On a chill spring evening the sunset over London gave a brief radiance of colour to the dull gray roof and smoke-stained chimneys of many thoroughfares. Shadows thickened in the eastern skies as if fold after fold of finest crape were drawn over the field of watery and opalescent light the fallen sun had left behind it. In one great thoroughfare running east and west the sky-line of the houses stood distinct, and bathed in light of many colours; whilst down below there was a wall of shadow. Two parallel walls of shadow rose from a shadowy level, and the dusk had a thousand indistinguishable voices.
The shadowy lines became accented by twin rows of flickering fire, the rear jets seen with a blurred halo of mist round each of them, the halo crawling feebly within itself, tormented by a feeble wind. The long vista of pavement became chequered like a chessboard, with patches of light from shop windows. Gable Inn, staring at the growing darkness with a single fiery eye, looked like a Rip Van Winkle. It had been old when Chaucer and the knights and ladies of whom he sang were young; and its hoary stunted angles and squat chimney cowls had the grave and impassive aspect proper to great age. It has stood there now for over seven hundred years hoarding a growing store of secrets. It is roughly picturesque in every detail, and its every chamber is a triumph of narrowness, obscurity, and inconvenience.
In the quadrangle the shadows climbed the sturdy walls as if they were an exhalation from the paving-stones. The dim staircase sent down all manner of muffled and echoing voices. Footsteps sounded, and the clang of doors, and the shriek of unwilling keys in rusty locks, and the hurrying traffic of the street without, softened by the moist atmosphere, was like the fading echo of following feet upon the stairs.
Lights sprang up in the basement windows, telling of protractive legal labours. Lights twinkled in the garrets, telling of lonely study or noisy conviviality in the coming hours of darkness. At length one side of the quadrangle viewed by a solitary watcher from a third-floor window of the opposing side, winked with a hundred windows through the wet air and deepening shadow like a blear-eyed Argus.
This watcher, lounging at his own window, was Mr. Philip Bommaney, recently self-entitled the ‘Solitary of Gable Inn.’ He was eight-and-twenty years of age or thereabouts, a broad-shouldered, deep-chested, manly-looking fellow, with curling brown hair, and a face expressive of pugnacity, good-humour, and many capacities. He was a little weary now, after a long day of satisfactory work. He watched the mounting shadows, and listened to the weird gamut of the wind among the telegraph lines, until the outer voices made his own dull room seem homely. One ruddy tongue of flame from the expiring fire in the grate played on the narrow walls and low ceiling, and woke twinkling reflections in the spare and battered furniture. A man’s dwelling-place is always an index to his character when its arrangement depends upon himself; and signs of Philip Bommaney’s nature and pursuits were visible in plenty here. There were symmetrical rows of books on the shelves flanking the fire-place. An orderly stack of newspapers occupied one corner of the room, and a set of boxing-gloves lay on top of the pile, and a pair of dumb-bells beside it. A shaded reading-lamp stood upon the table in the midst of a great litter of papers. The barrels of a huge elephant gun flashed dimly from the wall as the firelight played upon them, and two or three lighter weapons were ranged together lower down.
He turned from the window and lit the lamp, and, wheeling round, held up the light to a photograph, and studied it with a pleased face. It was the portrait of a pretty girl, very sweetly grave, and looking as if it could be very sweetly vivacious. When he had looked at it for a longish time he nodded and smiled, as if the pictured lips had actually spoken to him. There was a tumbler standing beside the photograph with a bunch of hothouse flowers in it, the one bright spot of colour in the dingy chamber. He took this in his disengaged hand, and nodding and smiling anew at the pretty girl’s portrait, he turned about again, and walked into a bedroom beyond a narrow and inconvenient little window. The strident voice of the clock over the entrance of the old Hall, answered or anticipated from multitudinous spires in the City far and near, sounded as Philip entered his bedroom. He stood and listened, counting six jarring strokes. The bedroom was a microscopic apartment, with as many corners in it as any room of its size in London, and the bed itself was a perfect triumph of littleness, so tucked under the sloping roof, and so surrounded by projecting corners, as to make the entry to it or the exit from it a gymnastic performance of considerable merit. The room was not over-light at the best of times, the fourth part of the space of one small window in the sloping wall was filled by its own heavy framework, and for half its height it was shielded by a parapet, which had at least its uses in hiding the occupant of the room from the too-curious observation of those who dwelt in the upper stories of the houses opposite. These houses opposite, compared with Gable Inn, are of a mushroom modernness, and yet are old enough (having begun with a debauched and sickly constitution) to have fallen into an almost complete decrepitude. Their stately neighbour seems to be less grimy with the London smoke than they are, has always been less susceptible to outside evil influences, even of that unescapable sort, and drives them to an added shabbiness of senility by contrast with its own hale old age. The bedroom window was already open for the admission of such fresh air as, disguised in London blacks, the exhalations of moist spring pavements, and the reeking odours of the cuisine of Fleeter’s Rents, might choose to wander thither. Philip, with the lamp in one hand and the tumbler of flowers in the other, put out his head and looked into the squalid depths below him, and having gazed there a while absently and with no object, drew back with a vague touch of pity upon him for the people who dwelt in so much squalor so near to healthy effort and reasonable competence. He could hardly have told as much, perhaps, but one pallid countenance, shining very dimly at an open window, was very much answerable for that vague touch of pity. The face in the darkness started away from the window as he looked at it, as if his own robust health and the light that dwelt about him startled its pinched shabbiness into solitude. He set the tumbler of flowers upon the window-ledge, and closing the window, made his toilet and returned to the sitting-room. Then, having banked up the fire, and set the matches in such a position that he could easily find them, he blew out the lamp, left his chambers, and ran down the tortuous stairs. As he turned the last corner a door clanged noisily, and the next thing of which he was conscious was that he was struggling in the embrace of a stranger whom he had doubled up in an angle of the wall.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said gaspingly; ‘I stumbled.’
‘You did,’ responded the stranger, gasping also. ‘Rather heavily. It was lucky you had something soft to fall on.’
Philip began to make apologies. The stranger, breathless still, but jovially polite, begged him not to mention it. He was a tallish young man, broad set, and a little too fleshy for his years. He had a cleanshaven face, healthily pallid, the whitest of teeth, and a most frank, engaging, and contagious smile.
‘Pray don’t say anything more about it,’ he said in answer to Philip’s reiterated apologies. ‘You are not hurt, I hope?’
‘No, thanks; but I’m afraid you are.’
‘Not at all. It was sharp for a minute; but I am all right now. The stairs are very inconvenient, especially to strangers.’
‘I haven’t even that excuse for my clumsiness, said Philip; ‘for I am living here.’
‘Indeed; then we are neighbours, and should know each other. Rather an informal kind of introduction, eh?’ The stranger said this with a mellow laugh and a flash of his white teeth. He opened his overcoat as he spoke, and produced a card-case, Philip catching the gleam of a gold-studded shirt-front as he did so. ‘That’s my name, John Barter; and these are my offices.’ The outer oak, cracked and blistered to the likeness of an ancient tar-barrel, bore an inscription, dim with long years—‘Fellowship, Freemantle, and Barter’—and the names were repeated on the doorpost at the entrance.
‘I have no card,’ said Philip, accepting the stranger’s. ‘My name is Bommaney—Philip Bom-maney;’ Mr. Barter’s smiling face was unchanged, though he gave a slight but perceptible start at the name, and repeated it.
‘Do you know it?’ asked Philip. To the ears of his companion there was something of a challenge in the tone. ‘It is not a common name.’
‘No. Not a common name. I think I have heard it somewhere.’
They were under the archway by this time, in the brief shelter of which the sanguine-faced, red-waist-coated lodge-keeper was taking his nightly constitutional. They answered the touch of the hat with which he saluted them.
‘Which is your way?’ asked Mr. Barter.
‘Westward,’ said Phil.
‘Mine is east,’ said Barter, ‘so we part here. We are bound to meet again before long. Good-night.’
‘Good-night, and many thanks for taking my clumsiness in such good part.’
Barter’s ready smile beamed out again. They shook hands before parting like old acquaintances, and Philip walked on, through the incessant noise of Holborn into quieter Bloomsbury Street, along the eastern side of Bedford Square, where the bare trees were shivering in a bath of fog, and into Gower Street. Half way down that hideous thoroughfare he came upon a house, one of the few which still retain the old lamp-iron and extinguisher before their doors, and knocking, was admitted by a trim maid, with the smiling alacrity due to a frequent and favoured visitor, and by her conducted to the drawing-room, where sat a young lady engaged in a transparent pretence of being absorbed in a novel. The pretence vanished as the door closed behind the handmaiden, and the young lady jumped up and ran forward to meet him, with such a glad welcome in her face as answered the appeal in his own. It does not need that we should look at her with Philip’s eyes to pronounce her charmingly pretty, or to admire the face, at once shy and frank, with which she nestled beside him.
‘I thought you were never coming,’ she said.
‘Am I so late, then?’
‘It seemed so, and now you are come, tell me what you have been doing.’
‘Working, and thinking of you.’
‘You work too much, Phil.’ She did her best to ignore the second item of his day’s occupation, but the deepened flush and her avoidance of her lover’s eyes answered it more effectively than words could have done. ‘You are getting quite pale and thin. No wonder, sitting all alone all day long in those musty old chambers.’
‘Well, you see, Patty, the more I work, the sooner I shall cease to be all alone.’ The flush deepened again, and the hand trembled in his like a caught bird. ‘And as for working too much, I don’t believe that’s possible. Work never killed anybody yet, and idleness has killed a good many. It’s better to work than sit still and wait for briefs which never corns. There’s no sensation more delightful than that of looking at a good day’s work, and thinking that every line and word has brought me nearer to you.’
His tenderness conquered her shyness, and she nestled closer still, looking up at him with a wholehearted admiration and affection. He felt a little sad and unworthy under it, as almost any honest fellow would have been sure to do, and yet it was wonderfully sweet to him, and more than reward enough for any effort.
‘I wish I could help you, Phil. I wish I could do something for you, when you have given up so much for me.’
‘Hush!’ he said, laying his hand lightly upon her lips. ‘We made up our minds long ago that no more was to be said about that.’ He was tender still—he could be nothing else with her—but there was a touch of sternness in his manner, too—as if the theme pained him.
‘But I can’t help thinking of it. It was so noble of you, Phil.’
‘It was the only thing to be done—the only thing possible. It was——’ he paused for a second, and then went on resolutely—‘it was my father’s act by which you suffered. I should have been a scoundrel if I had done otherwise.’
‘And are you to do all? and am I to do nothing? It is selfish to keep all the generosity to yourself.’
He laughed as if he found this female paradox a pleasant fancy, but she was not to be put off so.
‘If the subject pains you, as I know it does, dear, please understand why I speak of it I don’t want you to think I take your sacrifice as you pretend to take it. It isn’t a matter of course, as you pretend it is; and you may say what you like, Phil, but it isn’t a thing that everybody would have done. Don’t grudge me my gratitude; you did it for the love of me.’
‘I didn’t do it for the love of you,’ said Phil, laughing tenderly; ‘how often am I to tell you that, you little mountain of obstinacy? I did it because it was the right thing. I don’t say, mind you, that it wasn’t easier to do it for you than it might have been for somebody I didn’t know or care for; but that—as you will see quite clearly if you’ll bring your naturally logical mind to bear upon it—makes the thing so much the less creditable, provided there was any credit due to it at all.’
The loving feminine scorn of this masculine process of reasoning was expressed in a single glance, and was delightful to see.
‘It only means waiting a little longer before I claim you.’
The girl would fain have asked, ‘Why should you wait when I have enough for both by your gift? What does it matter which of us it is who has the money—you or I?’ But this question went unspoken, for obvious reasons. A woman is tongue-tied by the countless conventionalities of education. She must often let her thoughts lie silent in her heart, though she burns to express them, and find what answer she can to questions she dare not offer. Philip had repaired her loss by beggaring himself. That was noble. But now he persisted in deferring their marriage, and had buried himself in that lofty sarcophagus in Gable Inn, resolved only to claim her, though she was all his own already, when he had reinstated his fortunes by his labour. That was noble also, perhaps, but in her own heart she thought it a trifle foolish—say Quixotic, not to be too severe. She would rather have seen his ardour find a more commonplace expression. She had a general sort of belief that whatever Philip did was bound to be right, and yet this actual experience rather jarred with that assumption.
They found other themes in a while, and talked of the future and the happiness it would bring. That Philip was going to be rich and famous was a prime article in Patty’s creed, and he himself, though he had soberer hopes, was not likely to miss any chance of success which labour might bring him. He was more than modest enough in his conception of his own powers, and was often doubtful as to the fulfilment of the higher ambitions which are the necessary fuel of all artistic fires. Without those fires the chill of modesty will fall to the frost of cowardice, and in Art cowardice means indolence. In his moments of exultation—and these came generally at their strongest when he was in his sweetheart’s society—success looked easy enough. The memory of her undoubted belief in him came upon him often with a glow reflected from those magnificently hopeful moments. But then at times of depression it grew to look no more than a foolish unattainable dream. All young artists have times when they are going to be great—when the glory proper to white hairs makes a halo round un-wrinkled fronts and curls, brown or golden. They have times when the smartest turn of verse, the most delightful inventions of narrative, the most exquisite contrast of colour or mould of form their genius can compass are stricken through and through with the horror of commonplace. But when a man of the artisticgenushas once so far learned his own nature he has made a great advance towards the fulfilment of his ambitions. He has to learn that just as the hot fit is followed by the cold the cold fit is succeeded by the hot. He knows how intermittent he is. He learns to mistrust his own mistrust of himself. The periods of depression grow less frequent, and the depression grows less lasting. And then, just as the cold fit becomes less chilling to the one, the fit of exultation grows less intoxicating. The halo beams less bright—loss near.
Yet Philip, with the girl’s eyes worshipping him, and her sweet voice cooing hope and praise, and her hands knitted on his shoulder, and her warm breath fanning his cheek, gave himself up to the vision, and felt his heart warm with a world’s welcome as yet far away from him.
The prose of life will assert itself, even to visionary eight-and-twenty and sweet eighteen in love with one another. On this occasion it came as a summons to supper. The summoner was a stout and jovial elderly gentleman, about whose somewhat commonplace British exterior there was, to Philip’s mind, a reflection of the nimbus which glorified Patty to his mind, for he was Patty’s father. He had been called Old Brown at school when he was young—he had been called Old Brown in the country, and the prefix had found him out in town without the need for anybody to breathe a whisper of it. He was Old Brown to his new acquaintances in London before a month had gone by. The name suggests a beverage which is not unlike Old Brown himself—being mild and nutty to the taste as he to the mental palate—ripe and genial. He had a moist twinkle of the eye,—the look which bespeaks the kindly humorist,—and his slightly protruding under lip seemed covertly to taste the flavour of unspoken jokes. Old Brown’s jokes were mainly left unspoken, but he spent a good part of his life in laughing without any very apparent reason for laughter, and may have been internally the way he looked to be.
He shook hands with Philip, and chucked Patty under the chin with a waggish aspect, which called an appealing blush into the girl’s face. Perhaps the blush stayed the intended quip, but any way the old gentleman contented himself with a beaming laugh, and led the way to the supper table, rubbing his hands and chuckling.
The meal was quietly jovial, and if, after it, Old Brown was not quite so fast asleep as he pretended to be, at least his patience gave the lovers the shelter they needed. He snored in mellow murmurs from behind his bandanna, and they sat and talked together in low tones lest they might awaken him, until the time came for parting.
Outside the mist had given place to a dull persistent rain, and a peevish wind was complaining in area and chimney cowl. Philip turned to the street with a pleasantly haunting vision of Patty’s vivacious face outlined against the warmth and brightness of the hall. The touch of her good-night kiss lingered on his lips like live velvet, and he carried warmth and brightness enough within him to defy all the rain that ever rained, and all the wind that ever blew on smoky London.
The rain had cleared the streets, and the occasional gleam of a policeman’s cape or a furtive figure seeking the shelter of a doorway against the drifting showers was all he saw as he bored his way against the rising wind to the corner of Holborn. He was so absorbed by that fancy of music to which his own quick tread kept time that a shuffling step behind him rapidly drawing nearer failed to reach his sense. But as he came to the corner, a hand clutched his arm.
He turned, with the quick defensive gesture natural to a man so accosted at such a time, and faced the unexpected figure. An old man, clad in filthy fluttering rags, stood staring at him, with both hands stretched out. The rags shook as much with the horrible cough that tore him as with the cruel wind. He was a dreadful creature, with watery eyes, and a head and moustache of dirty gray. His long and unvenerable hairs strayed loose beneath the dunghill relic which crowned them. The rain was in his hair and beard, and had so soaked his tattered dress that it clung to him like the feathers of a drenched fowl. He shook and wheezed and panted, and gripped the air with tremulous fingers, and through the rents in his clothing his white flesh gleamed in the gaslight.
The look of surprise and pity which Philip bent upon this unclean apparition was startled into one of sudden fear and horror. In the very instant when these emotions struck him, they were reflected in the other’s face. The man made a motion to run, but Philip clutched his arm, and he stood cowering and unresisting.
‘You! Here in London?’
‘Phil,’ said the spectre imploringly, ‘for God’s sake help me. I didn’t know it was you, when I followed you. I thought——’ his voice trailed into silence.
‘You have come to this?’
‘Yes, Phil; this is what I’ve come to.’ The cough took him here again, and tore him so that he was fain to lean against the shutters of a shop near at hand.
‘Why do you come back here? Are you mad?’
‘I am—almost. What could I do? I’m as safe here as I am anywhere. Who would know me? or, if they did, who would hurt a wretch like me? I haven’t slept in a bed for weeks, Phil. I haven’t eaten a morsel for three days. For God’s sake! give me some money. I’ll—I’ll go away; I’ll never trouble you again.’
‘I’ll give you all I can. But you must go away from London.’
Philip thrust his hand into his pocket and brought up all the pocket’s contents. He took his keys and an unvalued trifle or two from the handful, and held the rest out towards his father. The old man shrunk from him with a terrible appeal and shamefaced gratitude which cut the son’s heart like a knife.
‘Where can I go to?’
‘Anywhere out of London. You are not—safe here. Go away. Write to me here.’ He thrust an envelope on which his name and address were written into the old man’s dirty trembling hand. ‘You must never come to see me. Promise me that.’
‘I promise,’ he said; and, thrusting the money and the envelope somewhere among his rags, stood silent for a while. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘I acted very foolishly and very——’
Then his voice trailed away again.
‘God help you!’ said Philip with a choking voice.
‘You’ll shake hands, won’t you, Phil? ‘said the old man. Phil took the proffered hand. ‘It’s something,’ said Bommaney the elder, clinging to him, ‘to feel an honest man’s hand again, God bless you, Phil!—God bless you!’
Philip stood silent, and the old man, with another shame-stricken glance upon him, moved away. His son watched him for a second or two, as he slunk, coughing and shivering, along the gleaming pavement, and then turned and went his own way heavily.
Bommaney senior, discerning the welcome beacon of a public-house, shuffled eagerly towards it, hugging beneath his rags the money his son had given him.
‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Bommaney; if you please, sir.’ He started at the sound of a voice which had been familiar to him for years. ‘I should like a word with you, sir; if you please.’
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,youknow 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.’