And, perhaps because his aspirations were so singular in a very ordinary world, taken with the fact that his temperament was even a curiously calm and virginal one, the Fates, who are a rather spinstery and spiteful triplet on the whole, were moved to do the unexpected thing by him—and in a very handsome and appropriate manner—by causing Messrs Plover, Stone and Company, the respectable solicitors, to insert an advertisement in the Agony Column of that very Daily Post, inviting the next-of-kin of the late Mr Lemuel Lamb to call upon them and hear of something considerably to his advantage.
Gilead read the advertisement in due course, and considered it with characteristic sobriety and an even pulse. “If,” he thought, “there is anything out of the common in this, I shall not forget my pledge to the Quest.”
He finished his chop placidly, recalling some traits of the departed Lemuel, who, he could little doubt (though with a philosophic reservation for contingencies) had been his sole surviving relative on the mother’s side. He remembered, with a certain easy gratification, how this disregarded uncle of his, from being a scapegrace and rather impossible waster, had been reported—from Australia, whither he had withdrawn—a reformed character of late years, which he had devoted to the amassing of a considerable fortune made out of stock—but whether soup or sheep Gilead did not know. Nor did he care in the least. All money was dirty stuff in the making. The moral of acquisition was in the cleansing of the hands that followed.
He brushed a crumb or two from his waistcoat, paid his bill, and returned to Whitehall to request a short leave of absence. None might have guessed from his exterior the issues which turned upon that petition.
It is not my purpose to recount the details of the interview which followed, or the processes by which identification was secured, and a claim substantiated. Suffice it to say that ‘Loquacious Lemuel,’ as he was known in the land of his adoption, had turned his natural predatory instincts to phenomenal profit during the few years that opportunity had allotted him for their full play, and had then, in a mood of magnificent atonement, bequeathed the whole of his gigantic fortune to the credulous brother-in-law in England whom he had once been instrumental in impoverishing, and whose sole heir Gilead remained by will. The young man—to jump formalities, and eschew all bewildering calculations of figures—entered upon his new world rich, in the stereotyped phrase, beyond the dreams of avarice—as if avarice ever had any dreams worth mentioning but of orts and candle-ends. But he faced his position with a clear brain, and a full appreciation of the ten thousand rapacities and importunities it would invite. As to that his plans were quite decided. He would employ a confidential secretary, and some subordinate agents and amanuenses, and to them entrust the active business of philanthropy, while he himself would stand in the background (the unconfessed one, the “nominis umbra,” like Junius) to direct operations, and give his personal attention to such cases as seemed to offer scope for the romantic quest.
He advertised, somewhat in the following terms: “Private Secretary wanted by a gentleman of means. Good salary offered to one willing to devote himself wholly to the interests of his employer. Address, in the first instance—” here followed the number of a house in Victoria Street, a suite of rooms in which Gilead had already furnished and turned into a central bureau for his operations. The result gave him food for thought. He received seven hundred and forty-nine replies, one hundred and sixty-eight of which were delivered on the date of the advertisement. He recognized at once his single incapacity for dealing with that vast stack of correspondence, and put on his hat and went to see Mr Plover in Arundel Street.
Mr Plover’s appearance and expression needed, perhaps, the assurance of his firm’s time-honoured reputation to make them convincing. He was a slack-lipped, beautifully white-whiskered old gentleman, wearing gold-rimmed pince-nez, which, being near the tip of his nose, were wont occasionally to topple over and get in the way of his speech. One had to put some force upon oneself to read legal profundity in features which seemed to betray even an excess of amiable vacuity. But one knew that the antiquity of the firm and its weighty connexions stood behind, and so one resigned oneself, like Longfellow’s good Christian, to a pious confidence in the things which “are not what they seem.”
Mr Plover applied to the difficulties of this immensely important new client that Napoleonic method which resolves all complexities by annihilation.
“Seven hundred and forty-nine!” said he. “Dear, dear! Now, take my advice, and make a bonfire of the lot, and start afresh.”
“Would that be fair?” said Gilead.