Part 19

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 the power 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--like the 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. _I_ believe 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 it has 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, and _vice 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 me lately, 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 you _can’t_ be 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 a horror 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.

XXXIII

Pale with conflict William Jordan took himself yet again to No. 24 Trafalgar Square on the following day. He still carried in his pockets the twenty pieces of gold. His guilt was written in his mien, yet the little world about him could not read.

“Mr. Jordan,” said Mr. W. P. Walkinshaw with great kindness, “it has seemed to me lately that all is not well with you. You have not been looking yourself. I would like to suggest that you take a fortnight’s rest; I think I can answer for it that the firm will raise no objection. I would like to suggest that you run down to Margate to take a breath of the sea.”

“You are k-kind, sir,” said the young man, with the simplicity that the good Mr. Walkinshaw had long come to recognize as part of him, “but my m-malady is of another nature.”

Mr. Walkinshaw shook his head solemnly, and subsequently observed to Mr. Aristophanes Luff, “That young man is suffering. He ought to seek medical advice.”

“One can imagine that Hamlet looked like that,” mildly observed Mr. Aristophanes Luff.

As William Jordan sat on his high stool in the left-hand corner, he saw through the glass partition that divided the counting-house from the exit into Trafalgar Square, Jimmy Dodson pass out of the door into the street. At the moment this apparently unrelated circumstance addressed his mind with no especial significance. But soon it began to produce a kind of vibration in it, as though it were charged with a meaning that his faculties had not the power to seize. Quite suddenly, however, the young man discarded the paper and string he was manipulating and came down from his high stool.

“Oh, yes,” he muttered to himself softly, “I understand now, I understand now.”

Again his limbs, in their weariness, mounted those well-remembered stairs. He passed the ante-chamber wherein his evil genius was wont to reside, but who, at this moment, all unconscious, was taking his way across the square. He tapped softly upon the door of the head of the firm. He entered silently, but without vacillation.

Mr. Octavius Crumpett was reading, with an occasional chuckle of audible pleasure, the manuscript of the latest polite fiction of Sir Topman Murtle, K.C.B., “the Queen’s favourite novelist,” and his own cherished and familiar friend.

“What an insight that man has into the human heart!” he kept exclaiming at intervals, as some uncommonly illuminating flash of intuition lighted his own sympathetic intelligence. At last this august gentleman chanced to pause in his labour of love. He looked up. And looking up he beheld the outline of a silent figure standing at the far end of the room with its hand still on the door it had closed so softly.

“Good-morning, Mr.--er--er--er--dear me!” said Mr. Octavius Crumpett.

How trying it was that he should actually fail to remember the name of one who rendered faithful service to that house! Really such an untoward incident had not occurred to the august gentleman for years. But in a sudden unmistakable ray of inspiration the name of the youthful clerk entered his mind.

“Good-morning, Mr. _Jordan_,” said Mr. Octavius Crumpett, almost proudly, almost triumphantly.

At the sound of that amiable and pleasant voice the strange-looking young man came forward to the table, and taking a handful of gold pieces from his pockets, placed them in a heap upon the table before Mr. Octavius Crumpett’s astonished gaze.

“I wish to submit myself, sir, to the consequences of my action,” said the young man, in soft yet self-contained speech.

At first Mr. Octavius Crumpett was powerless to give expression to his bewildered astonishment. But slowly, solemnly, mournfully the manuscript pages of the polite fiction of his distinguished friend fluttered from his grasp; and placing the palms of his beautifully-kept hands, with their delicately-trimmed nails, together, he murmured, “This is calamitous!”

Minutes seemed to pass in which the head of the firm appeared to resign himself to the fervour of a moral trepidation, which was yet so chastened that its only outward manifestation was that of gentle sorrow.

“This is ineffably calamitous!” murmured Mr. Octavius Crumpett.

William Jordan stood placidly with his hands by his sides.

“I would have hailed the opportunity,” said Mr. Octavius Crumpett, “of paying a _substantial_ sum of money to a charitable institution had it been possible by that means to prevent such a thing happening to this house. Mr. Jordan, I feel I must ask you to have the kindness to go down-stairs for a short time, while I--ah, I--ah, earnestly deliberate as to the right course to adopt.”

The young man bowed and withdrew. As he was passing out of the door, Mr. Octavius Crumpett said, “Do--ah, I understand, Mr. Jordan, that you have no palliation to offer, no words of contrition to express?”

“None, sir,” said the young man. His voice was precise; his absence of gesture was that of a statue.

At the top of the stairs William Jordan encountered James Dodson, who was ascending them.

“My God, Luney, you must be mad!” cried his mentor, giving one half-tragic glance at the face of the young man.

William Jordan passed down the stairs as though he had neither seen nor heard him.

For a considerable time Mr. Octavius Crumpett meditated upon his course of action. He was a humane, enlightened, high-principled, liberal-minded gentleman; a notable product of that which a long-established society had achieved in the way of civilization. In respect and solicitude for his kind he yielded to none. But he was now face to face with the most sinister problem that a sheltered experience had ever been called upon to confront.

As he sat revolving the matter in his thoughts, he seemed to feel that sterner and more forcible clay was required to grapple with an issue so momentous. In his enlightened desire to keep abreast of the foremost practice upon the subject, he rang his bell and summoned one upon whom, whose youth and subordinate rank notwithstanding, he had already learned to lean.

“Mr. Dodson,” said Mr. Octavius Crumpett, with unmistakable horror and distress in his kind brown eyes, “I was justified in my conjecture. The money was left upon the table; it was abstracted--and--and by one employed in this house.”

Mr. Dodson stood in a solemnity that paid homage to the occasion.

“Mr. Dodson,” said Mr. Octavius Crumpett, after a long pause, which was fraught with embarrassment for both gentlemen, “I find myself upon the horns of a dilemma. I desire to be just to this great house whom a grave public scandal threatens; I desire to be just to my own humane feelings; yet above everything, Mr. Dodson, I feel that I ought to act in accordance with the best and latest modern opinion; in a word, Mr. Dodson, one is desirous of consulting the public welfare.”

“I understand perfectly, sir,” said Mr. Dodson, with an air of weight that engaged the respectful attention of his good and large-minded employer. “I understand _perfectly_, sir, the position in which you are placed. It is one of great delicacy. One of great delicacy. I may say, sir, it is one of the--ah, _greatest_ possible delicacy. But if, sir, I might presume to speak----”

By the decree of Fate, however, it was not given to Mr. Dodson to presume to speak, for at that moment the door was opened, and one scarcely less in distinction than Mr. Octavius Crumpett himself was announced. It was Sir Topman Murtle, K.C.B.

Mr. Dodson withdrew in a respectful silence, in which much was expressed.

The pen of the devout historian approaches warily and with awe the momentous task of delineating the outline of the Queen’s favourite novelist. He was in his mature, full-blooded, middle period; the period of his most flamboyant successes; the period of the most memorable and appealing portraits. As they or their replicas adorn the walls of every self-respecting gallery in the United Kingdom, modelled upon Millais in his second manner, the faithful are with confidence thereto referred. It is only necessary to say for the purposes of this biography that Sir Topman Murtle, K.C.B., was a small, stout, middle-aged gentleman of a consummate English type--the type that is found in England, and nowhere else. In point of attire he was no less prosperous than Mr. Octavius Crumpett himself. His manner was cordial yet consonant with true dignity; his fine bearing and white gaiters were pregnant of unmistakable distinction.

When these august personages had greeted one another with a cordial frankness that was very pleasant to witness, said Sir Topman Murtle, in a smooth, high-pitched voice, “Before we approach the subject of _The Angel’s Bride_, I should value your advice, my dear Crumpett, upon a subject which is giving me, at the present moment, some little concern. I feel myself to be on the horns of a dilemma.”

The word “dilemma” touched a responsive chord in the bosom of Mr. Octavius Crumpett, M.A., D.C.L. (Oxon.).