XXXII
Forthe remainder of that night the young man committed himself to the much-dreaded darkness of the streets. He was endeavouring to harden his heart to seek for the miracle. And in the course of that day upon which he was now entered the power was vouchsafed to him miraculously to obtain that which he sought.
William Jordan, Junior, presented himself at the counting-house of Crumpett and Hawker at the usual hour. Throughout the forenoon he performed his duties with that intense, but incompetent assiduity for which he had long been notorious. About twelve o’clock Mr. Walkinshaw summoned him to his table, and requested him to carry some papers to the room of Mr. Octavius Crumpett.
William Jordan proceeded to do this. Knocking at the closed door, he received the assurance from James Dodson, who was ensconced near by, that Mr. Octavius had gone out. Thereupon the young man entered the empty room and placed the papers upon the table of his master.
In the act of so doing he beheld, with surprise and bewilderment, and with a start of horror, that upon the table were two piles of gold pieces. With trembling fingers, yet with horror increasing its grip upon his heart, the young man took up the pieces of gold and proceeded to count them. With a sense of stupefaction the idea percolated slowly through his being that the miracle had happened. The pieces of gold were twenty in number, no more, and no less.
The miracle had come to pass. The presence of twenty gold pieces could have but one interpretation. It only remained for him to act. Muttering words of despair and terror, he placed the twenty pieces of gold in his pocket and left the room.
All through the afternoon William Jordan assiduously fulfilled his duties. Yet his whole being was enveloped in a kind of entrancement. He scarcely knew what he did or where he was.
When at last the hour came in which he was relieved from the labours of the day, he returned to the little room. Within him was the exaltation of one who ascends the scaffold for an idea. The miracle had become consummated. In his pockets he bore twenty pieces of gold. The white hairs of his aged father would remain inviolate. Yet as soon as he crossed the threshold of the little room, he was met by the joyous eyes of the old man. A miracle had happened to him also.
It seemed that in the course of that eventful day an infrequent purchaser had made his appearance in the shop. And when he had come to examine the musty old tomes upon the shelves, had discovered one among them for which he had paid the fabulous sum of three hundred pounds.
Therefore the little room was now doubly secure. Yet both these occurrences left the young man untouched by gratitude. Even that which made his father’s eyes so radiant could not release his mind from the thrall of an indescribable torment which made it bleed. Better a thousand times to have lain in the streets of the great city, better a thousand times that his father and himself had been trampled lifeless by the relentless hordes of street-persons, than that he should have hardened his heart for the consummation of such a miracle as that.
As he paced the darkness that night in the throes of newer, and more sinister, and totally undreamt-of torments which his ill-starred attempt at action had imposed upon him, he could discern only one course to pursue. He must derive the power to make restitution.
Still, the mere act of restitution could not efface the deed. In whatever form he made amendment, there was still the foul stain that nothing couldexpunge. However, on the following morning, as he entered the counting-house of Crumpett and Hawker, the determination was strong within him to make all the reparation that lay in his power.
As he crossed the threshold of the outer office he was surprised to see the undersized figure of James Dodson ascending the staircase, although the time was a full hour before his usual appearance at the office. His mentor looked back over his shoulder.
“Morning, Luney,” he said in a rather forlorn manner, and passed on his way up the stairs.
William Jordan, in his bewilderment, in his strange self-amaze, in his dim uncertainty of the course of action he must now pursue, passed half-an-hour in the counting-house below. In that time he not only indulged in desperate, terrified self-intercourse, but, further, he sought the resolution to walk up-stairs, to enter the room of his confiding master, and to restore that which he had stolen. The conviction was being slowly evolved in his heart that some ampler form of reparation was demanded of him, yet the precise shape it must assume was not as yet vouchsafed to him. At last, spurred by the knowledge that if he let the hour of action pass it could never return, he slowly ascended the stairs.
Stealthily he crept up them, hardly knowing why he walked so softly. As he came noiselessly to his master’s door, and proceeded to open it, it suddenly gave a loud creak. It was as if it sought to rebuke his unworthy fear that it should do so. Before the young man could enter the room his friend and mentor had come out of the room adjoining, and was standing at his side.
“Come in here,” he said forlornly. “I was expecting you would give yourself away.”
James Dodson led the way into his own small room, and as William Jordan entered he closed the door.
“I don’t know what to say about it, Luney, I don’t indeed,” said Dodson dismally. “I have been thinking about it all night; and I don’t seem to get any nearer towards the wise and the straight thing.”
“I—I intend to make all the reparation that lies in my power,” said the young man, whose face was that of a ghost.
“Yes; somehow I expected you would do that,” said his mentor, “but if you do you will be found out.”
“I think I would choose to have it so,” said the young man, with gaunt eyes.
“No, my son,” said his mentor firmly, “that is just what you can’t afford. If you are found out there is no saying what will happen to you. You see Octavius is a very good chap; makes a god of what he calls honour, and so on, and that makes him a bit of a fanatic in some things. I really don’t know where this would land you if you were found out. I’ve lied about it already; I am absolutely up to the neck in lies. I dare say he half suspects me; and in any case I am quite likely to lose my billet. But one thing he can’t do, Luney, he can’t bring it home to me. And now, my son, we have got to take care that he doesn’t bring it home to you.”
“I—I think, Jimmy, the courage will be given to me to accept the entire responsibility of my action,” said the young man.
“Well, you see,” said James Dodson, with an odd look in his face, “you are such an extraordinary chap altogether, that I’m thinking the consequences might be too much for you. In any case you would have to go from here; and if you once go from here you will never get another billet—not as long as you live will you ever get another billet. And Octavius being, as I say, a bit of a fanatic in some things, it might even be worse for you than that.”
“But,” said William Jordan, “I—I think thepower will be furnished to me to submit to the consequences of my action.”
“I don’t quite know what you mean,” said James Dodson, “you have such an odd way of expressing yourself. But I am going to give you my advice in plain English. Mum is the word. I defy anything to be proved against you if you keep your mouth shut. If you do I won’t deny that James Dodson may lose his billet. But in any case he has it about him to get another; while, as I say, if you come to lose yours you are done for altogether. No, Luney, whatever you do you must not appear in this. The consequences may be so much more than you know; and you are not a chap who can stand up against them. If you will give the money to me I will restore it; but I shall use my own judgment as to how and when to put it back. You see I have already half persuaded Octavius that he has left the money somewhere else; that he has mislaid it, or that he has never had it. You see he is such an absent-minded sort of blighter, that by a bit of firm and judicious handling he might be persuaded that the money never existed. And I will do him this credit, my son; he would far rather it never had existed than that a thing like this should have happened in the house of Crumpett and Hawker.”
The immediate result of this curious and unlooked-for intervention was that the unhappy young man, although declining to incriminate his mentor by handing the money over to him to be restored at his discretion, also refrained, for the time being, from replacing it himself, because such a course, in Jimmy Dodson’s opinion, would tell heavily against himself.
“You see I’ve told such lies to Octavius,” said Jimmy Dodson, “that he might easily come to believe that the money was not there at all. But if it returns to the exact spot where he thinks he left it, he will naturally come to suspect me as having some sort of a hand in it, and he will know then—likethe d——d old fool that he is—that I have been trying to argue him clean out of his own reason.”
“T-the p-power will be furnished to me to make reparation,” the young man muttered, “t-the p-power will be furnished to me to confess my crime.”
“There must be none of that talk, my son,” said his mentor sternly. “This is not a case for high falutin’! It will not help at all. Either the money was there or it was not there.Ibelieve it was not there; Octavius is going to believe so too. You see a chap like Octavius doesn’t care a bit about the brass. It is the principle he cares about; and he is such a fanatic in some things, if he found you out there is no saying to what lengths he might go.”
The frail barque, chartless, aimless in mid ocean, was obedient to the will of the wind. William Jordan crept again down the stairs, his resolution unfulfilled. The pieces of gold were still in his pocket; his crime was still unconfessed.
During the luncheon hour, as he sat in the empty counting-house, with his paper of bread-and-butter untouched, and his head buried in desolation in his weak and nerveless hands, he was startled back to sensibility by feeling a hand laid suddenly upon his shoulder. It was that of James Dodson. His mentor’s forlorn aspect, of a few hours before, had yielded place to a kind of jubilation.
“What do you think, my son?” said this consummate man of action, “what do you think, old boy? I have positively persuaded that silly old cuckoo that he never left the money there at all.”
William Jordan gave a gasp.
“I—I d-don’t think it m-matters,” he stammered.
“You don’t think if matters!” said Jimmy Dodson. “Why, my good Christian boy, you must be up the pole. Don’t you realize what an escape ithas been for us both? But I must have the devil’s own tongue on me; if J. Dodson doesn’t end his days with a peerage in Grosvenor Square, I don’t know what two and two make, that’s all. I never understood, until to-day, how easy it is to argue some chaps clean out of their own reason. I’ve always despised the old fool; but even I never realized what a nincompoop he was until this blessed morning. He arrived about ten, as he always does, and when he rang for me and I came in, I thought, ‘Hullo, old friend, you look uncommonly sorry for yourself, you do.’ Well, the old boy blew his nose very violently, and cocked his glass in his right eye very fiercely, and he bleated like a kid of three, ‘Mr. Dodson, this affair is preying upon me. This great establishment was founded by my ancestor, Octavius Crumpett, in 1701. This house has published Dryden and Pope, Swift and Fielding, and all the foremost names in the literary history of this country until the present time. And I think, Mr. Dodson, I am justified in saying that an incident of this kind is quite without precedent in its annals. Such a reflection as is cast upon its personnel by this deplorable occurrence is—is, well, Mr. Dodson, more than I can contemplate.’ And that is where I came in again, my son. ‘Well, sir,’ I said, ‘you must forgive me if I repeat what I said yesterday afternoon, that you have not made it ab-so-lutely clear to my mind that the money was actually there. I don’t know whether you have noticed it, sir, but what you might call hallucinations are constantly occurring. How often, sir, do we persuade ourselves that we have not done a thing when we have done it, andvice versa! And you’ll pardon me, sir, but these scientific people say it is the same with disease. You can think you have got a disease until you get it; or, again, if you can persuade yourself you have not got a disease you have got, why, sir, in the course of time you find you have not got it after all.’
“Well now, my son, I could see I was pressing with both feet on the loud pedal. ‘Mr. Dodson,’ said the old mug, ‘I would pay a thousand pounds to a charitable institution if I could really persuade myself that I did not leave that wretched money upon my table.’ Well, after that, Luney, I went in to win. Since I buttered him up over his Homer—the d—— silliest production, I understand, that ever was perpetrated—he has always listened to me with what he calls ‘respect.’ He considers me ‘a scholar and a gentleman’; he likes to consider everybody in this old-established house, from Pa to the ex-caretaker’s widow, who feeds the cat, to be ‘a scholar and a gentleman.’ Well, I went for the gloves; I gave him five minutes of regular John Bright, and wound up with a bit of dissertation on self-deception. And, would you believe it, Luney? the silly old cormorant wrung me warmly by the hand, and said if only for his own peace of mind he must admit that he had deceived himself. The money could not possibly have been there; he must have left it in his hansom; it must have fallen from his pocket in Saint James’s Square; in fact, there must be a hideous mistake somewhere; on no account must I mention it in the office. I must treat all the circumstances exactly as though they had never occurred.
“Now, what do you say to that, my son? Of course it was all pretty useful work on the part of J. D. You see I guessed from the first that like all these ultra-pious church-and-chapel coves he was forcing himself to swallow that which he knew he had no right to swallow; and in the end he was able to convince himself it was ‘the right thing’ to swallow it rather than to admit the cold-drawn truth.”
To the surprise of the triumphant Mr. Dodson, this description of the further miracle that had been wrought in his favour brought no kind of relief to the unhappy William Jordan.
“T-there is still my shame,” he muttered.
“You just put that out of your mind, my son,” said the philosopher. “Throw the money down a drain, and pretend, like Octavius, that the whole thing never occurred. Of course, if Octavius or any other of the ultra-pious sect were to overhear me, they would swear I was as guilty as you are. And so I am; I expect I am far the worse of the two. Because I don’t call you guilty. You are odd, weak, you have a tile or two loose, but I could never look on a chap like you as having deliberate guile. And I mean to stand by you, although I don’t know why I should. I have nothing to gain; in fact I have everything to lose by taking up with a chap like you. I don’t recognize J. D., who intends to get on in the world, no matter what it costs him, in my dealings with you. But there they are. As I say, my son, you are against my principles altogether; but the fact remains, Luney, that since I have come to take up with you, I don’t seem, somehow, as though I can let you go.”
“I—I f-foresee the hour when you will have to deny me,” said the young man, in his difficult speech.
“You must get out of this habit of being low-spirited,” said James Dodson, to whom this speech was incoherent. “It might help to give you away. And I can’t impress it upon you too strongly that if Octavius should ever come at the truth—kind-hearted old duffer as he is—he will be only too ready to do what he calls his duty. As for me, I say right here, that whatever you did, Luney, having known you so long, and having come to know you so well, James Dodson could never look upon you as a wrong ’un. I’ll tell you, my son, in what light I have come to regard you, although it has taken me years to come at the truth. You are one of those fine mathematical instruments which can register things that ordinary instruments know nothing about. You are no earthly use for straight-forward, common, practical, two-and-two-makes-four sort of life, but it has begun to dawn on melately, that you must have a wonderful mind for some things. It is only lately that I have begun to notice it. But now and then you seem to come out with something that is—well, that is downright marvellous for a chap like you. In odd out-of-the-way subjects, that are not a ha’porth of use to anybody, you have a knack of saying things that chaps like John Dobbs and Joe Cox can’t even understand. My own private opinion is that youcan’tbe such a fool as you seem. I believe, Luney, that you ought to be kept under a glass case in a box lined with felt, because the slightest thing, even a change in the weather, is enough to throw you off your balance.”
Having thus delivered himself, and at an unexampled length, Mr. Dodson left his distracted friend to continue in that phase of remorse whose effect upon him was so dire.
Throughout the long hours of the afternoon the need for immediate action never left his mind. Already he had let the golden moment pass; every hour that followed would increase the likelihood that he would fail to derive the courage for his task. Even his brave, but misguided, friend, whose counsels were so subtle and so specious, had come to seem in his power to put a gloss on the cruellest of temptations, to be neither more nor less than the embodiment of evil.
Worn out in mind and body he went back that evening to the little room. Yet here there was no surcease to be had. Wherever he carried his guilt he could find nought to assuage it. When he turned to the ancient authors their unceasing demand of Action, Action, Action seemed to make his vacillating weakness turn to a gangrene in his flesh. Yet was not this dreadful shibboleth of theirs the rock upon which the frail vessel had been shattered! With the modern authors he fared no better. Their cynicism became a callous mockery that had no power to heal. And when he turned to the Book of the Ages, his mind was coloured by so dark ahorror that he failed to decipher a single word inscribed upon its leaves. They were as so many red blurs void of form and meaning.
During the long hours of the night the aged man, his father, sat with the passage before him in which was expressed the deep truth that miracles would continue to happen to those who had the courage to be credulous.
“Tell me, my father,” cried the young man at last in his despair, “what must happen to those who are too frail for action, too craven for belief?”
“Even these must fulfil their destiny, beloved one,” said the white-haired man.