When young Mr. Barter took time to think about things, he began, for more reasons than one, to be sorry. It is necessary for the due development of this history to go back a little, and to take up Mr. Barter on the day following the commission of his crime. The young man felt that he was unable to afford candour, and discreetly avoided the naming of his own action. Eight thousand pounds is a sum which most people would find tempting. Young Mr. Barter would never have found it tempting in the criminal way (though, if he had given his mind to the consideration, he could at any time have seen how enviable its unencumbered possessor might be) if he had not at the moment felt himself under considerable pressure. Mr. Barter’s fleshy and well-formed fingers were somewhat too familiar with the feel of cards. These fingers of his were peculiarly dexterous to look at, and had even an unnecessary braggadocio air of dexterity when he was engaged in his favourite occupation. Experienced people watched his shuffling and dealing with great care. In Mr. Barter’s frank and engaging countenance, and in that ready smile in which the faultless teeth shone so conspicuously, there was no hint of danger to the most unwary. Even the wariest, listening to his genial mellow laughter, and seeing the jolly shoulders shake with mirth, were inclined to think him a loyal honest-hearted fellow. His loud swagger, his frank rollicking gait, his hail-good-fellow-well-met shake of the hand, the other hand clapped upon the shoulder, the noisy greeting, and that unfailing smile, not merely disarmed suspicion, but made the mere fancy of it impossibly absurd. But young Mr. Barter had accustomed himself to associate with people whose experiences had forced them to be observant, and to these the dexterous caressing fingers with which he manipulated all instruments employed in games of chance seemed to justify a fairly constant watchfulness. The fingers handled the cards as if they loved them, as if they had been accustomed to them from the cradle. The tips turned back a good deal, and the nails hooked a little forward. There were little bulbs of tact at every tip, the hands were made for a gambler, and could by no possibility have belonged to anybody else.
The chief ground for the young man’s sorrow may be very easily and briefly stated. The packet which the unfortunate cruelly-tempted Bommaney had let fall in his half-drunken abstraction on the floor of young Mr. Barter’s private room was made up exclusively, as we know already, of notes for one hundred pounds.
Now Bank of England notes for one hundred pounds, though valuable, and easily enough employed in all civilised countries when honestly come by, are only to be got rid of when dishonestly acquired at great risk and loss. A note for a mere five pounds may pass through scores of hands before being stopped at the bank. Tens, so the experienced in such matters will tell you, are a little difficult. Twenties are inquired into rather carefully. Fifties are positively dangerous to handle in this way. Hundreds are, except after great lapse of time, almost impossible; and as for a thousand, a man might almost as well steal a white elephant as a bank-note of that value, except that it will cost him nothing for keep, unless you count the tremor of soul and nerve, which is surely worth something, in which a man criminally possessed of another’s property is almost certain to live.
Mr. Barter, then, had eight thousand pounds in ready money, was liable, if discovered, to penal servitude, and was unable to touch a farthing of his ill-got gains. There are many men in the world, the world’s experience proves it hourly, who set so small a price upon their self-respect, that they will sell it for a shilling, for a drink, for a word. But there is hardly any man so lost to the natural human desire for self-approval that he will actually give away his self-respect for nothing. Now this absurd transaction young Mr. Barter, when he took time to think about things, appeared to himself to have made.
He was not, and never had been, a great reader; he gave up his mind to pursuits which he found more attractive than the tranquil fields and lanes of literature. Yet he remembered, in a dim sort of way, either that he had read somewhere in his schoolboy days, or that a fanciful old nurse had told him, a story of a person somewhere, who, being possessed of a great chest of money, went one day to look at it, and found that his hard cash had changed to withered leaves. Precisely such a transformation had overtaken that eight thousand pounds, at the moment when it had fallen from the hands of a man who might have made an honest use of it. The fable was, and was not, true, so far as he remembered, and his fancy dwelt curiously about the history. There was no possibility of turning back the withered leaves to gold, and making them jingle and glitter again as only one’s own ready money can jingle and glitter. But, useless as these crisp and rustling leaves of paper were to him, they held still all their old potentialities, and in the hands of honest men or courageous rascals each leaf might still transmute itself into a hundred golden emblems of sovereignty and power. He was neither that honest man nor that courageous rascal, and the money grew to be a sort of devilish tantalising fetish to him. Before he had owned it a fortnight, he had felt a hundred times he could have burned it out of the exasperation of mere spite against it.
He heard, of course, of Bommaney’s flight, and of the failure of the old-established business house. People talked about these things a good deal for a time, and he himself listened to and took part in many speculations as to Bommaney’s whereabouts, and the means he would take to get rid of the notes and make them available for his own purposes. He found it at first a little trying to the nerves. There was nothing, since Bommaney had accepted his own disgrace and run away, to connect young Mr. Barter with the lost eight thousand pounds, yet it took much courage, and a considerable amount of inward spurring, to bring himself to talk about the business. When a man carries a secret of a quite harmless nature, it happens often, as almost everybody knows, that casual words and quite innocent glances startle him with hints of understanding and participation. What is it when the detection of the secret involves open shame and penal servitude? Can a man of genuine courage be a thief? Is not courage after all at the very bottom of all manly honour, of all sound honesty, all true self-respect? How shall a thief be other than a lurking cur, whose whole soul, such as it is, is bent to a mean suspicion that he is suspected, a continuous terror-stricken watchfulness, a sleeping and waking dread of an awful hand-clap on the shoulder? There are constitutional differences in thieves, no doubt, as there are in other people, but the key-note of the dishonest man’s whole thought is fear. When, after a day or two, young Mr. Barter had accustomed himself to speak of Bommaney and the lost eight thousand, and had often spoken of them, he began to look out for suggestions that might be useful to himselt He even led the way at times, and speaking to solicitors and barristers of extensive criminal experience, he asked often, for example, how could a scoundrel get rid of such a clumsy handful? Why didn’t the fool cash the notes, he would ask contemptuously, before he left town, and before he was suspected? Everybody knew of course that the notes had not been presented, and their numbers were advertised in all the daily papers. Now what could a fellow do who had them, by Jingo? Whatcouldhe do? There was no way open, so far as young Mr. Barter could see, and he was wonderfully engaging and innocent of the world’s wickeder ways as he talked thus with the ablest of his fellow professionals.
The fellow professionals cited cases. There was Rosenthal, a noted receiver in his day, to whom a dishonest clerk had sold five thousand pounds for five hundred. Rosenthal had held the notes for six years, and had then put them cautiously on the Continental market. He was an old hand, was Rosenthal, and very clever and leary, but they had bowled him out. The clerk was wanted on another charge, and turned Queen’s evidence against the receiver. Almost all the stories had this kind of termination, because the legal gentlemen whom young Mr. Barter consulted remembered mainly cases in which they or their friends had been engaged, or cases which had resulted in criminal proceedings. Others there certainly were, but they were vague and necessarily without those guiding particulars which he desired.
It has been already hinted that the young man was a gambler, and it is likely that most of the reasons which made the money seem so welcome to him had their sources at the gaming table. He belonged to one of those clubs which deserve to be numbered among the blessings of modern society—where men do not meet for social intercourse and good-fellowship, or for dining purposes, or for any of the common and amiable reasons which draw men into club-life, but simply and purely to the end that they may win one another’s money. It was a joint-stock swindling company to which young Mr. Barter belonged, and within its limits every man proposed to himself to get the better of every other man by such means as lay in his power. A pigeon got in amongst them every now and then, of course—came in well-feathered and went out plucked, but for the main part the rooks pecked hungrily at one another, and made but little of their time and pains. The one solitary advantage of these corporations is that they gather the depredatory birds together, and lead them to prey upon themselves instead of wandering abroad for the defeathering of the innocent and artless who abound even in these days. The well-constituted mind can hardly fail to take pleasure in the contemplation of these resorts, where Greek meets Greek (in the modern French sense as well as the old heroic)—where scoundrel encounters scoundrel, and learns that the pleasure of being cheated is by no means so great as that of cheating.
There were people of widely ranging social position in this curious contingent. One or two men of title, and one or two of the highest social or commercial respectability, lent their names for some inconceivable reason to grace the front page of the neatly-bound little volume of rules which govern, or sometimes fail to govern, the conduct of the corporation. Mr. Barter rubbed shoulders with young men—very young men they were—who would one day have handles to their names, and enjoy the control of considerable estates. He sat at the same table with men whose birth and antecedents, like those of the immortal Jeames, were shrouded in a mystery. He met men of his own position, who like himself were desperately glad of being numbered in the same club society with men eminent on the turf, or familiar in the gilded saloons of the great. He liked to think of those gilded saloons; it might be interesting to know what he thought they resembled—most probably a somewhat old-fashioned earthly paradise of ormolu. He bragged indefatigably of his club and the people whom he met there. He dated all his private correspondence from it, and spent hundreds of daylight hours above the ivories and the pasteboard.
At the time of that foolish and weak-willed Bommaney’s disaster there were two or three I.O.U.‘s for sums much more considerable than he could afford to part with in the hands of his fellow-members. Law is a necessity to human society. Even a band of brigands can’t hang together without it. Debt, outside the club, was by no means a thing to be harshly spoken of, but debt to a fellow-member was a literal millstone round a man’s neck, and would sink him out of sight in no time.
The elder Barter had gone over to the majority, despatched by that street accident, and if the old man had known nothing of the young man’s courses, he had had it in his power to make him well-to-do. But he had paid his debts once at least, and had more than once had occasion to grieve over the boy’s handling of the firm’s money, and so had made his will entirely in his wife’s favour, leaving his son dependent upon her good graces. The mother was disposed to be a little sterner than the father had been. Perhaps if young Barter had dreaded her less poor Bommaney’s fallen notes might have been returned to him.
But, to get on with the story, the young man’s chief creditor at the club was one Steinberg, a gentleman whose time appeared to be absolutely at his own disposal, though he was known by some of his fellow-members to have an address in Hatton Garden, and to be more or less of a diamond merchant there. He often carried about with him, in a pocket-book, or in neat little packages of grocer’s gay paper, borne in the waistcoat-pocket, a collection of gems of considerable value, and would show them to his intimates with theinsoucianceof a man who was accustomed to handling things of price. He never was without money, made little journeys at times, which rarely took him away from town for more than a day or two, and was, almost always, wholly unoccupied except for the cards.
Now young Barter had a prodigious idea of this gentleman’s astuteness. He had no particular belief in his honesty, and he believed him, not altogether unreasonably as the sequel proved, to be initiated into most of the mysteries of modern rascality. This was merely a general notion, based upon statements made by Steinberg himself, and supported by the opinion of his intimates. Nobody spoke ill of Steinberg; it was only understood that there was no move upon the board with which he was not familiar. Young Barter, meeting him one evening at the club, whilst Bommaney’s disappearance was still a fresh topic of town conversation, spoke to him about it, with an assurance clearly begotten of practice.
‘Now, look here, Steinberg,’ he said, in his open and engaging way. ‘Suppose you’d nobbled those notes, what should you do with ‘em?’
Perhaps Mr. Steinberg resented the form of this inquiry. But be that as it may, he responded with some tartness,
‘Suppose you’d nobbled them?’
At this chance thrust young Barter turned curiously red and white, and had some ado to recover that open smile of his.
‘Hang it,’ he said, ‘you can’t suppose I meant it that way. But,’ with a half-hysteric courage, ‘suppose you had—suppose I had—suppose anybody had—what would he do? You, I, anybody?’
Mr. Steinberg sipped at his lemon squash—he drank that inspiring liquid all the year round, and nothing else until cards for the day were over—and puffed at his cigar, and looking young Barter full in the face, nodded and smiled with an odd mingling of meaning and humour.
‘Put him on to me,’ he said, with perfect affability. ‘I’ll put him up to it.’
‘Rather dangerous, wouldn’t it be?’ said Barter, showing his white teeth in a somewhat forced and ghastly manner.
‘Everything’s dangerous for an ass,’ said Steinberg.
‘I shouldn’t have thought,’ laughed Barter, ‘that that was your line.’
He spoke as jestingly as he could, but he knew that his laugh was forced, and that the voice in which he spoke was unlike his voice of every day, and he wished, with the whole of his quaking heart, that he had left the theme alone.
‘Well, no,’ said Steinberg, ‘I suppose you wouldn’t.’ He sipped his liquor through a straw, and blew half a dozen rings of smoke from his lips with practised dexterity, and kept a glittering German-Jewish eye on Barter. Perhaps he meant something by the glance, perhaps he meant nothing. He was a rather Machiavelian and sinister-looking personage, was Mr. Steinberg, and there was something even in the calm expression of those perfectly-formed rings of smoke and in the very way in which, he sipped his liquor, and most of all in the observant glitter of his eye, which spoke of a penetration and shrewdness very far out of the common. More and more young Barter wished that he had not broached this theme with Steinberg.
He could not help it for his soul. He could feel that his colour was coming and going with a dreadful fluttering alternation. He quailed before the Israelitish eye so shrewdly cocked at him, and when in a very spasm of despair he tried to meet it, he was so abjectly quelled by it that he felt his face a proclamation of his secret.
Steinberg went on sipping and smoking, and said nothing; but when the young scoundrel, his companion, had somewhat recovered himself and dared again to look at him, there was the same shrewd and wary glint in his eyes.
Young Barter had been unhappy enough before this, but after it the money became a burden hateful and horrible. He met Steinberg often, and forced himself to be noisy in his company. In his dread of seeming low-spirited, or ill at ease, he said things about his dead father which he would have left unsaid, had he consulted the little good that was left in him; and Steinberg seemed to watch him very closely.
Young Barter put off his creditor with promises. He would have lots of money by and by. That seemed credible enough in the position of affairs, and Steinberg waited. In a while, however, he became exigent, and declined any longer to be satisfied with promises. One night the unhappy rascal, playing all the more because of his troubles, all the more wildly, and certainly all the worse, fell back upon his LO.U.‘s. Steinberg followed him from the club. It was late, and the streets were very quiet.
‘This won’t do, you know, Barter,’ said Steinberg, tapping him on the shoulder as they walked side by side.
‘Begad it won’t,’ said young Barter, doing his best to make light of it. ‘They’ve been cutting into me pretty freely this past week or two.’
‘Well,’ said Steinberg, puffing at his eternal cigar, and looking askant at Barter under the light of a street-lamp which they happened to be nearing at the moment, ‘what you’ve got to do, you know, is to find the man who knows Mr. Bommaney.’
The commotion which assailed Barter at this speech was like an inward earthquake.
‘What—what do you mean?’ he panted.
‘That’s what you’ve got to do,’ said Steinberg tranquilly.
‘Do you mean to insinuate——’ Barter began to bluster; but the older, cooler, and more accomplished scoundrel stopped him contemptuously.
‘You know where they are,’ he said ‘Why don’t you get at ‘em?’
About noon on the following day Mr. Steinberg, seated in a small inner chamber in Hatton Garden, leisurely answering his sole business correspondent of that morning, was in no way surprised when the boy he employed to open the door and receive visitors brought in a card bearing the name of ‘Mr. John Barter, jun.’
‘Show him in,’ said Mr. Steinberg; and young Mr. Barter, hearing this in the outer room, came in with a pale-faced and excited alacrity. The diamond merchant dismissed the boy with a word.
‘Well,’ he said, turning the tip of his cigar upwards by a protrusion of the under lip, ‘what is it?’
‘About that little matter,’ said young Barter nervously, ‘we were talking of last night.’
‘The little matter we were talking of last night?’ asked Steinberg idly, looking at him with half-shut eyes. ‘That hundred you owe me?’
‘Well, perhaps that afterwards,’ said Barter with a frightened breathless laugh in his voice. ‘But about the other matter first.’
‘The other matter?’ Steinberg asked, in a lazier manner than before. ‘What other matter?’ He took up his pen, dipped it in the inkstand before him, and tracing a line or two of his correspondent’s communication with it, turned to his own unfinished letter.
Young Barter was already sufficiently agitated, and this curious reception made him more embarrassed than ever.
‘About that affair of Bommaney’s,’ he said, feeling as if a rapid wheel had been somehow started in his brain.
‘Ah!’ said Steinberg, writing rapidly, and speaking in a voice which seemed to indicate that he neither understood nor cared to understand, ‘that affair of Bommaney’s, eh?’
This reception was nothing less than dreadful to the young criminal. He had reckoned on having his way made easy for him. Steinberg had actually offered to become his accomplice in crime, and had lured him to disclosure. He could have wished that the floor would open and let him through. He saw that he had already exposed his hand, and began to imagine all manner of consequences resulting from the exposure. Not one of the consequences he foresaw promised to be of a nature agreeable to himself, and for the moment the hatred with which Steinberg inspired him was of so mad a nature that there was nothing he would not have done to him if he had had the courage and the power.
Steinberg wrote on, shaking his fist in what seemed to be an unusual alert, and even threatening, manner. There was a great deal of unnecessary motion in Steinberg’s hand, and Barter, looking at its swift and resolute movements, got a blind sort of impression of strength out of it, and nullified the feeling with which it inspired him. The letter written, enveloped, addressed, and stamped, Steinberg tossed it on one side, and leaning back in his arm-chair, turned an uninterested look once more upon his visitor.
‘That affair of Bommaney’s,’ he said. ‘What was that?’
Mr. Barter thought this inquiry altogether too barefaced, and responded, with a hectic flush of courage,
‘Come, Steinberg, don’t play the fool with a fellow. You know jolly well what it was last night.’
Mr. Steinberg’s keen and impassive face underwent no change.
‘What did I know last night?’ he asked.
‘You know,’ Barter began angrily; and then the hectic flush of courage died, and a dreadful chill of fear succeeded it. What had he known? He had only guessed—till now. But now, young Mr. Barter felt, to employ the expressive ideas of his set, that he had given himself away. Steinberg capped the question in his mind. What did I know last night?
‘You haven’t come to waste your time or mine, I suppose? You’ve come to say something. Why not say it?’
His guest, sitting in a terrible confusion, and feeling himself altogether betrayed and lost, Steinberg marched to the door, and addressing the boy in the outer room, bade him carry the letter to the post and return no more that day. Then, having locked the outer door, he returned and resumed his seat.
‘Now, what is it?’ he asked.
Barter, recognising the fact that his own purpose was already exposed, made a desperate dash.
‘About those notes old Bommaney was supposed to have run away with. I think—I think, mind you, that if there was any way of using them, I could lay my hands upon them.’
‘I remember,’ said Steinberg, ‘you said something of the kind last night. I shouldn’t advise you to touch ‘em. It’s a dangerous game. They’re very worthless, and the game isn’t worth the candle.’
‘Worthless?’ echoed Barter. ‘They’re worth eight thousand pounds.’
‘They’re worth eight thousand pounds,’ responded Steinberg, ‘to the man they belong to. They’re not worth eight hundred to anybody else.’
Young Mr. Barter’s whole soul seemed to rise in protest against this abominable fallacy. When he had screwed up his courage so far as to induce himself to accept this older and more experienced scoundrel’s partnership, he had conceived the possibility of the partner crying out for halves. But that he should want so enormous a share of the spoil was quite intolerable.
‘Not worth eight hundred?’ He could only gasp the questioning protest.
‘If I had ‘em to sell,’ Steinberg answered calmly, flicking the waste from his cigar by a movement of his little finger, ‘I should think eight hundred an uncommon good price for ‘em. Later on and sold at second hand they might fetch a thousand. Later on and sold at third hand they might fetch fifteen hundred. One can hardly tell. Of course the value will go on mounting with distance from the original source of danger and with the lapse of time.’
He said all this very calmly and reflectively, and young Barter, collecting his whirling wits as well as he could, tried a stroke of diplomacy, which, as he fondly hoped, would answer a double purpose.
‘She’ll never let them go for that, or for anything like it.’
‘She won’t, won’t she?’ asked Steinberg, smiling brightly, as if the statement amused him. ‘Then she’ll never let ‘em go at all, my friend. How did you come to find she had ‘em?’
‘I made a little bit of a discovery,’ Barter answered.
‘Ah! That was it, was it,’ said the elder rascal, falling back into his utter want of interest. ‘You’ll let me have that hundred.’
‘I will in a day or two,’ answered Barter,arréanti.
‘Well, as for a day or two,’ returned Steinberg, rubbing his forehead with the tips of his fingers, and looking very careless and composed, ‘I’m really very much afraid I can’t let you have it. It’s been outstanding a goodish time, and to tell you the truth, old man, I want it very badly. If you’ll let me have it to-night I shall be obliged to you. I’ve been hit rather hard this last day or two. Shall we make that a bargain? To-night?’
‘I—I’m afraid,’ Barter stammered, ‘it’s no use talking about to-night.’
‘Well,’ said Steinberg, with a pitiless uninterested suavity, ‘you know the rules.’
He drew a little book from his pocket, and tossed it over the table to his guest.
‘You’ll find it on page five. Rule fourteen. It’s ticked in red ink, if you’ll take the trouble to look at it.’
Barter opened the book and consulted its pages blindly for a while, and then the mist which seemed to obstruct brain and eyesight clearing away, he read the pages indicated. It set forth the principle that all moneys lost at games of skill or chance, or upon bets made within the limits of the club, were payable within four-and-twenty hours. It set forth further that debts not paid within that time might be brought under the notice of the Committee, who were empowered to act under Rule nine. Rule nine ordained the public posting of the defaulter’s name, his suspension in default of payment, and, in case of continued obduracy or poverty, his expulsion.
‘First and last, Steinberg,’ said the wretched criminal, who began to find the way of the transgressor unreasonably hard and thorny, ‘first and last, you’ve had a pretty tidy handful of money out of me.’
‘Well, yes,’ said Steinberg tangibly. ‘Pretty fair.’
His very admission of this fact made Barter’s case seem hopeless to himself. If he had brow-beaten, or blustered, if he had shown anger or impatience, or had been querulous, there might have seemed to exist some slenderest chance for him. But Steinberg was so unmoved that he seemed immovable.
‘You’d better persuade her,’ he said, with a scarcely perceptible grin. Looking at Barter, and observing that he sat with his eyes still bent upon the book of rules, and head dejected, he allowed the grin to broaden. Barter, suddenly looking up at him, saw him smiling like a gargoyle, with a look of infinitely relishing cruelty and cunning.
‘You won’t find her hard to persuade, I’m sure,’ said Steinberg. ‘Come, now, I’ll talk business to you. I’ll take ten of ‘em for it, and cry quits, and I wouldn’t do that for anybody but a friend.’
The frank admission of the value of his own friendship was plainly legible in that gargoyle smile, and the unhappy Barter read it clearly.
‘I’ll—I’ll see what I can do with her,’ he said, with a face and voice of pure misery.
‘Do, my boy,’ said Steinberg, rising, and swinging the key of his chambers upon his forefinger, ‘see what you can do with her. I shan’t send any notification to the Committee before nine o’clock, old chap. You can trust me for that. You go off at once, old fellow, and see what you can do for her.’
The fraudulent possessor of the notes felt their burthen more than ever insupportable. He rose, and went his way with remorse and rage and the bitterness of baffled stratagem in his heart. His wounded mind soared to so lofty a height of egotism in its struggles that he positively found the impudence to curse Bom-maney for having dropped the notes in his office. Then he cursed himself for having taken them, and cursed Steinberg for robbing him, and so moved off in a condition quite pitiable to one who could find the understanding and the heart to pity him.
Steinberg stopped behind, and smoked smilingly. He was the successful scoundrel, and found the transaction as sweet as the young Barter found it bitter.
‘I don’t think hell have much trouble with her,’ he said to himself; and he enjoyed that little jest so much that he caught himself smiling at it a hundred times in the course of the afternoon and evening.
Old Brown, who was one of the sunniest-natured of men, went gloomy when the news of his old friend’s dreadful fall came to his ears. It does him no more than justice to say that he mourned Bommaney senior infinitely more than the money. He liked to trust people, and had all his life long been eager to find excuses for defaulters. He could find no excuse here. The theft was barefaced, insolent, dastardly. He puzzled over it, and grew more cynical and bitter in his thoughts of the world at large than he could have imagined himself. But then, when Bommaney junior came home, and insisted on the restoration of the missing eight thousand from his own small fortune, old Brown brightened up again. There was such a thing as honesty in the world, after all. The restoration warmed his heart anew. At first he fought against it, and would have none of it—the mere candid and honest offer of it was enough for him; but Philip was more resolute than himself, and the stronger man won. Phil should never have cause to repent his goodness, the old fellow declared to himself a thousand times. He should reap the proper reward of his own honour. Brown admired and loved Phil out of bounds for this little bit of natural honesty and justice. He thought there had never been a finer fellow in the world, and his heart warmed to him as if he had been a son of his own. As for that rascal of a father—and when he got so far in his thoughts he fumed so with wrath that he dared go no farther, and was compelled, for the sake of his own peace, to banish the friend of his schooldays from his mind a thousand times a week.
It was about a year later than the disgrace of the house of Bommaney that old Brown, to his daughter’s perplexity and grief, began to show signs of trouble almost as marked as those he had displayed after his old friend’s defection. The old boy’s newspaper no longer interested him of a morning. He began to be lax about that morning ride which he had once regarded as being absolutely necessary to the preservation of health in London. He had been impassioned with the theatre, and had become a diligent attendant at first-night performances. Even these ceased to have any joy for him, and he neglected, in fine, all his old sources of amusement He went about sorrowful and grumpy, expressing the dolefullest opinions about everything. There was going to be war, stocks were going down, trade was crumbling, there was no virtue in man.
Patty tried her best to coax him from these pessimistic moods, but the old boy was not to be persuaded. On fine evenings, when there was nothing better to be done, he had loved greatly, between the quiet old-fashioned tea and the quiet old-fashioned supper, to dress for out of doors, and with Patty on his arm to wander into Regent’s Park, and there inhale the best imitation of country atmosphere that London could afford. He dropped this amiable and affectionate habit, and took to rambling out alone, coming home late, and haggard, and not infrequently, at such times, staring at his daughter with an aspect so sorrowing and wretched that she knew not what to make of him.
The girl, watching him with a constantly increasing solicitude, could at last endure this condition of affairs no longer. He came home one night, leaving neither his stick nor hat in the outer hall, and sat down in the dining-room, muffled and great-coated, the picture of dejection. Patty, kneeling before him, removed his hat, smoothed his hair, and began to unbutton his overcoat.
‘Papa!’ she cried suddenly, ‘whatisthe matter with you? Why are you so changed?’
He breathed a great sigh, and laid his hand upon her head. Then he turned his face away from her—to hide his eyes, she fancied.
‘You are in trouble,’ she went on. ‘It is not kind to keep it from me. Is it anything that I have done, or anything I could do.’
‘No, no, my darling,’ he said softly, laying his hand upon her head again.
‘Is it money, dear?’
‘No, no. It isn’t money. Don’t talk about it, my dear. Don’t talk about it.’
‘Now, papa, you make me think it very grave indeed.’
‘There,’ he said, rising, ‘you shan’t see any more of it, and we’ll say no more about it Well be gay and bright again, and well hope that things will turn out for the best.’
The attempt to be gay and bright again resulted in most mournful failure, and the girl grew frightened. She had nursed her fears for many days, and had hidden them.
‘Papa!’ she said, trembling ever so little, ‘you must let me know what it is. Let us bear it together, dear. Whatever it may be it can’t matter very much if it leaves us two together—and——’
‘Ah! ‘said old Brown, looking at her with a pitying smile.
‘Is it anything——?’ She stopped short, and really found no courage to complete the question.
‘My darling,’ he answered, folding her in his arms, and staring sadly over her shoulder. She felt the hands that embraced her quiver, and she knew he had understood her half-expressed query. This frightened her so much that it gave her boldness.
‘There is something the matter with Phil,’ she said, pushing the old man away, and holding him at arm’s length. ‘Tell me what it is.’
‘My dear,’ he answered, ‘you shouldn’t leap at conclusions in that way.’ But the disclaimer was altogether too feeble to deceive her. Philip was the mysterious cause of her father’s trouble. Her wandering, pained eyes, her parted lips, the terror and inquiry in her face, frightened the old man. ‘No, no,’ he cried, ‘you must not think it too bad. I’m not sure of anything. I don’t suppose it’s at all a matter of consequence. I daresay he’s an old fool. I hope I am.’
These hints and innuendoes were about the last thing in the world to satisfy a girl who had been made anxious about her lover.
‘Tell me,’ she commanded. ‘I have a right to know. What has happened?’ She was no more inclined to be jealous than girls who are in love commonly are. She had, indeed, a native fund of confidence, and her trust in Phil’s loyalty had been of the unquestioning sort, quite profound and settled. Yet for a moment there rose before her mental vision the dim picture of some possible rival, and at the mere hint of this she grew ashamed, and flamed into indignation against herself.
‘Tell me,’ she said; ‘I insist on knowing.’
‘Well, my dear,’ said the old man miserably and reluctantly, I’ve been told that his father hastened his own ruin with dice and cards.’ It was the first time he had mentioned Bommaney senior in his daughter’s hearing for a year. She looked at him with eyes still intent, but somehow milder and less alarmed. ‘Phil,’ the old boy continued, ‘I’m afraid that Phil is travelling in his father’s steps.’
‘Phil a gambler!’ she said, with an honest scorn of conviction. ‘I know better. What makes you think it?’
‘There are a lot of beastly clubs at the West End,’ said the old man, beginning to struggle with his overcoat, partly because he wished to avoid the girl’s look, and partly because the motion was a relief to him. ‘Gambling-places. Places where men meet for no other earthly purpose than to cheat one another. I’m as fond of a rubber at whist as anybody; but no honest man would put his head into one of those holes of infamy if he knew its character.’
‘Are you speaking of Phil, papa?’ she asked. Her voice was low and tremulous, and there was almost a note of threatening in it. The gentlest creature will fight for her own—a fact for which some of us have reason to be grateful.
‘Yes, my dear,’ her father answered with a kind of sullen sadness; ‘I’m talking about Phil. He’s a member of the vilest crowd of the whole lot, and he’s there night after night.’ He dashed his overcoat into an arm-chair with despairing anger, and went marching up and down the room. ‘I saw him one night by accident as he was going in. I knew the place. You might have knocked me down with a feather. I’ve watched him there night after night. Don’t tell me I hadn’t the right to watch him. I had the right My little girl shan’t marry a gambler. I won’t have my fortune wasted by a gambler, and my child’s heart broken. I took a room,’ he pursued wrathfully, ‘opposite the place. I’ve sat there in the dark with the window open, and caught the d—— worst cold I ever had in my life watching for him. I’ve seen him go in again and again. He’s a lost man, I tell you,’ he cried in answer to his daughter’s look and gesture; ‘the man who has that vice in his blood is lost!’
He was storming loudly, for he was one of those in whom emotion must have expression in noise, but a sudden loud peal at the bell cut short his harangue, and he and Patty stood in silence to know who it might be who called so late. As it happened, it was no other than the lost man himself. He was shown in according to wont and usage without previous announcement, and entered gay and smiling, elate and tender.
As he looked from one to the other the expression of his face changed. He moved quickly towards Patty, and took her hands in his.
‘There’s something the matter,’ he said gently. ‘You’re in trouble!’
The old boy, glaring at him, growled, ‘We are,’ and snatching up his overcoat, threw it over his arm, and slipped his hat upon his head with a gesture which Philip took for one of defiance. As a matter of fact it expressed no more than wrathful grief, but then gesture and expression are hard to read unless you have the key to them.
‘We’d better have it out, Phil,’ said the old man, ‘here and now. You’ve turned gambler, and I’ve found you out.’
‘No,’ Phil answered, with an odd smile; ‘I haven’t turned gambler, I assure you. You’ve heard that I’ve joined the Pigeon Trap? That’s what they call it in the City. I prefer to call it the Hawks’ Roost. There are too few pigeons go there to be plucked to justify the other title, and I give you my word of honour, Mr. Brown, that I’m not one of them.’
The young man’s air was candid and amused. There was an underlying gravity beneath the smile, and for people who had believed in him as devoutly as his two listeners it was hard to disbelieve him now.
‘You’ve gone into the infernal hole,’ said old Brown, more than half abandoning suspicion, and yet inclined to leave it growlingly, as a dog might surrender a bone he conceived himself to have a right to. ‘What do you want there?’
‘I want to do a very important stroke of business there, sir,’ Philip answered. The smile quite disappeared from his eyes at this moment, and he looked very grimly resolute. ‘I will tell you this much,’ he added, ‘because you have a right to know it. I am in pursuit of a brace of scoundrels there. I think I’ve salted the tail of one of ‘em already. I believe with all my heart, sir, that I’m going to clear my father’s character, and I would go into worse places than the Pigeon Trap if I saw my way to doing that.’
Patty of course was clinging to him without disguise by this time, anxious only to atone for having given an ear to any word against him, even for a moment. Phil put his arm about her waist and kissed her. He had never to his knowledge performed this act in the presence of a third person until now, but he got through it without embarrassment.
‘You think you can clear your father’s character?’ asked his sweetheart’s father. There was a tinge of scepticism in his voice, though he tried to hide it.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Phil, his head thrown back a little, and his eyes gleaming. Nobody had ever looked so handsome to Patty’s fancy as he did at that moment ‘I know already that there was no real stain upon his honour, and I’m surprised myself for thinking that there ever could have been, bad as things looked. My father never took wrongful possession of your money. He was robbed of it, and I think I can lay my hand upon the thief.’
There was a prodigious excitement at this declaration, and the young man was overwhelmed with questions. He could name no names, of course, and give no clue, but he sketched the story. He contented himself by describing young Barter as Thief Number One, and he was satisfied to describe Steinberg as Probable Thief Number Two. He had learned, it appeared, that Thief Number One had succeeded on his father’s death to a carefully limited partnership in a business affair in the city. The guiding spirit in the concerns of Thief Number One had been his father’s managing clerk. The income of Thief Number One was strictly limited, and his actual control over the affairs of the firm was non-existent. Notwithstanding these facts, the young man was guilty of countless extravagances, and was a reckless gambler. Within the last twelve months he could hardly have paid away at the club less than a thousand pounds. He had been extremely hard up before the loss of the money, and it was in his offices that the roll of banknotes had been lost. As for Probable Thief Number Two, he played rook to Number One’s pigeon. He had a visible hold upon him; Number One trembled before him, and did what he was bidden to do. Number Two had plenty of money, and as shady a reputation as any man in London who was not among the known criminal classes. Phil’s belief was that Number Two was disposing of the notes for Number One, and that this simple fact accounted for his power over him.
‘And I’m going to follow their track,’ said Phil, tapping the clenched knuckles of his right hand upon the open palm of his left with a quiet vehemence, ‘until I find out everything, if I follow it until I am gray.’