jowell folded the newspaper, andwalked down the alley to his office, and rolled in amongst the pale-faced clerks, who did not dare to lift their heads from their ledgers, knowing what they knew already, and went in silence to his private room.
And Chobley, the Manager, peeping out of his own little glass-case, said to himself that it would be better to leave his employer to himself for a little. Hence we may gather that Chobley had peeped into the Admiralty telegram that lay waiting on the blotting-pad.
Jowell opened it, sitting at his table. It briefly conveyed the news, and condoled with him on the irreparable loss of his gallant son. He did not collapse as on a previous occasion. He sat very still after he had read the message, with his ghastly face hidden in his thick, shaking hands.
His son, for whom he had saved, and planned, and plotted, and swindled, who was to become a Titled Nob and found a race of Nobs that should carry down into remote posterity the glories of the paternal name, had repudiated the name, and cast off his father, and gone down to death, defying and disowning him.
He lifted his livid face and rolled his bloodshot eyes about the office, and the sentences of the letter he had burned seemed written on the dingy wall-paper and woven into the dirty carpet on the floor. An organ in the street was grinding out a popular air, and they fitted themselves to it, were jarred out over and over in maddening repetition. He knew that he must soon go mad if this sort of thing went on.
There was courage in the man. He took pen and paper and wrote a letter to the firm of underwriters who had insuredThe Realm, making it clear that he would accord no grace in the matter of the great sum they would have to pay. His name was Peter Prompt in such matters, he added, and had always been. And then he penned an additional sentence or so that made the Senior Partner open his eyes.
His letter directed, sealed and stamped, he pulled himself out of his chair, took his umbrella from its usual corner, and went about his City business in the usual way. Save that his eyes were bloodshot, and that he wore no hat, there was nothing out of the common in his appearance.Yet, wherever he went, by something that, unknown to him, kept cropping up in his conversation—he left the impression that grief had turned his brain.
He became conscious ere long that he was bareheaded, and supplied himself with the needed article—with the latest thing in mourning bands upon it—at his hatter’s in Cornhill. Leaving the shop, he blundered into the capacious waistcoat of Sowell, who was walking arm-in-arm with Powell and Cowell. And they wrung his hands and tenderly condoled with him, lengthening their faces that were expanded in irrepressible smiles of happiness, and squeezing tears into eyes that were twinkling with relief and joy.
For the wreck ofThe Realmhad saved the credit of the Army Contractors. The quills of Tussell ofThe Thunderboltand those other War Correspondents who told barbed truths were robbed of their venom. They were to be feared no more. Henceforth everything that was lacking to the health and comfort of the British Eastern Expedition would be proved to have been contained in that capacious scapegoat. There would be no end to the possibilities of the transport—safe at the bottom of Balaklava Bay.
And the sacrifice of young Mortimer had wreathed the crime of Jowell with a halo of impeccability. Sowell, Cowell, Powell and Co. could hardly refrain from chuckling, and digging him in the ribs. And they bore him off to lunch with them in a private room at a well-known City tavern, where Bowell, Dowell, Crowell, Shoell, and others of the fraternity were to meet them by appointment. And they plied the bereaved parent with meats and wines, and flattered and cockered him. After the cloth was drawn, their exultation bubbled over. There were toasts and speeches, full of allusions of the sly and subtle kind. And the health of their idol being drunk with acclamations, he got up heavily out of his chair to make a speech.
“Gentlemen...” he began.
There were protestations. Cowell would rather have heard the words “My friends” from the lips of a man so endeared to those present by long years of business association and successful enterprise, as his honored friend, Thompson Jowell. There were cries of “Hear, hear!” at this.
“By Gosh! You shall have your way!” said Jowellthickly, beating his big knuckles heavily on the shiny mahogany. Then he cleared his throat and began:
“My friends, if you do this thing that you have planned to do I will never come home again or call myself by your name, or take another sixpence of your money. Don’t do it, Governor! Don’t do it, for God’s sake! He might forgive you! I never should, I know!”
He smiled upon the sickened faces round the table, waiting for the applause that should have greeted the shoddy sentiment he had intended to dish up for them.... He did not know that he had repeated the words of his dead son’s last letter; or that he had wound up his communication to the underwriters by quoting them.
He must have left the confederates staring, for he found himself in the street, walking Westwards at a great rate.... It was now dark, and very wet—and the people who passed him were for the most part sheltered by umbrellas, and omitted to notice the stout man in the mourning hatband and flaring waistcoat, who walked with his coat unbuttoned heedless of the pouring rain.... But it seemed to Jowell that eyes followed him, and fingers pointed at him—and that the sentences of Mortimer’s last letter flared at him from every hoarding, and were written in fiery characters upon the pavement under his feet.
He let himself into the great house in Hanover Square, shut up and blinded and looked after, in his absence from town—by a housekeeper and an under-butler. He was expected, and preparations had been made to receive him. But, explaining to the curtseying housekeeper that he would want no dinner, he passed into his sumptuous library and locked the door. Nobody ventured to disturb him, and when he came out it was nearly midnight. To the under-butler, who was waiting up to valet him, he spoke quite gently, bidding him fasten up the house and go to rest.
And then he took his candlestick from the hall-table and passed up the wide, shallow-stepped, softly-carpeted staircase and went into the splendid suite of rooms he had furnished for his boy....
Evidences of the young man’s sporting tastes were not lacking in the driving-whips and fishing-rods, single-sticks, fencing-foils and boxing-gloves that—in conjunction with divers brilliantly-colored pictorial representations of Starsof the Ballet, and Beauties of the Harem, yachts winning cups, favorite racers winning the Derby, and Pets of the Prize-Ring winning Championships—decorated the walls.
The costly inlaid banjo, upon which the hope of the House of Jowell had been wont to thrum out the accompaniment to “Villikins and His Dinah,” lay upon a cedar cigar-cabinet, beside an Oriental divan stood the gildedhuquathat had never failed to make its owner deadly sick. A Turkish dressing-gown lay over a chair—an embroidered smoking-cap hung upon the corner of a gilded reading-stand.... Upon a table stood the Ensign’s library, consisting of an English Dictionary, a Bible presented by his mother on his tenth birthday; some Manuals of Infantry Drill and Musketry; sundry lives of celebrated pugilists, Ruff’sGuide to the Turf, theStud Book,Stonehenge on the Horse,Hoyle on Whist, and theSporting Almanac.
It had been the father’s whim that Mortimer’s rooms should be kept exactly as Mortimer had left them, and that nothing the Ensign had forgotten should be moved, or put away. There was a pair of doeskin military gloves he had worn, lying upon the toilet-table in the bedroom. And a strap that had formed part of a sword-belt lay forgotten upon the Brussels carpet near the foot of the bed.
Thompson Jowell picked up the strap, and as he set down his candlestick, he ran it between his fingers, remembering that it had belonged to his son, who, rather than be defiled by the golden mud that every roll in the gutter crusted more thickly upon him, had cast him off and chosen to die.
“I’m piling it up for you, Morty, my boy,” he heard himself saying, as he laid himself down heavily into the armchair by the huge carved four-poster, and sat there staring, and drumming heavily with his fists upon his knees.
He had throughout his life been a man destitute of imagination. Now, at this final hour, the gift was born in him. He heard thousands of voices cursing him. He saw thousands of blackened hands pointing at him. He knew himself a murderer. He realized that the millions he had gained by fraud and trickery had bought him estate in Hell.
“My name’s Done Brown—that’s what it is,” he muttered, thickly.
He lifted a shaking hand to wipe the cold sweat from his forehead, and started as the strap of the sword-belt dangled before his eyes. He lowered his hand and looked intently at the narrow band of tough, doubled buff-leather; pipeclayed, and having a solid gilt-brass ring stitched and riveted in the loop at either end. As he turned it musingly about in his fingers, he found that, doubled, and pushed through one of the gilt rings, it made a slip-noose. Then Imagination suggested the thing that he might do. No thought of the dowdy woman weeping for her son in the lonely house at Market Drowsing came to stay him. She had never been anything to Thompson Jowell but the mother of his son....
The thought of Mortimer spurred him to the act of desperation. He got up and went to the door that led from the bedroom into the luxuriously-furnished apartment adjoining, where the Stars of the Ballet and the Beauties of the Harem simpered from the walls. He measured its height with his eye—rolled an ottoman, worked in Berlin wools by Mortimer’s mother, to the right position—got heavily upon it—threw an end of the buff strap over the top of the door—shut the door, and put the noose about his short, thick neck. Then, supporting himself by the wooden molding of the upper framework—he drove the ottoman from him with a clumsy kick and flourish of his stumpy legs....
Lights danced before his eyes that might have been the fires of a distant camp. There were explosions in his ears that might have been the thirty-four pounders speaking from the batteries. There was a hissing as of steam from flooded engine-furnaces—and a crying and shouting as of men packed and crowded together upon the bursting decks of a great transport that was going down....
And then there was nothing but the dead body of a gross stout man in shiny broadcloth—hanging behind the door of the bedroom—waiting to scare the life out of the housekeeper when she looked in at seven upon a bright November morning to pull up the window-blinds.
The decision of the Coroner’s jury was that grief for the death of his son had temporarily unhinged the mind of the great Contractor, and there were many expressions of sympathyfor the widow, and there was a pompous Funeral.
Cowell, Sowell, and the rest of the fraternity attended the solemnity. They shook their heads regretfully, and the water stood in their eyes. They said that he had been the very devil, sir! and that there never had been a man like him, and that there might never be another; and added that they were surprised he had left as little as three millions behind him—considering his opportunities!—and that they shouldn’t wonder if the gross amount turned out to be a great deal more!
It did; much to the benefit of the various charities among which the great fortune was divided by his widow, carrying out the expressed wishes of the son who would never have been his heir.
But even from the grave, his gross and greedy hand bore heavily upon the Army; nor has his spirit been altogether exorcised up to the present day. A Jowell was mixed up in the Forage and Remount scandals—which occupied the attention of a Commission of Inquiry—subsequently to the close of the most recent South African War.
It was a Neapolitan descendant of his—one Thompsono Jowelli—who washed the oats destined for the Artillery horses of the Italian Army in Tripoli, who filled up the Commissariat cattle with dry hay and coarse salt—drove them to the weighing-machines past those water-tanks in the Via Angioina—kept back part of the shipments of coffee and sugar intended for the troops—carried it back to its original starting-point, and re-sold it to the Government. And of these, as in the case of their distinguished forerunner, the inevitable lesson must be learned in the long-run.
No man can plunder and defraud the community without injuring and despoiling himself.