Chapter 4

‘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, _you_ know 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.’

V

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? What _could_ he 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.