Dodson gave a low whistle.
“Oh, was it?” he said. “Then I should think that that street-person was not such a bad judge after all.” James Dodson turned his attention again to the shelves, in which were many gaps, with a livelier curiosity. “There don’t appear to be many first-folio Shakespeares left now,” he said in a tone of keen disappointment. “But it is no good supposing that there would be; these things have been pretty well gone through. Some street-person has picked all the pearls these many years, I expect. All that is left is hardly worth carting away. As I say, all that remains on your shelves, old man, would barely fetch two hundred pence.”
“Can we do nothing to obtain the sum of two hundred pounds?” said the old man. “Surely in this extremity a miracle must happen to us again.”
“I am no believer in miracles myself,” said James Dodson. “I have no faith in ghosts, spiritualism and sea-serpents either. But it is clear to my mind that that two hundred pounds has got to be found somehow; yet it looks as though a miracle will have to happen before it turns up.”
“And the hours are so brief,” said the old man in his impotence. “Each day is beyond price; the great Achilles grows frail.”
For a space Dodson was plunged in deep thought. He was not of the mettle that yields lightly to despair.
“By the way,” he said, “what was that very funny-looking old volume I saw on the table in your little room—you know, the funny old volume that seemed to have its pages scrawled over in red ink? Well, now it has struck me that those pages—I didn’t look at them carefully—were of the finest vellum of the sort they don’t make now-a-days. If that is the case a dealer might be willing to pay a good price for it, if the red scrawl was nicely cleaned off.”
At these words, uttered with singular carelessness, the old man staggered back against the counter of the shop. He trembled in every limb, his face was piteous to see.
“You mean the Book of the Ages,” he said. His voice seemed unrelated to anything in nature.
“I don’t know what you call it,” said Dodson, “but it looks very heavy and well-bound, and I dare say it is valuable in its way. Vellum of the old monastic sort fetches a rare good price now-a-days if you know where to take it. I shall send a chap with a handcart for it to-morrow, and he shall take it to Temple and Ward, the dealers in Bond Street, and we will see what can be raised.”