As he mapped out his consequent activity for the coming day, he heard the postman opening the gate in front of his villa, and went out to intercept the daily paper which he delivered.
Mr. Clutterbuck tore its cover thoughtlessly enough in the expectation of discovering some minor successes or perhaps an unfortunate but necessary surrender of men and guns, when a leaded paragraph in large type and at the very head of the first column, struck him almost as with a blow. With a dramatic suddenness that none save a very few in the highest financial world could have expected, negotiations for peace had opened and the enemy had laid down their arms.
Mr. Clutterbuck sat down upon the steps of his house, oblivious of the giggling maid who was washing the stone behind him, and gazed blankly at the two Wellingtonias and the Japanese arbutus which dignified his patch of lawn. He left the paper lying where it was, and moved miserably into the house.
During the meal Mrs. Clutterbuck made no more allusion to his business than was her wont, and was especially careful to say nothing in regard to the deceased friend, whose relations with her husband she knew had latterly been more than those of an ordinary acquaintance. She did, however, permit herself to suggest that there must be something extraordinary in the fact that the blinds in Mr. Boyle's house were now lifted, that there had been no orders for a funeral, and that her own investigations among her neighbours made it more than probable that no such ceremony would be needed.
The candid character of her husband was slow to seize the significance of this last item, but when in the course of the forenoon a police inspector, accompanied by a less exalted member of the force, respectfully desired an interview with him, Mr. Clutterbuck could not but experience such emotions as men do who find themselves engulfed in darkness by a sudden flood.
He was happy to find, after the first few moments, that it was not with him these bulwarks of public order were concerned, but with that faithless man whose name he had determined never again to pronounce.
Did Mr. Clutterbuck know anything of Mr. Boyle's movements? When had he last seen him? Had Mr. Boyle, to his knowledge, taken the train for Croydon as usual on the day he cashed the cheque? Had he any knowledge of Mr. Boyle's intentions? Had Mr. Boyle shown him, by accident or by design, a ticket for any foreign port? And if so (added the official with the singular finesse of his profession) was that ticket made out for Buenos Ayres?
To all of these questions Mr. Clutterbuck was happily able to give a frank, straightforward, English answer such as satisfied his visitors. Nor did he dismiss them without offering, in spite of the matutinal hour, to the more exalted one a glass of wine, to the lesser a tumbler of ale. To see them march in step out of his carriage gate was the first relief he had obtained that morning.
He comforted his sad heart by the very object of his sadness, as is our pathetic human way. He took a sort of mournful pride in handling the great key that gave him access to the warehouse, and a peculiar pleasure in snubbing the servant who had denied him when he had called before.
These eggs after all were a possession; they were a tangible thing, a million was their number; the very boxes in which they soaked were property; and it cannot be denied that Mr. Clutterbuck, who had hitherto possessed no real thing nor extended his personality to any visible objects beyond his furniture, his clothes, his pipe, his bicycle, and his wife, could not but be influenced by the sense of ownership. Sometimes he would select an egg at random, and placing it in the machine which had been witness of his first decisive interview, he would examine whether or no it were still transparent; but the occupation was but a pastime. Often he did not really note their condition, and when he did note it, whether that condition were satisfactory or no, he would replace the sample as solemnly as he had chosen it.