“They have been after me every few days to agree to leave New York. I did not know what for, but I knew Fenwick was up to some game. He always was up to some game, even when we were young fellows together.
“Now he is rich, and he might have found me better lodgings and something to do. But after I came back from the South and was unfit to do clerical work because of my eyes, he only threw me a dollar now and then—like throwing a bone to a starving dog.”
That explained how Helen had chanced to see the old man at Fenwick Grimes’s door on the occasion of her visit to her father’s old partner. And later, in the presence of Dudley Stone—who was almost as eager as Helen herself—the old man related the facts that served to explain the whole mystery surrounding the trouble that had darkened Prince Morrell’s life for so long.
Briefly, Allen Chesterton and Fenwick Grimes had grown up together in the same town, as boys had come to New York, and had kept in touch with each other for years. Neither had married and for years they had roomed together.
But Chesterton was a plodding bookkeeper and would never be anything else. Grimes was mad for money, but he was always complaining that he never had a chance.
His chance came through Willets Starkweather, when the latter’s brother-in-law was looking for a working partner—a man right in Grimes’s line, and who was a good salesman. Grimes got into the firm on very limited capital, yet he was a trusted member and Prince Morrell depended on his judgment in most things.
Allen Chesterton had been brought into the firm’s office to keep the books through Grimes’s influence, of course. By and by it seemed to Chesterton that his old comrade was running pretty close to the wind. The bookkeeper feared that he might be involved in some dubious enterprise.
There was flung in Chesterton’s way (perhaps that was by the influence of Grimes, too) a chance to go to New Orleans to be bookkeeper in a shipping firm. He could get passage upon a vessel belonging to the firm.
He had this to decide between the time of leaving the office one afternoon and early the next morning. He took the place and bundled his things aboard, leaving a letter for Fenwick Grimes. That letter, it is needless to say, Grimes never made public. And by the time the slow craft Chesterton was on reached her destination, the firm of Grimes & Morrell had gone to smash, Morrell was a fugitive, and the papers had ceased to talk about the matter.
The true explanation of the mystery was now plain. Chesterton said that it was not himself, but Grimes, who had been successful as an amateur actor. Grimes had often disguised himself so well as different people that he might have made something by the art in a “protean turn” on the vaudeville stage.