Chapter 5

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 the _insouciance_ of 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?’

VI

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.

VII

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.