“This—this is very terrible, my boy,” he said. “I ought to have been sooner. But—but—must you take that side?”
“I have promised, father. I would give anything to have been under the same promise to you. But I cannot, I will not stand up and accuse Cyril Mallow. Strive how I would, I should fight my hardest to get a verdict against him, and I could not afterwards bear the thought. I will get off taking this brief. Stay here while I go out.”
He took his hat, and was driven to his solicitors, where he had an interview with Mr Swift, and proposed that that gentleman should retire the brief from his hands.
Mr Swift smiled, and shook his head.
“No, Mr Ross,” he said; “I have given you your price, and after a chat with my partner, he agreed that I had done right. The matter is settled, sir! I could not hear of such a thing.”
Luke was in no mood to argue with him then, but went back to his chambers, dined with his father, and then sat up half the night studying the brief, not with the idea of being for the prosecution, but so as to know how Cyril Mallow stood.
It was a long brief, and terrible in its array of charges against Sage’s husband. As he read on, Luke found that the executors of Cyril’s partner, the late Mr Walker, were determined upon punishing him who had wrought his ruin. The wine business had been a good and very lucrative one until Mr Walker had been tempted into taking a partner, whose capital had not been needed, the object really being to find a junior who would relieve the senior from the greater part of the anxiety and work.
Cyril then had been received into the partnership, and a great deal of the management had after a short time been left to him, a position of which he took advantage to gamble upon the Stock Exchange with the large sums of money passing through their hands, with just such success as might have been expected, and the discovery that Cyril had involved the firm in bankruptcy broke Mr Walker’s heart, the old man dying within a week of the schedule being filed.
Worse was behind: the executors charged Cyril with having forged his partner’s name to bills, whereon he had raised money, signing not merely the name of the firm, but his own and his partner’s name, upon the strength of which money had been advanced by two bill discounters, both of whom were eager to have him punished.
In short, the more Luke Ross studied, the more he found that the black roll of iniquity was unfolding itself, so that at last he threw down the brief, heartsick with disgust and misery, feeling as he did that if half, nay, a tithe of that which was charged against Cyril were true, no matter who conducted prosecution or defence, the jury was certain to convict him of downright forgery and swindling, and seven or ten years’ penal servitude would be his sentence.