“What do you mean—Mr. Ilam been taken?” Carpentaria demanded.
“He’s been carried off—he carried the money off—he was forced to, sir. Revolver, sir. Can’t you come, sir?”
“Can I come? Ye gods! Man, do you know what a concert is? Can I come? Of course I can’t come!”
“Mr. Ilam may be dead, sir.”
“We shall have leisure to bury him after the concert,” said Carpentaria. “Go away. Go and consult Lapping, head of the police department. Or, rather, don’t. You’ll upset the audience making your way out. Sit down. Sit right down there, and don’t move. We’re going to play my new arrangement of the ‘Glory Song’ with variations. You’ll see it will bring the house down. It will be something you’ll remember as long as you live.”
“But, sir,” pleaded Mr. Gloucester pathetically.
“Sit down—and listen,” Carpentaria repeated sternly.
He returned to the centre of his men. He rapped the magic wand on his desk, and the next moment the band had burst deliriously into the now famous orchestral arrangement of the “Glory Song.” The audience was thrilled by the waves of sound that emanated from the instruments, especially when the variations began. So the entertainment continued, while Mr. Gloucester, consuming his middle-aged impatience as best he could, ruminated upon the strange caprices of employers. He had been an employé all his life; he had never commanded; and his conclusion, at the age of fifty odd, was to the effect that the nature of employers is incomprehensible, and that you never know what they will do next.
“Excuse me, sir.” He timidly touched Carpentaria when the concert was over.
Carpentaria, it appeared, in the rush and fever of the music, had forgotten all about him, and was on the point of leaving the court deafened by applause.