“My dear chap! Oh, my dear chap!” Mr. Fortune was startled into sympathy.
“I say Fortune—for God’s sake——” Charlecote gasped.
“Quite. Quite,” said Mr. Fortune, linked arms with him, and marched him off.
When Reggie Fortune ambled through his four years at Oxford, Geoffrey Charlecote was one of the great men of his college, a cricket blue, socially magnificent, and even suspected of brains. The Charlecote family dated from the Victorian age. When the building of railways began, Geoffrey’s grandfather was a navvy. He became a contractor, made half a million, and died. Shares of his practical ability, his originality, his driving power, and his disdain for the ten commandments (he was a mean old sinner) were inherited in different proportions by his three descendants. Stephenson Charlecote, his son, had one child, Geoffrey, and was also the guardian of an orphan nephew, Herbert. Stephenson Charlecote was a capable man of business. In his hands the family wealth increased. His only ambition was that the family should get on in the world. So it was Eton and Oxford for Geoffrey, Harrow and Cambridge for his cousin Herbert. Herbert emerged elegant and ordinary. In spite of Eton and Oxford, Geoffrey disturbed his father by showing signs of originality. He was bored by the big house in Mayfair, he would not bother himself with society, he scoffed at going into Parliament. This freakish obstinacy roused the hereditary temper in Stephenson Charlecote, who was the more angry with his son because his nephew Herbert obeyed him in all things, and was successful in the most pompous drawing-rooms. The breaking-point came when Geoffrey discovered that he wanted to go abroad and be a sculptor. Stephenson Charlecote raged and decreed that he should not. And Geoffrey went.
All this Reggie Fortune, who never forgot anything when he wanted it, knew at the back of his mind. The rest Geoffrey told him as his car took them back to London.
“My God, Fortune, it’s ghastly! I found him lying dead in the street outside my place. I stepped in his blood. The old guv’nor!”
“Quite. Quite,” said Reggie Fortune. “Now begin at the beginning.”
“What is the beginning?”
“Well, you quarrelled, didn’t you?”
“He quarrelled. Oh, that sounds blackguardly. I dare say it was my fault. Yes, we had a big row. Damn it, man, what do you mean? Do you think I—— Oh, I say, this is loathsome. I believe that’s what the police think. The old guv’nor!”