William Jordan, Junior

by J. C. Snaith

“T-the p-power will be furnished to me to make reparation,” the young man muttered, “t-the p-power will be furnished to me to confess my crime.”

“There must be none of that talk, my son,” said his mentor sternly. “This is not a case for high falutin’! It will not help at all. Either the money was there or it was not there. I believe it was not there; Octavius is going to believe so too. You see a chap like Octavius doesn’t care a bit about the brass. It is the principle he cares about; and he is such a fanatic in some things, if he found you out there is no saying to what lengths he might go.”

The frail barque, chartless, aimless in mid ocean, was obedient to the will of the wind. William Jordan crept again down the stairs, his resolution unfulfilled. The pieces of gold were still in his pocket; his crime was still unconfessed.

During the luncheon hour, as he sat in the empty counting-house, with his paper of bread-and-butter untouched, and his head buried in desolation in his weak and nerveless hands, he was startled back to sensibility by feeling a hand laid suddenly upon his shoulder. It was that of James Dodson. His mentor’s forlorn aspect, of a few hours before, had yielded place to a kind of jubilation.

“What do you think, my son?” said this consummate man of action, “what do you think, old boy? I have positively persuaded that silly old cuckoo that he never left the money there at all.”

William Jordan gave a gasp.

“I—I d-don’t think it m-matters,” he stammered.

“You don’t think if matters!” said Jimmy Dodson. “Why, my good Christian boy, you must be up the pole. Don’t you realize what an escape it has been for us both? But I must have the devil’s own tongue on me; if J. Dodson doesn’t end his days with a peerage in Grosvenor Square, I don’t know what two and two make, that’s all. I never understood, until to-day, how easy it is to argue some chaps clean out of their own reason. I’ve always despised the old fool; but even I never realized what a nincompoop he was until this blessed morning. He arrived about ten, as he always does, and when he rang for me and I came in, I thought, ‘Hullo, old friend, you look uncommonly sorry for yourself, you do.’ Well, the old boy blew his nose very violently, and cocked his glass in his right eye very fiercely, and he bleated like a kid of three, ‘Mr. Dodson, this affair is preying upon me. This great establishment was founded by my ancestor, Octavius Crumpett, in 1701. This house has published Dryden and Pope, Swift and Fielding, and all the foremost names in the literary history of this country until the present time. And I think, Mr. Dodson, I am justified in saying that an incident of this kind is quite without precedent in its annals. Such a reflection as is cast upon its personnel by this deplorable occurrence is—is, well, Mr. Dodson, more than I can contemplate.’ And that is where I came in again, my son. ‘Well, sir,’ I said, ‘you must forgive me if I repeat what I said yesterday afternoon, that you have not made it ab-so-lutely clear to my mind that the money was actually there. I don’t know whether you have noticed it, sir, but what you might call hallucinations are constantly occurring. How often, sir, do we persuade ourselves that we have not done a thing when we have done it, and vice versa! And you’ll pardon me, sir, but these scientific people say it is the same with disease. You can think you have got a disease until you get it; or, again, if you can persuade yourself you have not got a disease you have got, why, sir, in the course of time you find you have not got it after all.’

“Well now, my son, I could see I was pressing with both feet on the loud pedal. ‘Mr. Dodson,’ said the old mug, ‘I would pay a thousand pounds to a charitable institution if I could really persuade myself that I did not leave that wretched money upon my table.’ Well, after that, Luney, I went in to win. Since I buttered him up over his Homer—the d—— silliest production, I understand, that ever was perpetrated—he has always listened to me with what he calls ‘respect.’ He considers me ‘a scholar and a gentleman’; he likes to consider everybody in this old-established house, from Pa to the ex-caretaker’s widow, who feeds the cat, to be ‘a scholar and a gentleman.’ Well, I went for the gloves; I gave him five minutes of regular John Bright, and wound up with a bit of dissertation on self-deception. And, would you believe it, Luney? the silly old cormorant wrung me warmly by the hand, and said if only for his own peace of mind he must admit that he had deceived himself. The money could not possibly have been there; he must have left it in his hansom; it must have fallen from his pocket in Saint James’s Square; in fact, there must be a hideous mistake somewhere; on no account must I mention it in the office. I must treat all the circumstances exactly as though they had never occurred.

“Now, what do you say to that, my son? Of course it was all pretty useful work on the part of J. D. You see I guessed from the first that like all these ultra-pious church-and-chapel coves he was forcing himself to swallow that which he knew he had no right to swallow; and in the end he was able to convince himself it was ‘the right thing’ to swallow it rather than to admit the cold-drawn truth.”