"I've told you everything, Mr. Pollexfen. What do you think of our chance of finding him again within the year that is stipulated?"
The lawyer shrugged his shoulders. "Very slight indeed, I fear, even if the advertisement reaches his eye. You say he had over two hundred pounds in a bank at his disposal, and chose to run after cabs. Now, to me, that looks very like hallucination. No. If I was the reversionary legatee, I'd feel pretty comfortable."
I said I had told him everything, but, as a matter of fact, I had not told him what I had every reason to believe I knew, and that is, the source whence the money came which Ingram had been loath to touch. I wonder, if I had, whether he would have changed his estimate of my poor quixotic friend. Codes of honor must seem shadowy things to a man who has been instructing counsel for thirty years.
VII
THE WAITING-ROOM
And, after all, it happened so simply in the end. A brief note, lying on my table, when I got back, with an address at the top that was strange to me, asking me to call "when convenient, for a chat." Imagine if I found it convenient. Is there in all the world a cleaner, purer joy than to be the bearer of such tidings as mine?
The house proved to be one of some shabby mouldering little stucco "gardens" near Chalk Farm. It suggested seediness rather than great poverty, and, with my abominable journalist's flair for the dramatic, I was almost sorry the contrast was not to be a more startling one. Perhaps I hardly realized how much misery a decorous exterior can conceal in modern London, until an old woman, bent, deaf and short-sighted almost to blindness, opened the door. The hall was more than bare; it was naked. Not a picture on the walls, not a strip of oilcloth on the boards. On the bottom stair a cheap glass lamp without a shade had been set down and filled the passage with wavering, smoky shadows. The air was penetrated with the raw smell of paraffin, the "triple bouquet" of poverty.
If the nakedness had repelled in the hall, its persistence in the room to which I was let find my way was shocking. No curtains nor blinds at the window; a low truckle bed, rather felt than seen in the shadow at one side; upon the uncarpeted floor a great, crooked parallelogram of moonlight. As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I made out further a chair by the bedside, with a flat candlestick and a paper-covered book turned face downward, and a big china wash-basin close to the bedside. I don't know what made me look more curiously at this than at anything else, and shudder when I saw how dark its contents were. Next moment I had felt for his hand and grasped it in mine, Thank God! it was not cold and heavy as I had half dreaded. Life—feverish, parched, burning life, it is true, but still life, was in its contact.
He must have been sleeping, and it is eloquent of his utter abandonment that, before I uttered a word, he guessed who had awakened him.
"Clear away that candle and sit down," he said, in a drowsy, muffled voice. "No! don't light it please."