"We know nothing about it, sir: nothing beyond what he conveyed in a letter to our Vice-Chairman. In fact, sir, during the last year or so of his life, when Mr. Farrell took his strange fancy for foreign parts, it seemed to us—well, it seemed to us that, in his strange condition of mind, anything might happen. To this day, sir, we haven't what you might call any certitude of his demise. It is not, up to this moment, legally proven—as they say. Our last letter from him was dated from far up the coast—from a place called San Ramon, which I understand to be in Peru. In it he announced that he was married again, and to a lady (as we gathered) of Peruvian descent. He added that he had never, previously to the time of writing or thereabouts, known complete happiness."
Jimmy brought back this information, having, on top of it, acquired a bedroom suite of painted deal. "And there," said he, "the matter must rest. Foe's gone, and Farrell's gone. Both decent, in their way; and both, but for foolish temper, alive now and hearty."
So it seemed to be, and the book to be closed. I mourned for Jack, yet not as I should have mourned for him a year or two before. Jimmy married and left me, and soon after I moved from our old quarters in the Temple to my present rooms in Jermyn Street.
Four years passed: and then, one fine morning, my door opened, and John Foe called me by name.
"Hallo, Roddy! How goes it?"
I jumped up, in a pretty bad scare. It was the voice that did it: for, my door making an angle with the window, and the day being sunny, he stood there against a strong light—sort of silhouette effect, as you might put it. And there was a something about him, thus gloomed—but we'll talk of that by and by. The voice was Jack Foe's, and none other.
"It's all right," he went on easily. "Pull yourself together. … It is the Ancient Mariner come home, but you needn't imitate the Pilot and fall down in a fit.… Where's the Pilot's Boy, by the way—young Jimmy Collingwood? You still keep Jephson, I see. … I happened on Jephson at your street-door, just returned from posting a letter. Jephson performed the holy Hermit very creditably: he raised his eyes and almost sat down on the doorstep and prayed where he did sit. 'Doctor Foe!' said Jephson. 'Good Lord, send may I never—!'—which amounts to a prayer, eh?… He let me in with his latchkey, and I told him I'd run up unannounced.… Well?"
He came forward. In the old days Jack and I never shook hands; nor did we now. He set down hat, gloves, and umbrella carelessly on my knee-hole table and dropped into a chair with a long-drawn sigh. "Reminds one—eh?—of the famous stage-direction in The Rovers— Several soldiers cross the stage wearily, as if returning from the Thirty Years' War.… Well? What are you still staring at? … Oh, I perceive! It's my clothes.… Yes; I should inform you that they are expensive, and the nearest compromise a Valparaiso tailor and I could reach in realising our several ideas of a Harley Street doctor. I am going to open a practice in that neighbourhood, and thought I would lose no time. The hat and umbrella over there are all right, if you'll give yourself the trouble to examine them. I bought them on the way along."
He was right, in a way, about his clothes. (I believe I have already mentioned that Jack had always dressed himself carefully and in good form.) His frock-coat had a fullness of skirt, and his trousers a bluish aggressive tint, that I couldn't pass for metropolitan. His boots were worse—of some wrong sort of patent leather. But they ought not to have altered the man as I felt that he was altered. … Yes, cheapened and coarsened, in some indefinable way. His hair had thinned and showed a bald patch: not a large patch: still, there it was. His shape had been rather noticeably slim. I won't say that it had grown pursy, but it had run to seed somehow. Least of all I liked the change in his eyes, which bulged somewhat, showing an unhealthy white glitter. I set down this glitter as due to long weeks at sea: but the explanation couldn't quite satisfy me. When a lost friend returns as it were from the grave—from shipwreck, at any rate, and uncharted travel—you look to find him gaunt, brown, leathery, hollow of cheek and eye, eh? Foe's appearance didn't answer to this conception… not one little bit.
"Then you didn't sail in the Eurotas, after all?" said I, finding speech. "We saw your name on the list."