‘Shall I venture, sir?’ asked Mr. Hornett, more moved than ever, and coughing to clear a little huskiness in the throat. ‘Shall I venture, sir, to look in on Mr. Phil in the morning?’
‘Yes, go, James,’ said Bommaney, sobbing outright by this time. ‘Perhaps—perhaps he may believe me.’
V
When young Mr. Barter took time to think about things, he began, for more reasons than one, to be sorry. It is necessary for the due development of this history to go back a little, and to take up Mr. Barter on the day following the commission of his crime. The young man felt that he was unable to afford candour, and discreetly avoided the naming of his own action. Eight thousand pounds is a sum which most people would find tempting. Young Mr. Barter would never have found it tempting in the criminal way (though, if he had given his mind to the consideration, he could at any time have seen how enviable its unencumbered possessor might be) if he had not at the moment felt himself under considerable pressure. Mr. Barter’s fleshy and well-formed fingers were somewhat too familiar with the feel of cards. These fingers of his were peculiarly dexterous to look at, and had even an unnecessary braggadocio air of dexterity when he was engaged in his favourite occupation. Experienced people watched his shuffling and dealing with great care. In Mr. Barter’s frank and engaging countenance, and in that ready smile in which the faultless teeth shone so conspicuously, there was no hint of danger to the most unwary. Even the wariest, listening to his genial mellow laughter, and seeing the jolly shoulders shake with mirth, were inclined to think him a loyal honest-hearted fellow. His loud swagger, his frank rollicking gait, his hail-good-fellow-well-met shake of the hand, the other hand clapped upon the shoulder, the noisy greeting, and that unfailing smile, not merely disarmed suspicion, but made the mere fancy of it impossibly absurd. But young Mr. Barter had accustomed himself to associate with people whose experiences had forced them to be observant, and to these the dexterous caressing fingers with which he manipulated all instruments employed in games of chance seemed to justify a fairly constant watchfulness. The fingers handled the cards as if they loved them, as if they had been accustomed to them from the cradle. The tips turned back a good deal, and the nails hooked a little forward. There were little bulbs of tact at every tip, the hands were made for a gambler, and could by no possibility have belonged to anybody else.
The chief ground for the young man’s sorrow may be very easily and briefly stated. The packet which the unfortunate cruelly-tempted Bommaney had let fall in his half-drunken abstraction on the floor of young Mr. Barter’s private room was made up exclusively, as we know already, of notes for one hundred pounds.
Now Bank of England notes for one hundred pounds, though valuable, and easily enough employed in all civilised countries when honestly come by, are only to be got rid of when dishonestly acquired at great risk and loss. A note for a mere five pounds may pass through scores of hands before being stopped at the bank. Tens, so the experienced in such matters will tell you, are a little difficult. Twenties are inquired into rather carefully. Fifties are positively dangerous to handle in this way. Hundreds are, except after great lapse of time, almost impossible; and as for a thousand, a man might almost as well steal a white elephant as a bank-note of that value, except that it will cost him nothing for keep, unless you count the tremor of soul and nerve, which is surely worth something, in which a man criminally possessed of another’s property is almost certain to live.
Mr. Barter, then, had eight thousand pounds in ready money, was liable, if discovered, to penal servitude, and was unable to touch a farthing of his ill-got gains. There are many men in the world, the world’s experience proves it hourly, who set so small a price upon their self-respect, that they will sell it for a shilling, for a drink, for a word. But there is hardly any man so lost to the natural human desire for self-approval that he will actually give away his self-respect for nothing. Now this absurd transaction young Mr. Barter, when he took time to think about things, appeared to himself to have made.
He was not, and never had been, a great reader; he gave up his mind to pursuits which he found more attractive than the tranquil fields and lanes of literature. Yet he remembered, in a dim sort of way, either that he had read somewhere in his schoolboy days, or that a fanciful old nurse had told him, a story of a person somewhere, who, being possessed of a great chest of money, went one day to look at it, and found that his hard cash had changed to withered leaves. Precisely such a transformation had overtaken that eight thousand pounds, at the moment when it had fallen from the hands of a man who might have made an honest use of it. The fable was, and was not, true, so far as he remembered, and his fancy dwelt curiously about the history. There was no possibility of turning back the withered leaves to gold, and making them jingle and glitter again as only one’s own ready money can jingle and glitter. But, useless as these crisp and rustling leaves of paper were to him, they held still all their old potentialities, and in the hands of honest men or courageous rascals each leaf might still transmute itself into a hundred golden emblems of sovereignty and power. He was neither that honest man nor that courageous rascal, and the money grew to be a sort of devilish tantalising fetish to him. Before he had owned it a fortnight, he had felt a hundred times he could have burned it out of the exasperation of mere spite against it.
He heard, of course, of Bommaney’s flight, and of the failure of the old-established business house. People talked about these things a good deal for a time, and he himself listened to and took part in many speculations as to Bommaney’s whereabouts, and the means he would take to get rid of the notes and make them available for his own purposes. He found it at first a little trying to the nerves. There was nothing, since Bommaney had accepted his own disgrace and run away, to connect young Mr. Barter with the lost eight thousand pounds, yet it took much courage, and a considerable amount of inward spurring, to bring himself to talk about the business. When a man carries a secret of a quite harmless nature, it happens often, as almost everybody knows, that casual words and quite innocent glances startle him with hints of understanding and participation. What is it when the detection of the secret involves open shame and penal servitude? Can a man of genuine courage be a thief? Is not courage after all at the very bottom of all manly honour, of all sound honesty, all true self-respect? How shall a thief be other than a lurking cur, whose whole soul, such as it is, is bent to a mean suspicion that he is suspected, a continuous terror-stricken watchfulness, a sleeping and waking dread of an awful hand-clap on the shoulder? There are constitutional differences in thieves, no doubt, as there are in other people, but the key-note of the dishonest man’s whole thought is fear. When, after a day or two, young Mr. Barter had accustomed himself to speak of Bommaney and the lost eight thousand, and had often spoken of them, he began to look out for suggestions that might be useful to himselt He even led the way at times, and speaking to solicitors and barristers of extensive criminal experience, he asked often, for example, how could a scoundrel get rid of such a clumsy handful? Why didn’t the fool cash the notes, he would ask contemptuously, before he left town, and before he was suspected? Everybody knew of course that the notes had not been presented, and their numbers were advertised in all the daily papers. Now what could a fellow do who had them, by Jingo? What could he do? There was no way open, so far as young Mr. Barter could see, and he was wonderfully engaging and innocent of the world’s wickeder ways as he talked thus with the ablest of his fellow professionals.