VI
GENEALOGICAL
The first thing I did the next morning, after a sleepless night besieged by possibilities, was to send a prepaid cable to Alberta; rather for the relief of my own feelings than because my promptitude could effect any possible good. Indeed, as the telegraph clerk was at pains to inform me, eight o'clock in England is three o'clock in western Canada, and the very earliest of alarm clocks had not yet delivered its nerve-racking message there. Also I was pacing up and down the passage outside Pollexfen and Allport's offices fully three quarters of an hour before their managing clerk ascended the linoleum-covered stairs, rattling his keys and warbling a morning carol, to open them for the day.
Mr. Pollexfen, the senior partner, was a spruce, well-preserved man, with white hair and moustache, but as little of parchment in his manner as in his florid, supple skin. He swung round in his chair and listened to my story attentively, with the tips of his fingers joined, and clicking his well-groomed nails as I talked.
"Well! well! well!" said he, with a commentary sigh, when I had ended. "It's a strange case: the strangest, I verily believe, that I've had to deal with in the whole course of my practice."
He pulled a drawer open and tossed something to me across the table.
"Do you know anything of this?"
"This" was a little book sumptuously bound in blue roan, and bearing upon its cover, embossed and gilt, a coat-of-arms, and the following legend in old English lettering.
"Pedigree of the Ingram or Ingraham family of Lilburn, Mass."
It was the very pamphlet over which, more than two years ago now, Paul had joined me in rather shamefaced laughter.
"Oh, yes," I replied. "I saw it at his rooms. Look! there's his name at the bottom."
"It seems so strange to us," the lawyer mused. "So contrary to all preconceived notions of America. Here, in peer-governed, class-beridden England, we take these things so much more as a matter of course. Myself, as an instance. I believe we are a highly respectable landed family, somewhere in the Eastern Counties, but I'd be bothered to say what my great-grandmother's maiden name was, and, I assure you, except for some tangible reason, I would regard time spent in finding out as time sadly wasted. The very crest on my spoons and carriage is a matter of tradition. It's never occurred to me to regard it with any degree of complacency. But, indeed, I must own to a rather complete ignorance of America, though we manage a good deal of business for clients over there. My ignorance extended, until lately, to the very name of the city where all this money was made. Oshkosh? You're a journalist, I see. Can you truthfully say the name stirs any latent geographical idea."
"Yes. I've heard Ingram mention it. It's a big grain-shipping place on the Lakes."
"Grain?—grain? Yes. That's how the dollars were made, I remember. Three quarters of a million of them. Over sixty thousand pounds. We had no idea of it. The plainest, driest little man. Stayed at one of those cheap Bloomsbury hotels, and lunched on an apple and a wheat biscuit."
"Do you mean to say all this money is left to my friend unconditionally?"
"Absolutely, sir. Lester Ingraham—he'd even gone back to the old spelling—seems to have spent the evening of his days in compiling the little book you hold in your hand. That's how he came to be sent to us by our New York correspondents. They are big people, and seemed to think him very small fry indeed. It had become an absolute obsession with him. Used to bore Allport to death talking of the senior and the junior branches, and sometimes it was all I could do to keep a straight face. His dream had been to buy the old homestead and die there, and he told me the discovery it had been pulled down robbed him of ten years' life. Then the idea occurred to him, since it had vanished and he had no near relatives, to leave his money to the last Ingram born within the old walls, the walls which, as he told me impressively, had had an Indian arrow-head sticking in them for two hundred and fifty years. He had seen that in the museum. Well, well—who says romance is dead?"
"Sixty thousand pounds!" All the time Mr. Pollexfen was speaking I kept writing the sum on the Ingram pedigree with my finger nail, calculating interest at, say, four per cent, and thinking of Paul as I had last seen him.
"I've told you everything, Mr. Pollexfen. What do you think of our chance of finding him again within the year that is stipulated?"
The lawyer shrugged his shoulders. "Very slight indeed, I fear, even if the advertisement reaches his eye. You say he had over two hundred pounds in a bank at his disposal, and chose to run after cabs. Now, to me, that looks very like hallucination. No. If I was the reversionary legatee, I'd feel pretty comfortable."
I said I had told him everything, but, as a matter of fact, I had not told him what I had every reason to believe I knew, and that is, the source whence the money came which Ingram had been loath to touch. I wonder, if I had, whether he would have changed his estimate of my poor quixotic friend. Codes of honor must seem shadowy things to a man who has been instructing counsel for thirty years.