Away down in Hampshire Mr. Petre watched those figures with a vague, imperfect comprehension of their meaning; but he had at least a general impression that he was safe. Of when settling day might be, of what settling day might mean, he knew nothing; but he saw that something had happened which—unless Terrard was hopeless—made him secure. His first wild thought of flight left him altogether. He determined to return; and only when he had made that determination did it occur to him that if he had fled he would have come in a very few weeks to the end of his tether.
He made no haste to get back to London, though the hotel was again his goal. The freedom from haunting terrors of publicity and pursuit was grateful. He stopped at one place and another, drinking in the spring. And when he got back to the Splendide he was refreshed and strengthened to meet whatever might be awaiting him, though his nervousness returned as he got back into his room and looked for his correspondence.
There was only one letter, in the business envelope of Blake and Blake, upon his table; and within it a very few formal lines, and a check for £73,729, 16s. 3d.
The importance of any sum of money differs with the habits of the recipient. It is possible that Mr. Petre in the full knowledge of what and who he was would have found that sum sufficient, but nothing overwhelming. It is possible that it might have seemed to him an incredible fortune. If he were what all indications made him out to be, it was but one fairly successful minor transaction. If he were what a very vague, very confused, but permanent profound sense warned him that he was, it was a miracle, changing all his prospects.
But neither the one attitude nor the other was that of Mr. Petre as he spread out the check before him and stared rather stupidly at the figures. His preoccupation was not with the magnitude of the sum, nor with its comparative insignificance. His preoccupation was with a much simpler question—of what he should do with that little bit of pink paper. He knew, just as he knew the Strand, and the map of England, and Bradshaw and the rest of it—though he did not know himself—that there were such things as banks and banking accounts, and that pieces of paper of this kind went through that machine. But he stood like a child in the matter of how to begin.
Here again the simplest course would have been to have looked up Terrard in the book, met him and consulted him. But that would have been to give himself away, and to open that series of questions the starting of which he had come to dread as a man dreads an operation. He did what all men do when they are quite at a loss. He plunged. He put that check into an hotel envelope, put the envelope in his pocket, walked aimlessly through half a dozen turnings, and entered the doors of the first bank he saw. It was a branch, neither small nor great, doing business briskly in a quarter of large shops; one of a score of such branches in central London, nothing more.
The furniture was familiar to him, for banks are all upon a pattern; and the brass railings and the mahogany desks and the glass swing doors and the little army of clerks all scribbling in huge leather-bound books, gave him, he knew not why, an odd association of discomfort and dread: of irritation and humiliation: of worries. But the feeling was slight, a long and far-off thing stirring in the depths of his mind. He went straight up to a worthy young gentleman in round spectacles adorning a face like the full moon, who was rapidly counting slips with a dampened finger behind the railings. He simply pushed over the check.
