I saw him one night loafing about outside a sporting club, evidently hard up. A year later I saw him in fine feather and quite the "sporting gent.," as he would have said, at Nice races, and that night I met him again in evening dress at the roulette tables at Monte Carlo. He was living luxuriously at one of the best hotels. I met him a year or two later in a railway carriage coming back from Newmarket after the Cambridgeshire, and I gathered from his conversation with another passenger that he was going to try Egypt for his winter trip.
The "mystery of the money spent" in this case was not to be accounted for by any sudden stroke of luck on the Turf. The man had a good, solid income which enabled him to live at ease all the year round. His change of fortune dated from the day he was put on to try and recover a pocket-book which had been stolen from the rooms of an exceedingly wealthy young man, well known in sporting circles.
The pocket-book was recovered, with the bank-notes which it had contained missing, but a certain letter which the owner had placed in it still there. The letter must have been a very important one. The bargain struck for its restoration started the restorer on the road to fortune.
A professional burglar—a man who had been a skilled mechanic, earning good wages, in early life, but had taken to evil ways—broke into a West End mansion in the small hours. It happened that the tenant of the mansion had been making a very late night of it with some friends, and, entering his house with his latchkey at 4 a.m., he came upon the burglar in the dining-room.
The next morning the burglar went to the tenement house in which he was living with his wife, flung a handful of gold into her lap, told her to go and buy herself some good clothes while he went and got himself decently rigged out. She was to meet him in the afternoon at a given place. The husband and wife met, well dressed, and set out to look for a villa residence in the suburbs. They took a nice house, furnished it elegantly, if somewhat showily, engaged servants, and settled down into easy suburban well-to-do-ness. They had a horse and trap, and were looked upon by their neighbours as retired tradespeople, who had made their money and were living on a well-earned competency.
The ex-burglar and his wife enjoyed themselves. They had an occasional week at Brighton, or Margate, or Yarmouth; and in the summer they went away for a month or six weeks.
How did their change of fortune come? How did a burglar who was so badly off that he lived with his wife in one room in a tenement house suddenly develop into a well-to-do retired tradesman with plenty of money to spend?
The secret of the sudden access of wealth lay in the chance meeting of the burglar and the burgled in that West End mansion.
The tenant was a man of fifty, who had recently returned with a large fortune from South Africa. When he found a burglar on his premises he seized him by the throat. But as the light fell upon his assailant the burglar uttered a cry, not of terror, but of astonishment.
"Jack!" he exclaimed.