Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

‘You want my word for that only?’

‘That will be enough, sir.’

‘Very well; he shall be here.’

‘He shall be here,’ said Wilder, ‘and the idiot who brought him here shall have a lesson.’

‘You take my tip, sir,’ said the officer. ‘You was pretty fairly full, and you was very noisy, and you cracked on pretty awful. Talk of eloquence,’ said the officer, interrupting himself to turn to Paul. ‘I’ve heard a thing or two in my time—it comes here, you know, sir, in the way of business—but I’ve never met anybody as could hold a candle to this gentleman.’

Wilder smiled, and pulled up a dirty apology for a collar with an air of self-applause.

‘But what I want to advise is this, sir,’ said the officer genially: ‘Say nothing, and it’s five bob and costs, and there’s an end of it; make a song about it, and it’s forty shillings or a month, and it gets into all the papers. For this is a shop, sir, where the more you say the more you pay. And that’s the truth about justice in a general way throughout the land, and so you’ll find, sir, if you’ll take the trouble to look into it. The more you say the more you pay. That’s the fruit of thirty years’ experience, sir, and you’ll find it pretty sound Say nothing, and a little thing blows over. Make a talk about it, and it lasts, as you might say, for ever. The more you say, the more you pay.’

Paul was not greatly inclined to idle superstition as a general thing, but the thrice-repeated saying stuck to him. The fancy came into his mind that he had been aroused thus oddly in the middle of the night on purpose that he might hear it, and have it dinned into his mind by force of repetition. There was no reason under heaven why he should have attended the insolent call of Mr. Wilder, and he had not even been conscious of a kindly impulse towards the man. There was a sort of providential finger laid upon his own sense here. Of course, he denied the belief, but it was active with him none the less. It was so active that he resigned all the preparations he had contemplated for his own defence, and absented himself from London.

During his absence the case of Armstrong against Armstrong was heard in the Divorce Court. A Boanerges of a Queen’s Counsel was entrusted with Annette’s side of it. He made a speech, and that speech was reported in a hundred journals. Had it been true, the unlucky Paul would have been a comrade for the devil, but there was no defence, and it passed as true. Paul read the speech, and came tearing back express to London in a tumult of rage and resentment. He was a day behind the fair, and could do nothing. The world seemed to ring of him, and he had abandoned all means of redress. He was publicly shunned, and shunned for ever.

So fruitful may be the smallest accident of life that this chance episode with the drunken Wilder and the foolish resolve to which it led seemed to have darkened Paul’s skies for good and all. He might have beaten Boanerges on every point save one, and have come out of the fight with but one wound in place of a hundred, and that very far from fatal Now he felt stabbed to death, and seemed to bleed at every pore.