THE JADE BUTTON
The little story I am about to tell will meet, I have no doubt, with a good deal of incredulity, not to say derision. Very well; there is the subject of it himself to testify. If you can put an end to him by any lethal process known to man, I will acknowledge myself misinformed, and attend your last moments on the scaffold.
Miss Belmont disapproved of Mrs. John Belmont; and Mrs. John Belmont hated Miss Belmont. And the visible token of this antagonism was a button.
It was of jade stone, and it was a talisman. For three generations it had been the mascot of the Belmont family, an heirloom, and symbolizing in its shining disk a little local sun, as it were, of prosperity. The last three head Belmonts had all been men of an ample presence. The first of them, the original owner of the stone, having assigned it a place in perpetuity at the bottom hole of his waistcoat (as representing the centre of his system), his heirs were careful to substantiate a tradition which meant so much to them in a double sense.
Indeed, the button was as good as a blister. It seemed to draw its wearer to a head in the prosperous part of him. It was set in gold, artfully furnished at its back with a loop and hank, and made transferable from waistcoat to waistcoat, that its possessor for the time being might enjoy at all seasons its beneficent influence. In broad or long cloth, in twill or flannel, by day and by night, the button attended him, regulating indiscriminately his business and his digestion. In such circumstances, it is plain that Death must have been hard put to it to find a vulnerable place; and such was the fact. It has often been said that a man’s soul is in his stomach; how, then, could it get behind the button? Only by one of those unworthy subterfuges, which, nevertheless, it does not disdain. The first Belmont lived to ninety, and with such increasing portliness that, at the last, a half-moon had to be cut, and perpetually enlarged, out of the dining-room table to accommodate his presence. Practically, he was eating his way through the board, with the prospect of emerging at the other end, when, in rising from a particularly substantial repast one night, he caught the button in the crack between the first slab (almost devoured) and the second, wrenched it away, and was immediately seized with apoplexy. He died; and the Destroyer, after pursuing his heir to threescore years and ten, looking for the heel of Achilles, as unworthily “got home” into him. He was lumbering down Fleet Street one dog-day when, oppressed beyond endurance by the heat, he wrenched open—in defiance of all canons of taste and prudence—his waistcoat. The button—the button—was burst from its bonds in the act, though, fortunately—for the next-of-kin—to be caught by its hank in the owner’s watch-chain. But to the owner himself the impulse was fatal. A prowling cutpurse, quick to the chance, “let out” full on the old gentleman’s bow-window, quenching its lights, so to speak, for ever; and then, having snatched the chain, incontinently doubled into the arms of a constable. The property was recovered—but for the heir; the second Belmont’s bellows having been broken beyond mending.
The third met with as inglorious an end, and at a comparatively early age; for the button—as a saving clause to whatever god had thrown it down, for the fun of the thing, among men—was possessed with a very devil of touchiness, and always instant to resent the least fancied slight to its self-importance. Else had Tithonus been its wearer to this day, as——but I won’t anticipate. The third Belmont, then, in a fit of colossal forgetfulness, sent the button, in a white waistcoat, to the wash. The calamity was detected forthwith, but not in time to avert itself. After death, the doctor. Before the outraged article could be restored to its owner and victim, he had died of a rapid dropsy, and the button became the property of Mrs. John Belmont, his relict and residuary legatee, who——
But, for the history of the button itself? Why, in brief, as it affected the Belmont family, it was this. Mr. Adolphus Belmont had been Consul at one of the five treaty ports of China about the troublous years of 1840-42. During the short time that he held office, a certain local mandarin, Elephoo Ting by name, was reported to Peking for high treason, and honoured with an imperial ukase, or invitation to forestall the headsman. There was no doubt, indeed, that Elephoo Ting had been very strenuous, in public, in combating the intrusion of the foreign devil, while inviting him, in private, to come on and hold tight. There is no doubt, too, that in the result Elephoo and Adolphus had made a profitable partnership of it in the matter of opium, and that the mandarin had formed a very high, and even sentimental, opinion of the business capacities of his young friend. Young, that is to say, relatively, for Adolphus was already sixty-three when appointed to his post. But, then, of the immemorial Ting’s age no record actually existed. The oldest inhabitant of Ningpo knew him as one knows the historic beech of one’s district. He had always been there—bland, prosperous, enormous, a smooth bole of a man radiating benevolence. And now at last he was to die. It seemed impossible.
It was impossible, save on a condition. That he confided to his odd partner and confidant, the English Consul, during a last interview. He held a carving-knife in his hand.
“Shall I accept this signal favour of the imperial sun?” he said.
“Have you any choice?” asked the Consul gloomily. “The decree is out; the soldiers surround your dwelling.”
Elephoo Ting laughed softly.
“Vain, vain all, unless I discard my talisman.” He produced the jade button from his cap. “This,” he said, “I had from my father, when the old man sickened at last of life, desiring to be an ancestor. It renders who wears it, while he wears it, immortal; only it is jealous, jealous, and stands upon its dignity. Shall I, too, part with it, and at a stroke let in the light of ages?”
He saw the incredulity in his visitor’s face, and handed him the carving-knife.
“Strike,” he said. “I bid thee.”
“You take the consequences?”
“All.”
With infinite cynicism, Mr. Belmont essayed to tickle, just to tickle, the creature’s infatuation with the steel point. It bent, where it touched, like paper. He thrust hard and ever harder, until at last he was thrashing and slicing with the implement in a sort of frenzy of horror. The mandarin stood apathetic, while the innocuous blade swept and rustled about his huge bulk like a harmless feather. Then said he, as the other desisted at length, unnerved and trembling: “Art thou convinced?”
“I am convinced,” said the Consul.
Elephoo Ting handed him the button in exchange for the knife.
“Take and wear it,” he said, “for my sake, whom you have pleased by outwitting, on the score of benefiting, two Governments. You have the makings of a great mandarin in you; the button will do the rest. Would you ever escape the too-soon satiety of this stodgy life, pass it on, with these instructions which I shall give you, to your next-of-kin. Be ever deferential to the button and considerate of its vanity, for it is the fetish of a sensitive but undiscriminating spirit. So long as you cherish it, you will prosper. But the least apparent slight to itself, it will revenge, and promptly. As for me, I have an indigestion of the world that I would cure.”
And with the words he too became an ancestor.
Then riches and bodily amplitude came to Adolphus Belmont, until the earth groaned under his importance. He was a spanker, and after him Richard Belmont was a spanker, and after him John Belmont was a very spanker of spanks, even at thirty-two, when he committed the last enormous indiscretion which brought him death and his fortunes almost ruin. For the outrage to the button had been so immeasurable that, not content with his obliteration, it must manœuvre likewise to scatter the accumulations of fortune, which it had brought him, by involving in a common ruin most of the concerns in which that fortune was invested, so that his widow found herself left, all in a moment, a comparatively poor woman.
And here Mrs. John Belmont comes in.
She was a little woman, of piquancy and resource, and a very accomplished angler of men. She could count on her pink finger-tips the ten most killing baits for vanity. And, having once recovered the button, she set herself to conciliating it with a thousand pretty kisses and attentions. It lived between the bosom of her frock and the ruff of her dainty nightgown. Yet for a long time it sulked, refusing to be coaxed into better than a tacit staying of its devastating hand. And so matters stood when the Assembly ball was held.
Miss Emma Belmont and Mrs. John Belmont lived in the same town, connexions, but apart. Their visits were visits of ceremony—and dislike. Miss Emma was Mr. John’s sister, and had always highly disapproved of his marriage with the “adventuress.” Her very name, she thought, bordered on an impropriety! How could any “Inez” dissociate herself from the tradition of cigarette-stained lips and white eyeballs travelling behind a fan like little moons of coquetry? This one, in fact, took no trouble to. Her reputation involved them in a common scandal; and it was solely on this account, I think, that she so resented her sister-in-law’s appropriation of the button. She herself was devoted to good works, and utterly content in her mission. She did not want the button; but, inasmuch as it was a Belmont heirloom, and Mrs. John childless, she chose to symbolize in it the bone of contention, and to use it as a convenient bar to amenities which would, otherwise, have seemed to argue in her a sympathy with a mode of life with which she could not too emphatically wish to disconnect herself.
They met at the Assembly ball. Miss Belmont, though herself involved in the financial ebb, had considered it her duty to respect so respectable an occasion, and even to adorn it with a silk of such inflexibility that (I tremble as I write it) one could imagine her slipping out of it through a trap, like the vanishing lady, and leaving all standing. Presently Mrs. John Belmont, with a wicked look, floated up to her.
“You here, Inez!” exclaimed Miss Emma, affecting an amazement which, unhappily, she could not feel.
The other flirted and simpered. When she smiled, one could detect little threads drawn in the fine powder near the corners of her mouth. There was no ensign of widowhood about her. She ruffled with little gaudy downs and feathers, like a new-fledged bird of paradise.
“Yes, indeed,” she said. “And I’ve brought Captain Naylor, who’s been dining with me. Shall I introduce him to you?”
Miss Belmont’s sense of decorum left her speechless.
Inez, on the contrary, rippled out the most china-tinkling laugh.
“You dear old thing,” she tittered. “Don’t look so shocked. I knew you’d be here to chaperon me, and——” She came a step closer. “Yes, the button’s there, Emma. You may stare; but make up your mind, I’m not going to part with it.”
Miss Belmont found herself, and responded quietly—
“I hope not indeed, Inez. I don’t ask or expect you. You might multiply it to-night by a dozen, and only offend me less.”
Mrs. John laughed again, rather shrilly.
“O, fie!” she said. “Why, even you haven’t a high-necked dress, you know.”
And then a very black and red man, in a jam-pot collar and with a voice like a rook, came and claimed her.
“Haw, Mrs. Belmont! Aw—er, dance, I think.”
Miss Belmont, to save appearances, rigidly sat out the evening. When at last she could endure no more, she had her fly called and prepared to go home. She was about to get into it, when she observed a familiar figure standing among the few midnight loafers who had gathered without the shadow of the porch.
“Hurley!” she exclaimed.
The man, after a moment, slouched reluctantly forward, touching his hat. He had once been her most favoured protégé—a rogue and irreclaimable, whom she had persuaded, temporarily, from the devil’s service to her own. He had returned to his master, but with a reservation of respect for the practical Christian. Miss Belmont was orthodox, but she had a way with sinners. She pitied and fed and trusted them. She was a member of the Prisoners’ First Aid Society, with a reverence for the law and a weakness for the lawless. Her aim was to reconcile the two, to interpret, in a yearning charity, between the policeman and the criminal, who at least, in the result, made a common cause of honouring her. Inez asserted that, living, as she did, very nervously alone on the outskirts of the town, she had adopted this double method of propitiation for the sake of her own security. But, then, Inez had a forked tongue, which you would never have guessed from seeing the little scarlet tip of it caressing her lips.
Well, Miss Belmont had once coaxed Jim Hurley into being her handy man, foreseeing his redemption in an innocent association with flowers and the cult of the artless cabbage. He proved loyal to her, gained her confidence, knew all about the button and other matters of family moment. But the contiguity of the kitchen-garden with Squire Thorneycroft’s pheasant-coops was too much for hereditary proclivities. He stole eggs, sold them, was detected, prosecuted, sentenced to a short term of imprisonment, and disappeared. Miss Belmont herself met him on his discharge from the jail gates, but he was not to be induced to return. The wild man was in his brain, and off he had gone, with Parthian shots of affection, in quest of fun. And for two years she had not seen him again until to-night, when his scratch of red hair and beard—which always looked as if he had just pulled his head out of a quickset—suddenly blew into flame before her. And then there followed a shock of distress.
“Jim! Why, what’s happened? What’s the matter with you?”
There was no need to specify. The man was obviously going off his tramp—nearing the turn of the dark road. He was ghastly, and constantly gave little spasmodic wrenching coughs during the minute he stood beside her.
“Well,” he gasped, “I dunno. The rot has got into my stummick. I be all touchwood inside like an old ellum.”
“Will you come and see me?”
“ ’Es. By’m-by.”
“Why not now? Where are you going to sleep?”
He grinned, and coughed, half suffocated, as he backed.
“I’ve got my plans, Missis. You—leave me alone.”
It did not sound gracious. One would not have guessed by it his design, which was nothing less than a jolly throw against the devil in the teeth of death. Miss Belmont, a little hurt, but more sad, got into her fly and was driven home. Arrived there, she sat up an hour contemplative. She was just preparing to go to bed in the grey dawn, when she heard the garden-gate click and footsteps rapidly traverse the path to the front door. Her heart seemed to stop. She stole trembling into the hall. “Who’s there?” she demanded in a quavering voice. The answer came, with a clearness which made her start, through the letter-box.
“Me, Missis—Jim Hurley.”
Amazed, and a little embarrassed, she opened. The man burst, almost fell in, and, staggering, recovered himself.
“ ’Ere!” he said, with eager manipulation trying to force something upon her. “I’ve done ’er! I’ve got it for yer! Take it—make ’aste—they’re arter me. It’s yourn as by rights, and she’s got to crow on the wrong side of ’er woundy little mouth.”
But Miss Belmont, with instinctive repulsion, had put her hands behind her back and retreated before him.
“Jim!” she said sickly. “What have you got? What do you mean? I’ll take nothing from you.”
“O, go along!” he insisted. His cough was gone. He seemed animated with a new masterfulness. “Ain’t I in the know? It’s yourn, anyhow, and”—his eye closed in an ineffable rapture—“I done the devil out of his own when I heard I be booked to go to him. He’ll pay me, I reckon; but I don’t care. You take it. It’s your dooty as a good woman.”
“No, no,” cried Miss Belmont, beating him away with her hands. “Don’t let me even see it to know. How could you suppose such a thing? Take it back while you’ve time.”
B’s 33 and 90 wore their list-footed boots; but Jim’s ear was a practised one. Swiftly summoned, they had raced on his tracks from the Assembly Rooms. He had known it, and had laboured merely to keep his start of them by three minutes—two—one. Now, while their sole was yet on the threshold, he darted into the dining-room and was under the table at a dive. They had him out and handcuffed, of course, in a jiffy; and then they stood to explain and expostulate.
“Well, you ain’t a cheeked one neither, Hurley! To run up here of all places for cover! Don’t you mind him, Miss.” (She stood pale and shivering. “The shock!” she had murmured confusedly.) “Why,” said 33, “the man was heard by plenty proposing of hisself to visit you; and looked to your hold kindness to him to take and shelter, is supposed.”
She found voice to ask: “What’s he done?”
“Done!” said 33. “Why, bless you, Miss! Treating of you as if you was in collusion, ain’t I?” (She shivered.) “Why, he grabbed a jewel—a gold button, as I understand—out o’ the buzzim o’ your own late brother’s good lady as she was a-stepping into her broom, and bolted with it. It’ll be on ’im now if we’re lucky.”
“You ain’t then, old cock,” said Jim, with a little hoarse laugh and choke.
“Chuck it!” said 90, a saturnine man.
“That’s what I done, Kroojer,” said Jim. “You go and ’unt in the bloomin’ ’edges if you don’t believe me.”
“It’s my duty to tell you,” said 33, “that whatever you says will be took down in evidence agen you.”
“Not by you,” said Jim. “Why, you can’t spell.”
They carried him off dispassionately, with some rough, kindly apologies to Miss Belmont for the trouble to which they had put her. She locked and bolted the door when they were gone; mechanically saw to the lamps, and went upstairs to bed in a sort of stunned dream. So she committed herself to the sheets, and so, in a sort of waking delirium, passed the remaining hours of slumber. She felt as if the even tenor of her way, her stream of placid days, had been suddenly dammed by a dead body, the self-destroyed corpse of her own character. Sometimes she would start from a suffering negation to feel B 90’s hand upon her shoulder. “What have I done—O! what have I done?” she would moan in anguish; and B 90 would glower from under his helmet like a passionless Rhadamanthus—
“What have you done? What but, like our second Henry, meanly, by inference and innuendo, imposed upon your wretched tool the responsibility for a deed which you dared not seek to compass by the open processes of the law. Did you dispute the right ownership of the button? Then why choose for your confidant an ex-thief and poacher? No use to say you designed no harm. By the flower be known the seed. Come along o’ me!”
She rose late, ate no breakfast, and sat awaiting, pinched and grey, the inevitable ordeal. It opened, early enough, with the advent of Mrs. John. The little widow came sailing in, with a face of floured steel. When she saw, the edge of her tongue seemed to whet itself on her lips. Miss Emma broke out at once in an unendurable cry—
“Inez! You can’t think I was a party to this!”
“Who said so, dear? Though the man was a protégé of yours, and was known to have remained where he encountered me by your instructions.”
“It is not true.”
“Isn’t it? Well, at least, the plan miscarried. Now, give me the button, and I promise, to the best of my power, to hush the matter up.”
“I haven’t got it, indeed; O, you must believe me! He told the policeman himself that he had thrown it away while escaping.”
“Yes, yes. I give him credit for his loyalty to you. But, Emma—you know I never put much faith in your sanctimoniousness. Don’t be a fool, and drive me to extremities.”
“You can’t mean it. I blame my covetous heart. I envied you—I admit it—this dear fetish of our family. But to think me capable of such a wickedness! O, Inez!”
Then Mrs. John Belmont exploded. I muffle the report. It left Miss Belmont flaccid and invertebrate, weakly sobbing that she would see Hurley; would try to get him to identify the exact spot where he had parted with the bauble; would move heaven and earth to make her guiltless restitution. Yet all the time, remembering the scene of last night, she must have known her promise vain. Jim had sought to thrust no shadow of a fact upon her. He had not thrown the button away. He alone knew where it now was; but would he so far play into the hands of her enemy as to tell? She felt faint in the horror of this doubt; and Mrs. John perceived the horror.
As for her, she was utterly hateful and incredulous. She had friends, she screamed—one in particular—who would act, and unmercifully, to see her righted. She hardly refrained from striking her sister-in-law, as she rushed out in a storm of hysterics.
And at this point I was called in—by Miss Belmont, that is to say.
I found her utterly prostrated—within step of the brink of the final collapse.
I coaxed her back, foot by foot; won the whole truth from her; laughed her terrors to scorn, and staked her my professional credit to have the matter put right, or on the way to right, by our next meeting.
And I meant it, and was confident. For that very day—though of this she did not know—I had officially ordered Jim Hurley’s removal from the cell in which he had been lodged to the County Hospital. The man was dying, that was the fact; and a fact which he had known perfectly when he staked at one throw for an easy bed for himself, and a repayment of his debt to his old benefactress.
He was ensconced in a little ward by himself, when I visited him and sat down to my task. He cocked an eye at me from a red tangle, and grinned.
“Now, Hurley,” I said, “I come straight from Miss Emma, by her authority, to acquaint you with the results of your deed.”
“O!” he answered. “Hev the peelers been a-dirtyin’ of their pore knees lookin’ for it in the ’edgerows? I ’opes as they found it.”
“You know they couldn’t. You’ve got it yourself.”
“S’elp me, I haven’t!”
Then I informed him, carefully and in detail, of the awful miscarriage of his intentions. He was patently dumbfounded.
“Well, I’m blowed!” he whispered, quite amazed. “Well, I am blowed!”
“You must undo this,” I said. “There’s only one way. Where is the button?”
He gauged me profoundly a moment.
“On a ledge under the table,” he said. Then he thrust out a claw. “Don’t you go lettin’ ’er ’ave it back,” he said, “or I’ll ’aunt you!”
I considered.
“You must undo what you’ve done,” I repeated. “Don’t you see? Unless you can prove that it’s been in your possession all the time, and is now, her character’s gone for ever. Mrs. John will see to that.”
He did not, professionally, lack wits. He understood perfectly. “You’re ’er friend?” he asked.
I nodded.
“All right,” he said, “you get ’old of it private, and smuggle of it ’ere, and I’ll manage the rest.”
“But, my good fellow! You’ve been overhauled, I suppose, and pretty thoroughly. How can you convince—convince, you understand—that you’ve kept the thing snug through it all?”
“You go and smuggle of it ’ere,” he repeated doggedly.
It needed only a very little manœuvring. I hurried back to Miss Belmont’s, heard the lady was still confined to her room, forbade the servant to report me, and claimed the privacy of the dining-room for the purpose of writing a prescription. The moment I was alone, I made an excited and perfectly undignified plunge under the table, found the ledge (the thing, in auctioneer’s parlance, was a “capital set,” in four leaves), and the button, which in a feverish ecstasy I pocketed. Then, very well satisfied, I hurried back to Mr. Hurley.
I found him, even in that short interval, changed for the worse; so much changed, that, in face of his condition, a certain sense of novel vigour, an overweening confidence in my own importance which had grown up, and lusty, in me during my return journey, seemed nothing less than an indecency. However, curiously enough, this mood began to ebb and sober from the very moment of my handing over the pièce de conviction to its purloiner. He “palmed” it professionally, cleared his throat, and took instant command of the occasion. “Now,” he said, “tell ’em I’ve confessed to you, and let ’em all come.”
His confidence mastered the depression which had overtaken me. I returned, with fair assurance, to Miss Belmont, who received my news with a perfect rapture of relief. What she had suffered, poor good woman, none but herself might know.
“Did he own to you where he had hidden it?” she asked. And “Yes,” I could answer, perfectly truthfully.
By my advice, she prepared at once to go and fetch her sister-in-law to the hospital—with a friend, if she desired it—that all might witness to the details of the restitution.
In the meanwhile I myself paid a visit to the police station, and thence returned to my post to await the arrival of my company.
It came in about an hour: Miss Belmont, tearfully expectant; Mrs. John Belmont, shrill and incredulous; an immaculate tall gentleman, Captain Naylor by name, whose chin was propped on a very high collar, that he might perpetually sniff the incense of his own superiority; and, lastly, and officially to the occasion, B 90.
I lost no time in conducting them to the bedside of the patient. He had rallied wonderfully since our last encounter. He was sitting up against his pillow, his red hair fluffed out like the aureole of a dissipated angel, an expression on his face of a quite sanctimonious relish. I fancy he even winked at me.
“Now, Hurley,” I said gravely, “as one on the threshold of the grave” (which, nevertheless, I had my doubts about), “speak out and tell the truth.”
He cleared his throat, and started at once in a loud voice, as if repeating a lesson he had set himself—
“ ’Earing as ’ow my rash hact ’ave brought suspicion on a innercent lady, I ’ereby makes affirmation of the fac’s. I stole the button, and ’id it in my boot, where it is now.”
“No, it ain’t,” said B 90 suddenly. “Stow that.”
Mr. Hurley smiled pityingly.
“O, ain’t it, sir?” he said. “ ’Ow do you know?”
“Because I searched you myself,” said B 90 shortly.
“The patient, infinitely tolerant, waved his hand.
“ ’E searched me, ladies and gentlemen! Ho, lor! Look at ’im; I only arsks that—look at ’im! Why, he doesn’t even know as there’s a smut on his nose at this moment.” (B 90 hastily rubbed that organ, and remembering himself, lapsed into stolidity once more.) Mr. Hurley addressed him with exaggerated politeness—“Would you be so good, sir, as to go and fetch my boots?”
B 90 thought profoundly, and officially, a minute; wheeled suddenly, withdrew, and returned shortly with the articles, very massive and muddy, which he laid on the counterpane before the prisoner. The latter, cherishing the ineffable dénouement, deliberately took and examined the left one, paused a moment, smilingly canvassing his company, and then quickly, with an almost imperceptible wrench and twirl, had unscrewed the heel bodily from its place and held it out.
“ ’Ere!” he said; and, with his arm extended, sank back in an invertebrate ecstasy upon his pillow.
The heel was pierced with a tiny compartment on its inner side, and within the aperture lay the button.
They all saw it, but not as I, who, standing as I did at the bed-head, and being something of an amateur conjurer myself, was conscious in a flash of the rascal “passing” the trinket into its receptacle even as he exposed it.
There followed an exclamation or two, and silence. Then Captain Naylor said “Haw!” and Miss Belmont, with a gasp, turned a mild reproachful gaze upon her sister-in-law. But Mrs. John had not the grace to accept it. She gave a little vexed, covetous laugh, and stepped forward. “Well,” she said to Miss Emma, “you must go without it still, dear, it seems.” Then, coldly, to Hurley: “Give it me, please.”
Now, so far so good; and, though I was enraged with, I could not combat the decision. But truly I was not prepared for the upshot.
Jim, at Mrs. John’s first movement, had recovered possession of the button.
“No, you don’t!” he said quite savagely. “I know all about it, and ’tain’t yourn by rights.”
“Jim, Jim,” cried Miss Belmont in great agitation; “it is hers, indeed; please give it up. You don’t think what you make me suffer!”
But the man was black with a lowering determination.
“ ’Tain’t,” he said. “Keep off, you! I’ve not thrown agen the devil for nothing. It’s goin’ to be Miss Emma’s or nobody’s.”
“Not mine,” cried the poor lady again. “I don’t want it. Not for worlds. I wouldn’t take it now!”
And then Mrs. John Belmont, in one discordant explosion of fury, gave away her case for ever.
“Insolent! Beyond endurance!” she shrieked, and whirled, with a flaming face, upon her cavalier.
“Archibald! why do you stand grinning there? Why don’t you take it from him?”
Thus prompted, Archibald, in great confusion, uttered an inarticulate “Haw!” explained himself in a second and clearer one, and strode threateningly towards the bed. Watching, with glittering eyes, the advance, Jim, at the last moment, whipped the button into his mouth and swallowed it!
* * * * *
The case, as a pathological no less than as a criminological curiosity, was unique. I will state a few particulars. The button lodged in the pancreas, in which it was presently detected, comfortably ensconced, by means of the Röntgen rays. And it is a fact that, from the moment it settled there—never apparently (I use the emphasis with a full sense of my responsibility) to be evicted—Mr. Hurley began to recover, and from recovering to thrive—on anything. Croton-oil—I give only one instance—was a very cream of nourishment to him. Galvanic batteries but shook him into the laughter which makes fat, but without stirring the button. It was ridiculous to suggest an operation, though the point was long considered. But in the meanwhile the button had continued piling up over itself such impenetrable defences of adipose tissue that its very locality had become conjectural. The question was dropped, only to give rise to another. How could one any longer detain this luxuriant man in hospital as an invalid? He was removed, therefore, beaming, to the police court; received, for some inexplicable reason, a nominal sentence, dating from the time of his arrest (everything, in fact, was henceforward to prosper with him), and trundled himself out into the world, where he disappeared. I have seen him occasionally since at years-long intervals. He grows ever more sleek and portly, till the shadows of the three dead Belmonts together would not suffice to make him a pair of breeches. He has a colossal fortune; he is respectable, and, of course, respected—a genial monster of benevolence; and he never fails to remind me, when we meet, of the time when I could pronounce his life not worth a button.
I have, can only have, one theory. The button, after many cross adventures, “got home” at last—fatally for Mrs. John Belmont, who fell into a vicious decline upon its loss, and, tenderly nursed by her sister-in-law, departed this sphere in an uncertain year of her life. And, unless the button itself comes to dissolve, Jim, I fear, is immortal.