Chapter 2

Bommaney was chilled by the silence and darkness of the rooms, and he shivered to see the temptation he had conquered looming again before him. He knocked loudly with a trembling hand, and the noise of iron on iron went rolling and echoing up the staircase and came back in a hollow, lonely, sounding murmur from the rooms within. His heart sank, and a horrible fear of himself got hold of him. He had actually conquered, and here was the fight to be fought over again with almost a certainty of defeat at the end of it. Indeed, the defeat in that bare moment of time had grown so certain, that he was conscious of a distinct state of disappointment when a sudden footstep within the rooms answered his noisy summons.

The door opened, and a young man stood before him, peering at him with half-closed uncertain eyes through the dark. He was a young man of the fleshly school, something too stout for his years, very pallid, and more than commonly personable, with a fine broad forehead, fine frank eyes, and features modelled with an engaging regularity. When he recognised his visitor his pale and handsome face glittered with a sudden smile of welcome, teeth and eyes gleaming quite brightly, and the whole face lighting up in the pleasantest and friendliest fashion conceivable.

This agreeable expression faded into one of almost mechanical dolor, and the personable young man shook hands with Mr. Bommaney sadly, and sighed as if he suddenly recalled an idea that sighing was a duty.

‘Come in, Mr. Bommaney,’ he said. ‘Come in, sir. I have sent home all the clerks, and was just about to lock up for the night. To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit? Let me light the gas.’

Bommaney, the door being closed behind him, stumbled along the darkened passage after the more assured and accustomed steps of young Mr. Barter, and the inner office being gained, and the gas being lighted, allowed himself to be motioned to a chair. What with having been too much agitated by the contemplation of his troubles to be able to eat at all that day, and what with the fight he had had with his temptations, and the too frequent applications he had made to the brandy, it happened that for the moment he was by no means certain of his purpose. He sat for a little while wondering rather hazily what had brought him there. As often happens with absent-minded people, his hands remembered what had been required of them before his brain began to act again, and by and by the fact that he had unbuttoned his overcoat, and had taken a bundle of papers from his pocket, recalled him to his purpose.

‘I wanted,’ he said, emerging from his haze, and holding the bundle of papers nervously in both hands, ‘I wanted to see your father upon very special and urgent business.’

‘My father?’ the young man answered, with a look and accent of pained surprise. ‘Do you mean to say, sir, that you haven’t heard the news?’

‘The news?’ cried Bommaney, feeling blindly as if some new misfortune threatened him. ‘What news?’

‘My father, sir,’ said young Mr. Barter, with a certain blending of professional airs, something of a legal impress mingled with something of the manner of a medical man conveying mournful intelligence to the relatives of a patient, ‘my father, sir, was struck down by an omnibus in the street this morning. He is terribly injured, and not expected to recover.’

‘God bless my soul!’ Bommaney cried out. His chin fell upon his breast, and his eyes stared at the floor, seeing nothing. He felt like a man upon a raft, who sees the bindings of the frail thing break apart. Shipwrecked already, and now the last hope gone! He hardly knew, if he could have asked himself the question clearly, why he so particularly desired to see Barter. He hardly knew what Barter could have done for him, except to listen to his troubles and take charge of the eight thousand pounds which tempted him, and yet the disappointment seemed as heavy and as hard to bear as anything he had hitherto endured. He sat staring forlornly before him, with tears in his eyes, and young Mr. Barter, in much astonishment at his susceptibility and tenderness, sat watching him. Something slid from Bommaney’s hands with a rustle, and dropped upon the floor. Young Mr. Barter made a mere hint or beginning of a movement, as if he would have picked it up for him. Bommaney made no movement at all, but stared before him with his blue-gray eyes filling more and more with tears, until two or three brimmed over and trickled down his cheeks. He said, ‘God bless my soul!’ once more, mechanically, and restored what remained of his bundle of papers to his pocket. Young Mr. Barter looked with one swift and vivid glance from the fallen bundle to his guest’s face, then back again. Bommaney rose from his seat, buttoned his overcoat with awkward and lingering fingers, and put on his hat. He was evidently unconscious of his own tears, and made no attempt to disguise them, or to wipe them away. He said, ‘God bless my soul!’ a third time, and then, shaking young Mr. Barter by the hand, murmured that he was sorry, very sorry, and so went stupidly away. Young Mr. Barter accompanied him to the door, casting a strange backward glance at the papers as he left the room, and was curiously voluble in his dismissal of his visitor. Anything he could do--Mr. Bommaney might rest perfectly assured--the clerks would be back to-morrow in any case--he would advise Mr. Bommaney of his father’s condition by that night’s post--he himself was naturally most profoundly anxious. In this wise he talked Bommaney from the chambers, and when once he had closed the door behind him, went back along the dark little corridor with an unnecessarily catlike tread. He could hardly have been other than certain that he was alone, yet when he reached the inner room he looked about him with a keen quick darting suspicion, and for half a minute ignored the fallen papers on the floor.

‘Dear me!’ he said, when at length he suffered his eyes to rest upon them. ‘What can that be? How did that come here?’

He stooped, picked up the papers, laid them upon his desk, and smoothed them out, making a fold lengthways to counteract the creases into which they had already fallen. He saw a crisp clean Bank of England note for a hundred pounds, and, lifting it, found another. Then he lifted half the bundle, and, finding a note of the same value, gave an inward gasp, and expelled his breath slowly after it. Then he looked at the last note of all, and sat down with the whole bundle in his hands. His pale and fleshy features had taken an unusual colour, and his breathing was a good deal disturbed. A watcher might have guessed that he was profoundly agitated from the swift unintermittent rustle the paper made in his hands. He seemed to sit as steady as a rock, and yet the crisp paper rustled noisily.

Mr. Brown’s bank-notes had been a fruitful source of emotion that day already, and, in Bommaney’s mind at least, had raised very dreadful doubts and perplexities. There were doubts and perplexities in the mind of young Mr. Barter, but they were altogether of another order. Young Mr. Barter was perfectly aware that he was being tempted, and felt that, in its way, the temptation wets a kind of godsend. He even said as much in a low murmur to himself. His perplexities related to other things than the fear of any fall from honour. Bommaney had evidently been very queer. Bommaney had been horribly cut up about something, even before he heard the news the young solicitor had to give him. But was he so disturbed as to be likely to forget where he had last secured so considerable a sum of money? This mental inquiry naturally set young Mr. Barter to work to discover how considerable the sum of money actually was. He laid the notes upon the table, and tried to wet his thumb upon his lips. There was no moisture there, and his mouth was as dry as touchwood. He drank a little water, and then began to count the notes. He made them eighty-one at first; and then, recounting, made them seventy-nine. Counting them a third time, he made them eighty.

‘Damn it all!’ said young Mr. Barter, ‘can’t I count? I suppose the old buffer will come back for them.’ He tried a fourth time, and confirmed his third counting. ‘They’ll get stopped at the Bank,’ he said. ‘They’ll be no use to anybody.’ He sat for a while thinking, with his eyes half-closed, drumming out a tune upon the table with the tips of his fat white fingers, then he folded the notes with great precision and delicacy, put them into his pocket, found his hat, overcoat, and walking-stick, and made ready for the streets. In the quiet of these legal chambers many chance noises from without had from time to time been clearly audible. He heard now a hurrying step upon the pavement of the quadrangle, and, with a palpitation at the heart, he moved swiftly to put out the light, and listened. The step stumbled at the entrance to the staircase, at the foot of which the outer door stood closed. Young Mr. Barter’s heart beat, if possible, faster than before; and the veins in his head so throbbed, that only the confining rim of his hat seemed to keep his head itself from bursting. There came an eager summons at the door, an imperative rapping with the head of a stout walking-stick. He set his teeth, and, drawing back his lips with a horrible smile in the dark, breathed noiselessly. The rapping grew more and more imperative and urgent, and then came a preternatural silence, with an undercurrent of distant sound in it, and the sudden blare of a cornet in the street, which sounded to his nerves like the trumpet of the herald of the day of judgment He heard the hurrying feet plunge down the steps again, and cross the quadrangle, and listened until their sound merged into the dull noises of the London night. He stood in the dark after this for what seemed a long time, learning that his features twitched, and teaching himself to control them. Then he left his chambers with great secrecy, and broke into a cold sweat to think, as he stood half through the doorway, how narrowly he had escaped from slamming the door behind him. This was an act which might have been suicidal in its stupidity; for to give any sign of his presence there after that thundering summons at the door would have been to betray himself beyond redemption. He inserted his latch-key noiselessly, and, crouching to escape imagined observers, drew the door gently after him, and turned the key slowly in the lock. As he did this he heard a footstep and a cough together close at hand, and, turning with a start, beheld a pale and slender man of brief stature, who scraped his lantern jaws with apologetic thumb and finger, and looking at him with a startled meekness, as if he would fain propitiate anger for a possible intrusion, sidled to the foot of the stairs, mounted the stairway with a backward glance and a second cough of apology, and so disappeared.

Young Mr. Barter, with his nerves already shaken by this small episode, walked into the main thoroughfare and merged with the crowd, bearing Mr. Bommaney’s eight thousand pounds with him. When he had walked for a while he hailed a cab, and was driven home. He had, or prided himself on having, an exceptional eye for horseflesh, but it was not his faculty in this direction which had led him to choose a cab horsed by a brute of unusual symmetry and swiftness. This was an accident, but, like other accidents in this perplexed world, it served its purpose. It landed him at the paternal door in Harley Street almost at the instant at which Bommaney arrived there in pursuit of him.

Now, although young Mr. Barter had not calculated on meeting Bommaney so soon, and although the meeting was naturally something of a shock to him, he had already schooled himself for interview and inquiry. He went a little paler than common as he grasped his father’s old friend by the hand for the third time that evening, and trembled ever so little as he spoke.

‘I half expected to find you here,’ he said. ‘I could see how moved you were by the news of my father’s illness.’ The door stood open, and the old-fashioned man-servant within had been in the act of closing it upon Bommaney’s retreating figure when cab number two had driven up, and the young master of the house had alighted from it. ‘Is the news worse or better?’ He laid both hands upon Bommaney’s arms as he put this question.

The elderly servitor, who had never had reason given to him to believe that young Mr. Barter was above the reasonable attached to his father, was a little surprised to see the young man so moved. He drew the door gently after him, and came out upon the steps.

‘I’m afraid, Mr. John,’ he murmured sympathetically, ‘that it’s practically all over, sir. The poor gentleman’s quite unconscious, and the doctor don’t expect him to last till morning.’

Young Mr. Barter’s mind was active, and accustomed to rapid movement. He knew at once that the old servant read the signs of disturbance in his face and manner, and how far he misread them. So, to insure the misreading, he took out his handkerchief, and groaned at this melancholy intelligence.

‘I----,’ began Bommaney, stammering and speaking a little thickly, ‘I didn’t come to ask about your father.’ Young Barter’s heart at this, though he was perfectly prepared for it, began to beat like a sledgehammer. ‘I’ve had a dreadful loss. I have called nowhere but at your office since I left my own, and I have lost eight thousand pounds. I am convinced that I must have left it there.’

‘I can’t think so, Mr. Bommaney,’ said Barter, with a face of innocence.’ We can go back together, if you like, and look for it.’ Bommaney’s driver lingered for him; the other cabman was already jingling leisurely down the street.

‘Johnson,’ said young Barter, addressing the domestic, ‘you hear what Mr. Bommaney says. This is a matter of the most urgent importance, and must be looked into at once. Tell my mother that I have been home, and that I have been called suddenly back on urgent business.’ Bommaney stood in a kind of stupid trance, and the young man, taking him by the arm, had some ado to secure his attention. ‘Come! Come, sir,’ he said; ‘we will look into this at once. You must not remain in suspense about such a matter.’

They rustled together through the straw which had been laid down upon the roadway, and had been scattered by the feet of passers-by upon the pavement, and, mounting the cab, drove in a ghastly silence for a score of yards, and then, with a clatter which made conversation difficult, Bommaney, rousing himself at intervals, shouted his certainty that the notes would prove to have been left at Barter’s chambers. Barter, growing curiously inured to the circumstances of the case, shouted back that he dared to say they would be; that it was very likely; that he really did not see where else Mr. Bommaney could possibly have left them, furtively pressing the notes against his breast meanwhile, and once, at a quiet interval, when Bommaney had sunk into his former stupor, venturing to steal a hand to the pocket in which the stolen money lay, caressing the edges of the notes with the tips of his fingers.

‘I’m sure,’ said Bommaney, as the cab pulled up at the gate of the quadrangle, ‘that we shall find them here.’ He spoke with a tremulous uncertainty, and so obviously appealed for a confirmation of his hope, that Barter felt constrained to answer,

‘Oh, we are bound to find them.’

The striking of a wax vesta at the door of the chambers, the shaky hunt for the key, the well-known obstinacy of the lock, the opening of the door, the fevered working of Bommaney’s fingers, and the flushed eagerness of his face, were all memorable to young Barter for many and many a day. They entered together the room in which their interview had taken place; and Barter, nursing the remnant of the flaming vesta, lit the gas with it, and then, dropping it on the floor, set his foot upon it, and looked at his companion.

‘Where do you think you left the notes, sir?’ he asked. ‘Have you any idea? I think you took out some papers here. You wanted to consult my father about them, I fancy, and, if I remember, you returned them to your pocket.’

Bommaney stood looking about him on the floor, trailing the point of his walking-cane purposelessly hither and thither; and it was at this moment, seeing how confused and broken his victim seemed, that young Mr. Barter tasted the first flavour of safety.

‘I don’t see anything,’ he said.

‘Did you,’ Bommaney asked him, with both trembling hands grasping the knob of his walking-cane, and shaking in appeal before the unsuspected thief--’ did you lock any papers away before you left?’

As a matter of fact, young Barter had not had any papers to lock away that evening after Bommaney’s departure; but he thought the trick worth playing, and, producing his keys again, opened the heavy iron safe which stood against the wall.

‘Yes,’ he said, with an air of hopeful alacrity. ‘By Jove, I did!’ He stood aside, with an outstretched hand, and motioned Bommaney to examine the contents of the safe. There was a parchment there, there were half a dozen bundles of documents tied in pink tape and docketed; but there were no bank-notes.

‘You know,’ said Bommaney, with a fretful wail, ‘I must have left them here; I couldn’t have left them anywhere else. I put it to you--could I?’

Barter looked at him mournfully, with raised eyebrows. There was just a hint of expostulation in his raised eyebrows, and in the expression of his voice.

‘You see, sir,’ he said, waving his white hands--’ you see for yourself, there’s nothing here.’

Bommaney walked to a chair, and, sitting down there, lifted up his voice and wept. ‘I’ve been an honest man, by God! all my life long; and now I’m not merely ruined, but I shall be taken for a thief.’ He cried bitterly after this outburst, with his head between his hands. His hat fell off, and his walking-stick tumbled noisily to the floor. Mr. Barter picked them up, and, having set them on the table, looked at the shaking shoulders, and listened to the ruined man’s sobs and wailings. It was a pity--of course it was a pity--but young Mr. Barter really did not see how it was in his power to help it.

III

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.