Charlie Terrard and his Catch were at the door of the Splendide. He looked over his shoulder as he went off and nodded gayly to Mr. Petre.
“I’ll get you fifty thousand. Round about 2½ one ought to”; and was gone.
Charlie Terrard hastened; he was in the City just at a quarter past three, and he had said behind closed doors, and to his partner alone, what he had to say. Only after hours was the thing released.
With the next morning every one—that is, all the fifty or sixty who count—was full of it. John K. Petre was buying Touaregs.
When Mr. Petre reached his room he realized that panic is a bad adviser.
In his terror and shame lest that roomful should guess his misfortune, he had not only put himself in peril—he did not know the law on these things, but he thought that he might very well have committed a crime—but he had also brought in, with that peril, the peril of a complete discovery. For if things went badly, and that mad order to buy left him under a heavy obligation—whenever a settlement should come (and he know nothing about the times and the seasons—evidently in that mysterious former life of his, whatever else he had been, he had not been a stockbroker, and yet he had evidently been very rich, and must have made investments: it was all exceedingly bewildering)—and if his inability to meet the same losses (and he was unable to meet anything more than a few pounds) led to a prosecution, everything would come out in Court. Could the law act, he wondered? He didn’t know. If it could and did, the law would charge itself with finding out who he was, and all the misery he had desired to avoid would be upon him with tenfold force. Not a mere roomful of rich people would merely suspect him; he would be a laughing stock for the whole of England. And heaven only knew what friends or nearer ones would be involved in the affair. It was too late to undo it. The thing had gone through.
For a moment he had a wild idea of flight. Then he remembered the diminishing sum that stood between him and disaster. He would do better than that. He would hide himself. With infinite precaution he would hide himself, until there was news one way or the other of what had happened to that dreadful order for Touaregs.
And again, what were Touaregs? He was quite clear upon what shares were; he was quite clear upon the buying and selling of the same; perhaps he had cautiously speculated in a few hundreds once or twice. No incident of the sort had any place whatever in his mind to-day, and yet the terms seemed familiar enough to him. But fifty thousand! And at what price? Two and one-half pounds, shillings, francs? What had he let himself in for?... It maddened him.
A Bradshaw was part of the furniture of his room. He spread out the map, noted affectionately one of those little curling lines which leave a main railway and stop abruptly in the Wolds. He took the name of the village; he packed his bag, looked up a train; he had half an hour. He went down to leave his orders. He would keep the room; nothing was to be forwarded to him; to any enquiry they were to say that he had gone out of town, and were not to know when he would return.