But Mr. Blagden had recovered his fierce determination.
“No!” he said, “I won’t. I’ll make an arrangement.”
“And if they won’t take it?” said the lawyer.
There was a silence—luckily for Peter Blagden’s future happiness he was the first to break it; the Dæmon had suggested with his supernatural vision just what was needed, and had slid it into Mr. Blagden’s heart: “I never said I was John K. Petre. I never alluded to one act of John K. Petre’s life,” he said slowly; “it was thrust upon me. I’ll give reasons—good reasons, I’ll find ’em—for not wishing to have my own name come out. I’ll swear—and it’s the truth—it was a chance name; I’ll swear I knew nothing of John K. Petre the millionaire; and I’ll let ’em believe what they like. I won’t have my humiliation published. I won’t. If the lawyers insist, my own evidence will break them. Go to this man’s lawyers and tell him I’ll compromise. I’ll take any terms they offer.”
Poor Mr. Wilkins saw vast receipts from a most juicy Action fade away. He sighed and accepted his fate.
As I draw near to the conclusion of this simple story I review in my mind the little army of those who had done well out of Mr. John K. Petre’s—I mean Mr. Peter Blagden’s—little adventure, and I conclude that Providence orders all things together for good.
An economist, perhaps, might tell you who had provided these various windfalls. I cannot. But I mark that Charlie Terrard was now established for life and precariously married to his Dada; that Mr. Charlbury would in the next honors list be Sir Marmaduke Charlbury (he had dropped his original Christian name), and had already bought that fine old Jacobean country house which I have not had the leisure to describe for you; that the hard-faced man in the Court off Broad Street had retired upon a small, but for him, excellent competence; that at least fifteen of the hangers-on round the Paddenham Site had collared from one or two hundred up to five hundred; that Williams, intermediary grasper of the Paddenham Site, had been saved—certainly from bankruptcy, possibly from prison, and was now sunning himself in Madeira planning a new coup (for you cannot teach wisdom to such men); that the innumerable new Debenture holders in the Trefusis reconstruction of B.A.R.’s were not disappointed in their steady eight per cent.; that the ordinary shares still crept upwards; that even the little people of that distant luncheon table had pocketed their little packets safely; that Mrs. Cyril had been able to cover the silly old Victorian walls of her house with brand-new pictures which looked as if they had been painted by a lunatic in hell, and to stuff it with chairs and tables like the inside of a German philosopher’s mind; that the kind old Cabinet Minister had a little more to leave to his nephews, and even the two ex-Lord Chancellors had for a brief moment enjoyed a few extra hundreds, which they had lost (and a little more) through a combined speculation in Virtue Deeps, to which they had been emphatically recommended by a friend of prominent South African type.
I said just now that I could not tell you who had provided all these sums; but upon consideration it seems to me that they can only have been provided by the British taxpayer at large. The burden was therefore distributed over the widest possible field and nothing more equitable could be imagined.