CHAPTER XII.
Imagine a man paying forty thousand pounds into the Bank of England, and learning to-morrow that that stupendous financial concern had stopped payment! Imagine Lady Clara Vere de Vere discovering her wonderful parure, with its European renown, to be paste! Imagine the feelings of Thomas Carlyle when the carelessness of John Stuart Mill destroyed the labour of years! Imagine poor Euclid’s state of mind when his wife burnt his books! In short, imagine, each of you, the greatest calamity you can think of, and you will have some faint notion of the feelings of the quartet in Mr Carver’s office at Mr Bates’s disconcerting discovery.
For a few minutes, silence reigned supreme, and then Edgar commenced to whistle. It was not a particularly cheerful air, but it sufficed to arouse the others from their stupefaction.
‘If I had not been an infatuated old idiot,’ said Mr Carver, hurling the unfortunate volume of romance with unnecessary violence across the room, ‘I should have foreseen this;’ and murmuring something about strait-waistcoats and the thick-headedness of society in general, he lapsed into gloomy silence.
Mr Bates regarded his chief in mild disapproval. Such an ebullition of feeling by no means accorded with his views of professional etiquette; besides, he had a feeling that his discovery had not been treated in a proper and business-like manner. ‘Hem!’ said that gentleman, clearing his throat gently—‘hem! If I may be allowed to make a remark—apologising to you, sir’—Mr Carver nodded with dark meaning—‘and taking upon myself to make a suggestion: might it not be possible that where the money is, a will may be concealed also?’
The party ceased to contemplate space, and a ray of hope quivered on the gloomy horizon for a moment. Mr Carver, however, eyed his clerk with an air of indignation blended with resigned sorrow. ‘I suppose, Bates, every man has moments of incipient insanity,’ he said in accents of the most scathing sarcasm. ‘You, I perceive, are only mortal. I should be sorry to imagine you to have arrived at the worst stage; but I may be allowed, I think, to point out to you one little fact. Do you for one moment suppose that a man who is idiot enough to bury his treasure in this manner, has enough sense remaining to make a will?’ and Mr Carver looked at his subordinate with the air of a man who has made his great point and confounded his adversary.
‘I do not agree with you, sir,’ retorted Bates mildly. ‘A gentleman who has brains enough to carry out such a scheme as this, was not likely to forget a vital part. You are generally sharp enough to see a point like this. What with romances and games of marbles, hem! and such other frivolities, business seems quite forgotten!’
It was curious to note with what eagerness the parties most interested hung upon the clerk’s words.
‘Bates, Bates! I never thought it would come to this,’ returned the pseudo-justice, shaking his head in more sorrow than anger. ‘A man still in the prime of life and to talk like this! Poor fellow, poor fellow!’
‘Well, sir, you may doubt, and of course you have a right to your own opinion; but we shall see.’
‘See, Bates! how can we see?’ exclaimed the lawyer. ‘Is not this treasure buried upon Miss Wakefield’s property, and are we likely to get an order to search that property?—O yes, of course’—returning to the sarcastic mode—‘Miss Wakefield is so gentle, so amiable, so sweet, and unsuspecting!—Bates, I am ashamed of you!’
The imperturbable Bates shrugged his shoulders slightly and resumed his writing. So far as he was concerned, the matter was done with; but he knew the character of his superior sufficiently to know that the words he had said would take root, for, sooth to say, Mr Carver laid considerable weight upon his junior’s acumen, though, between the twain, such an idea was tacitly ignored.
During the above interesting duologue, Mr Slimm had been eyeing the antagonists with a smile of placid amusement. That wily gentleman was rather taken with Bates’s argument. ‘Seems to me,’ he said, ‘the advantage is not all on one side. The honoured mistress of Eastwood, the lady whom our friend’—pointing to Mr Carver—‘has spoken of in such eulogistic terms, is no better off than we are. She has the property where the money is concealed, and, as far as we know now, it belongs to her. Any movement on our side will be sufficient to arouse her suspicions. Providing the money is found, as I have before said, as far as we know, it belongs to her. It is scarcely worth while going to the trouble and expense of unearthing this wealth for her. So far, she has the bulge on us. On the other hand, we know where the money is. She does not, and there we have the bulge on her.’
‘And what is your proposition?’ Mr Carver inquired.
‘Arbitration,’ replied the American. ‘There is only one thing to do, and that is compromise. Even supposing our friends only get half, surely that is better than nothing. It’s the easiest thing in the world. All you have to do is to say to the lady: “Miss Wakefield, Mr Morton left you his money. You cannot find the money. Mrs Seaton knows where it is. The money, we admit, is yours, though in justice it should belong to her. In a word, my dear lady, divide;”’ and Mr Slimm leant back in his chair whistling a little air from Princess Ida, as if the whole thing was settled to the satisfaction of all parties.
Mr Carver looked at him as a connoisseur eyes a bad copy of an old master. ‘Mr Slimm, I presume you have never seen the lady?’
Mr Slimm shook his head.
‘I thought not,’ continued Mr Carver. ‘You have been all over the world, and in the course of your rambles I presume you have seen the Sphinx?—Very good. Now, I do not suppose it ever struck you as a good idea to interview that curiosity, or to sit down before its stony charms with a view to learning its past history and the date of its birth.—No? The idea is too absurd; but I may venture to say, without exceeding the bounds of professional caution, that you are just as likely to get any display of emotion from Miss Wakefield—and indeed, the wonderful stone is much the more pleasant object’——
‘But she is not so very awful, Mr Carver,’ Eleanor interposed.
‘My dear, I know she is not endowed with venomous fangs, though she has the wisdom of the serpent. I am prepared to do anything for you in any shape or form, but I do draw the line at Miss Wakefield. As regards interviewing her upon such a subject, I must respectfully but firmly decline.’
‘Surely you don’t object to such a course being taken?’ Edgar asked eagerly. ‘There is no particular harm in it.’
‘On the contrary, I think it is the right course to adopt; but I do not propose to be the victim,’ said Mr Carver drily. ‘If any one in this select company has some evil to atone for, and wants a peculiarly torturing penance, let him undertake the task.’
Felix looked at Mr Bates; Edgar looked at his wife, and each waited politely and considerately for the others to speak. It is not often one meets such pure disregard of self in this grasping world. However, the task must be done; and as Mr Carver disclaimed it, and Bates had no interest in the affair, moreover, Eleanor not being expected to volunteer, manifestly the work lay before the American, Edgar, or Felix.
The American, like another Curtius, was prepared to fling himself into the gulf. With characteristic and national modesty, he merely waited, willing to yield the van of battle; but the delicacy of the others left him no alternative. He volunteered to go.
‘I am a man of few words,’ he said, ‘and I guess I am about calculated to fill the vacancy. I am alone in the world, and if I fail to return, there will be no dear one to mourn the loss. I have one little favour to ask before I go, and that is, in case the worst happens, to spare me an epitaph. You will think of me sometimes; and when you sit round your winter firesides and the wind is howling in the naked trees’—— Here he waved his hands deprecatingly towards the company, as if praying them to spare his emotions.
Mr Carver’s eyes twinkled at this tirade. ‘Well, that is settled then,’ he said. ‘The sooner you go the better. Shall we say to-morrow?—Very good. The address is 34 Cedar Road, Hampstead.’
‘It is well,’ said the victim to friendship. ‘Before I quit you once and for ever, I should like to break the bread of joviality once more; for the last time, I should like to look upon the wine when it is red. To drop the language of metaphor, I invite you all to lunch with me at the Holborn.’
It was left, then, in Mr Slimm’s hands to consummate what he denominated as ‘working the oracle.’
‘What do you think of my dream, now?’ Eleanor asked her husband as they walked home together.
‘Your “Argosy with golden sails?”’ queried Edgar. ‘Well, I am beginning to think it may come into port after all.’
Like the ‘condemned man’ of the penny-a-liner, Mr Slimm passed a good night, and the thought of the task he had undertaken did not deter him from making a hearty and substantial breakfast. Without so much as a tremor, he ordered a cab, and sped away northwards on his diplomatic errand.
Cedar Road may, without any great stretch of imagination, be termed dingy. It is not the dinginess of the typical London street, but a jaunty kind of griminess, a griminess which knows itself to be grimy, but swaggers with a pretension of spick-and-span cleanliness; a sort of place which makes one think of that cheap gentility which wears gaudy apparel and unclean linen, or no linen at all. I may better explain my meaning by saying that the majority of the houses were black with smoke, and yet, singularly enough, the facings of light stone at the corners had preserved their natural colour, and each house was adorned by a veranda painted a staring green, which stood out in ghastly contrast to the fog-stained fronts. Every house had a little grass plot—called, by a stretch of courtesy, the lawn—fronting it. It was presumedly of grass, because it was vegetation of some kind, but about as much like the genuine article as London milk resembles the original lacteal fluid. In the centre of each ‘lawn’ was an oval flower-bed, tenanted by some hardy annuals, bearing infinitesimal blooms of a neutral tint. Each house was approached by a flight of steps rising from the road, which gentle ascent served to keep the prying gaze of the vulgar from peering too closely into the genteel seclusion of the dining-rooms. Every house was the counterpart of its neighbour, each having the same sad-coloured curtains and wire-blinds on the ground-floor, the same cheap muslins at the drawing-room windows, and the same drawn blinds, surmounted with brass rods, to the bedrooms. A canary likewise hung in a painted cage in every drawing-room window; No. 34 boasting in addition a stagnant-looking aquarium, containing three torpid goldfish in extremely dirty water.
After three peals of the bell, each outrivalling its predecessor in volume, which is not saying much for the bell-metal at No. 34, Mr Slimm was answered. Through the fragile door he had distinctly heard the sounds of revelry within, and acquired the information that some mystic Melissa was ‘tidying,’ and therefore ’Tilda must transform herself for the nonce into the slave of the bell. By the petulant expression on ’Tilda’s face, the errand was not particularly pleasant to her.
In answer to his query, the misanthropic ’Tilda vouchsafed the information that Miss Wakefield was in, adding, that he had better come this way; which siren summons he lost no time in obeying, and was thus introduced into the seclusion of Miss Wakefield’s chamber. Inquiring his name with a snap, and having obtained the desired information, the bewitching ’Tilda disappeared, and apparently appeared to be singing some sort of ditty in a crescendo voice at the foot of the stairs; the fact of the case being that Miss Wakefield was summoned vivâ voce; her part of the conversation being inaudible, and the voice of the charmer being perfectly distinct to the visitor, the song running something after this fashion: ‘Miss Wakefield’—um, um, ‘wanted, mum’—um, um. ‘A man, please’—um, um, um. ‘Rather tall’ (very distinctly)—um. ‘No; he is not a gentleman’—um, um, um.—‘All right, miss.’ And then she reappeared with the information that Miss Wakefield would be down at once.
The space of time mentioned having resolved itself into a quarter of an hour, Mr Slimm was enabled to complete his plan of campaign, not that he anticipated any resistance—in which deduction he was decidedly wrong—but because he thought it best to be quite prepared with his story, and in a position to receive the enemy in good and compact order. By the time he had done this, and taken a mental inventory of all the furniture in the room—not a violent effort of memory—the door opened, and Miss Wakefield entered.