In the Mayor's Parlour

by J. S. Fletcher

Brent asked for Alderman Crood. The girl glanced towards the end of the hall and then looked at him doubtfully.

"What name?" she inquired in tones that were little above a whisper.

"My name's Brent," the caller answered, in a clear, loud voice. Somehow, he had a suspicion that Crood was listening at the other end of the cavernous hall. "I am Mr. Wallingford's cousin."

The girl gave him a curious glance and motioning him to wait, went away up the hall to a door which stood partly open, revealing a lighted interior. She disappeared within; came out again, walked a little way towards Brent, and spoke with a timid smile.

"Will you please come this way?" she said. "Mr. Crood will see you."

Brent strode up the hall, the girl, preceding him, pushed open the door which she had just left. He walked into a big room and, through a fog of tobacco smoke, saw that he was in the presence of three men, who sat in arm-chairs round a hearth whereon a big fire of logs blazed. Behind their chairs a table was set out with decanters and glasses, a tobacco-jar and cigar-boxes: clearly he had interrupted a symposium of a friendly and social sort.

The visitor's eyes went straight to the obvious master of the house, a big, heavily-built, massive-framed man of sixty or thereabouts, who sat in state on the right-hand side of the hearth. Brent took in certain details of his appearance at a glance: the broad, flabby, parchment-hued face, wide mouth, square jaw, and small, shrewd eyes; the suit of dead-black broadcloth, and the ample black neckcloth swathed about an old-fashioned collar; he noted, too, the fob which dangled from Alderman Crood's waist, and its ancient seals and ornaments. A survival of the past, Alderman Crood, he thought, in outward seeming, but there was that in his watchful expression which has belonged to man in every age.

The small shrewd eyes, in their turn, measured up Brent as he crossed the threshold, and Crood, seeing what he would have described as a well-dressed young gentleman who was evidently used to superior society, did what he would certainly not have done for any man in Hathelsborough—he rose from his chair and stretched out a hand.

"How do you do, sir?" he said in a fat, unctuous voice. "The cousin of our lamented Mayor, poor gentleman, of whose terrible fate we have this moment learned, sir. I can assure you, Mr.—Brent, I think?—and whatever other relations there may be, of our sincere sympathy, sir—I never knew a more deplorable thing in my life. And to happen just as you should arrive on a visit to your cousin, Mr. Brent—dear, dear! The constable who came to inform me of what had happened mentioned that you'd come, and we were just talking—But I'll introduce you to these gentlemen, sir; allow me—Mr. Mallett, our esteemed bank manager. Mr. Coppinger, our respected borough treasurer."

Brent silently shook hands with the two other men; just as silently he made a sharp inspection of them as they resettled themselves in their chairs. Mallett, a spick-and-span sort of man, very precise as to the cut of his clothes and particular as to the quality of his linen and the trimming of his old-fashioned side-whiskers, he set down at once as the personification of sly watchfulness: he was the type of person who would hear all and say no more than was necessary or obligatory. Coppinger, a younger man, had that same watchful look; a moment later, Brent saw it in Crood's big face too. They were all watchful, all sly, these men, he decided: the sort who would sit by and listen, and admit nothing and tell nothing; already, before even he asked the questions which he had come to put, he knew that he would get no answer other than noncommittal, evasive ones. He saw that all three men, instead of being anxious to give him information, were actuated by the same desire—to find out what he knew, to hear what he had to say.