“It’s more so from mine!” cried Mr. Upton, in fresh alarm and indignation. “You think about your school. I think about my wife and boy; it might kill her to hear about this before he’s found. But if I don’t go to the police, who am I to go to?” The head master leant back in his chair, and joined his finger-tips judicially.
“There was a man we had down here to investigate an extraordinary case of dishonesty, in which I was actually threatened with legal proceedings on behalf of a certain boy. But this man Thrush came down and solved the mystery within twenty-four hours, and saved the school a public scandal.”
“He may save you another,” said Mr. Upton, “if he can find my boy. What did you say the name was?”
“Thrush—Eugene Thrush—quite a remarkable man, and, I think, a gentleman,” said the head master impressively. Further particulars, including an address in Glasshouse Street, were readily supplied from an advertisement in that day’s Times, in which Mr. Thrush was described as an “inquiry agent,” capable alike of “delicate investigations” and “confidential negotiations.”
That was the very man for Mr. Upton, as he himself agreed. And he departed both on speaking terms with Mr. Spearman, who said a final word for his own behaviour in the matter, and grimly at one with the head master on the importance of keeping it out of the papers.
CHAPTER IX.
MR. EUGENE THRUSH
The remarkable Mr. Thrush was a duly qualified solicitor, who had never been the man for that orderly and circumscribed profession. The tide of events which had turned his talents into their present channel, was known to but few of his many boon companions, and much nonsense was talked about him and his first career. It was not the case (as anybody might have ascertained) that he had been struck off the rolls in connection with the first great scandal in which he was professionally concerned. Nor was there much more truth in the report that he drank, in the ordinary interpretation of the term.
It is true, however, that Mr. Thrush had a tall tumbler on his dressing-table, to help him shave for the evening of that fateful Friday. He was dressing for an early dinner before a first night. His dressing-room, in which he also slept in Spartan simplicity, was the original powder-closet of the panelled library out of which it led. There was a third room in which his man Mullins prepared breakfast and spent the day. But the whole was a glorified garret, at the top of such stairs as might have sent a nervous client back for an escort.
Mullins, with the expression of an undertaker’s mute (a calling he had followed in his day), was laying out his master’s clothes as mournfully as though his master were in them, instead of chatting genially as he shaved.
“I’m sorry to have missed your evidence, Mullins, but if we go into this case it’s no use letting the police smell the competitive rat too soon. Inquests are not in my line, and they’d have wondered what the devil I was doing there, especially as you refrained from saying you were in my service.”