‘Have you heard of any of them coming into circulation?’ asked Bommaney.
‘I haven’t been in the way to hear of anything, sir,’ the clerk answered mournfully, ‘but,’ with a sidelong look at his old employer, ‘if I could only get to look a bit respectable, I could make inquiries in an hour. I have no doubt I could find out, sir.’
‘My boy believes I’m guilty, like the rest,’ said the old man, moaning and shivering and coughing again. The passion of his protest and the warmth of heart which Hornett’s returning confidence had taught him had all died away, and he was his bankrupt, disgraced, and broken self again, old and maudlin, and strickenly conscious of his miseries.
‘Phil might help me,’ he said shakily. ‘He ‘could, but he won’t. He’s got plenty of money. If I’d been a rogue, James Hornett,’ and there he flashed up again, ever so little, ‘I could have robbed my own flesh and blood with safety. A rogue would have done it. I was his sole trustee, and I could have had nine thousand by a stroke of the pen at any minute.’
‘Mr. Phil, sir,’ said Hornett ‘Mr. Phil hasn’t got much money left’
‘Why not?’ the old man asked, staring round at him with his watery eyes.
‘He paid Mr. Brown the eight thousand in full, sir, and divided the rest, as far as it would go, amongst the poorest of the creditors.’
Bommaney turned back towards the fire, and drooped there. He seemed very impassive under this intelligence, but he was deeply moved by it all the same. The sense of his son’s high feeling of honour gave him a keen throb of pride, and then he thought bitterly that his own ill-luck pursued his offspring.
The loss was double. It had disgraced and ruined him, and had robbed his son of his inheritance.
‘Hornett,’ he said, ‘James Hornett.’