"Did you," Bommaney asked him, with both trembling hands grasping the k.n.o.b 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 doc.u.ments 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 G.o.d! 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 c.r.a.pe 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 h.o.a.ry stunted angles and squat chimney cowls had the grave and impa.s.sive aspect proper to great age. It has stood there now for over seven hundred years h.o.a.rding 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 st.u.r.dy walls as if they were an exhalation from the paving-stones. The dim staircase sent down all manner of m.u.f.fled 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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-ent.i.tled 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.
He turned from the window and lit the lamp, and, wheeling round, held up the light to a photograph, and studied it with a pleased face. It was the portrait of a pretty girl, very sweetly grave, and looking as if it could be very sweetly vivacious. When he had looked at it for a longish time he nodded and smiled, as if the pictured lips had actually spoken to him. There was a tumbler standing beside the photograph with a bunch of hothouse flowers in it, the one bright spot of colour in the dingy chamber. He took this in his disengaged hand, and nodding and smiling anew at the pretty girl"s portrait, he turned about again, and walked into a bedroom beyond a narrow and inconvenient little window. The strident voice of the clock over the entrance of the old Hall, answered or antic.i.p.ated from mult.i.tudinous spires in the City far and near, sounded as Philip entered his bedroom. He stood and listened, counting six jarring strokes. The bedroom was a microscopic apartment, with as many corners in it as any room of its size in London, and the bed itself was a perfect triumph of littleness, so tucked under the sloping roof, and so surrounded by projecting corners, as to make the entry to it or the exit from it a gymnastic performance of considerable merit. The room was not over-light at the best of times, the fourth part of the s.p.a.ce of one small window in the sloping wall was filled by its own heavy framework, and for half its height it was shielded by a parapet, which had at least its uses in hiding the occupant of the room from the too-curious observation of those who dwelt in the upper stories of the houses opposite. These houses opposite, compared with Gable Inn, are of a mushroom modernness, and yet are old enough (having begun with a debauched and sickly const.i.tution) to have fallen into an almost complete decrepitude. Their stately neighbour seems to be less grimy with the London smoke than they are, has always been less susceptible to outside evil influences, even of that unescapable sort, and drives them to an added shabbiness of senility by contrast with its own hale old age. The bedroom window was already open for the admission of such fresh air as, disguised in London blacks, the exhalations of moist spring pavements, and the reeking odours of the cuisine of Fleeter"s Rents, might choose to wander thither. Philip, with the lamp in one hand and the tumbler of flowers in the other, put out his head and looked into the squalid depths below him, and having gazed there a while absently and with no object, drew back with a vague touch of pity upon him for the people who dwelt in so much squalor so near to healthy effort and reasonable competence. He could hardly have told as much, perhaps, but one pallid countenance, shining very dimly at an open window, was very much answerable for that vague touch of pity. The face in the darkness started away from the window as he looked at it, as if his own robust health and the light that dwelt about him startled its pinched shabbiness into solitude. He set the tumbler of flowers upon the window-ledge, and closing the window, made his toilet and returned to the sitting-room. Then, having banked up the fire, and set the matches in such a position that he could easily find them, he blew out the lamp, left his chambers, and ran down the tortuous stairs. As he turned the last corner a door clanged noisily, and the next thing of which he was conscious was that he was struggling in the embrace of a stranger whom he had doubled up in an angle of the wall.
"I beg your pardon," he said gaspingly; "I stumbled."
"You did," responded the stranger, gasping also. "Rather heavily. It was lucky you had something soft to fall on."
Philip began to make apologies. The stranger, breathless still, but jovially polite, begged him not to mention it. He was a tallish young man, broad set, and a little too fleshy for his years. He had a cleanshaven face, healthily pallid, the whitest of teeth, and a most frank, engaging, and contagious smile.
"Pray don"t say anything more about it," he said in answer to Philip"s reiterated apologies. "You are not hurt, I hope?"
"No, thanks; but I"m afraid you are."
"Not at all. It was sharp for a minute; but I am all right now. The stairs are very inconvenient, especially to strangers."
"I haven"t even that excuse for my clumsiness, said Philip; "for I am living here."
"Indeed; then we are neighbours, and should know each other. Rather an informal kind of introduction, eh?" The stranger said this with a mellow laugh and a flash of his white teeth. He opened his overcoat as he spoke, and produced a card-case, Philip catching the gleam of a gold-studded shirt-front as he did so. "That"s my name, John Barter; and these are my offices." The outer oak, cracked and blistered to the likeness of an ancient tar-barrel, bore an inscription, dim with long years--"Fellowship, Freemantle, and Barter"--and the names were repeated on the doorpost at the entrance.
"I have no card," said Philip, accepting the stranger"s. "My name is Bommaney--Philip Bom-maney;" Mr. Barter"s smiling face was unchanged, though he gave a slight but perceptible start at the name, and repeated it.
"Do you know it?" asked Philip. To the ears of his companion there was something of a challenge in the tone. "It is not a common name."
"No. Not a common name. I think I have heard it somewhere."
They were under the archway by this time, in the brief shelter of which the sanguine-faced, red-waist-coated lodge-keeper was taking his nightly const.i.tutional. They answered the touch of the hat with which he saluted them.
"Which is your way?" asked Mr. Barter.
"Westward," said Phil.
"Mine is east," said Barter, "so we part here. We are bound to meet again before long. Good-night."
"Good-night, and many thanks for taking my clumsiness in such good part."
Barter"s ready smile beamed out again. They shook hands before parting like old acquaintances, and Philip walked on, through the incessant noise of Holborn into quieter Bloomsbury Street, along the eastern side of Bedford Square, where the bare trees were shivering in a bath of fog, and into Gower Street. Half way down that hideous thoroughfare he came upon a house, one of the few which still retain the old lamp-iron and extinguisher before their doors, and knocking, was admitted by a trim maid, with the smiling alacrity due to a frequent and favoured visitor, and by her conducted to the drawing-room, where sat a young lady engaged in a transparent pretence of being absorbed in a novel. The pretence vanished as the door closed behind the handmaiden, and the young lady jumped up and ran forward to meet him, with such a glad welcome in her face as answered the appeal in his own. It does not need that we should look at her with Philip"s eyes to p.r.o.nounce her charmingly pretty, or to admire the face, at once shy and frank, with which she nestled beside him.
"I thought you were never coming," she said.
"Am I so late, then?"
"It seemed so, and now you are come, tell me what you have been doing."
"Working, and thinking of you."
"You work too much, Phil." She did her best to ignore the second item of his day"s occupation, but the deepened flush and her avoidance of her lover"s eyes answered it more effectively than words could have done.
"You are getting quite pale and thin. No wonder, sitting all alone all day long in those musty old chambers."
"Well, you see, Patty, the more I work, the sooner I shall cease to be all alone." The flush deepened again, and the hand trembled in his like a caught bird. "And as for working too much, I don"t believe that"s possible. Work never killed anybody yet, and idleness has killed a good many. It"s better to work than sit still and wait for briefs which never corns. There"s no sensation more delightful than that of looking at a good day"s work, and thinking that every line and word has brought me nearer to you."
His tenderness conquered her shyness, and she nestled closer still, looking up at him with a wholehearted admiration and affection. He felt a little sad and unworthy under it, as almost any honest fellow would have been sure to do, and yet it was wonderfully sweet to him, and more than reward enough for any effort.
"I wish I could help you, Phil. I wish I could do something for you, when you have given up so much for me."
"Hush!" he said, laying his hand lightly upon her lips. "We made up our minds long ago that no more was to be said about that." He was tender still--he could be nothing else with her--but there was a touch of sternness in his manner, too--as if the theme pained him.
"But I can"t help thinking of it. It was so n.o.ble of you, Phil."
"It was the only thing to be done--the only thing possible. It was----"
he paused for a second, and then went on resolutely--"it was my father"s act by which you suffered. I should have been a scoundrel if I had done otherwise."
"And are you to do all? and am I to do nothing? It is selfish to keep all the generosity to yourself."
He laughed as if he found this female paradox a pleasant fancy, but she was not to be put off so.
"If the subject pains you, as I know it does, dear, please understand why I speak of it I don"t want you to think I take your sacrifice as you pretend to take it. It isn"t a matter of course, as you pretend it is; and you may say what you like, Phil, but it isn"t a thing that everybody would have done. Don"t grudge me my grat.i.tude; you did it for the love of me."
"I didn"t do it for the love of you," said Phil, laughing tenderly; "how often am I to tell you that, you little mountain of obstinacy? I did it because it was the right thing. I don"t say, mind you, that it wasn"t easier to do it for you than it might have been for somebody I didn"t know or care for; but that--as you will see quite clearly if you"ll bring your naturally logical mind to bear upon it--makes the thing so much the less creditable, provided there was any credit due to it at all."
The loving feminine scorn of this masculine process of reasoning was expressed in a single glance, and was delightful to see.
"It only means waiting a little longer before I claim you."