Something more than his position upon the Stock Exchange was at stake. He had done desperate things in the vain hope of sustaining that position against the destroying sweep of Fortune's turning tide. Bills were afloat which he must meet, or stand before the world a detected forger,—bills drawn upon companies that were shadowy as the regions of their supposed operations. Bills amounting to five thousand pounds, drawn, upon the Honduras Mahogany Company, Limited; other bills amounting to upwards of three thousand pounds, against the Pennsylvanian Anthracite Coal Corporation, Limited. The sum he might raise on the policies of insurance would about cover these bills; and, simultaneously with their withdrawal, fresh bills might be floated, and the horse-leech cry of the brokers for contango might be satisfied until there came a reaction in the City, and the turning tide should float him into some harbour of safety. Beyond this harbour shone a splendid beacon, the dead girl's inheritance—his, to claim by right of the same will that would give him the sum insured upon her life.
Without this immediate ready money there was no extraction from the hideous labyrinth. His position had been already too long sustained by bills of exchange. There were people in the City who wanted, in vulgar parlance, to see the colour of his money. He knew this—and knew how frail the tenure by which he held his position, and how dire the crash which would hurl him down to ruin.
After the proclamation of his inability to meet his differences—the Deluge: and, looking gloomily athwart the flood and tempest, he saw neither ark nor Ararat.
Charlotte's death was the one chance of redemption; and to that event he looked as to a figure in a mathematical proposition. Of this girl herself, with all her wealth of beauty and goodness, of hope and love, he had scarcely any definite idea. She had so long been no more to him than an important figure in the mathematics of his life, that he had lost the power to behold her in any other light.
The hardness of his nature was something lower than absolute cruelty of heart. It was less human than the half-insane ferocity of a Nero. It was a calm indifference to the waste of human life, which, displayed upon a larger field of operation, would have made a monster cold and passionless as Sphinx or Chimæra.
"I must see Ann Woolper," he said to himself, presently, "she will not dare to exclude me from that room."
He listened to the striking of the Bayswater clocks. Two o'clock. Within and without the house reigned a profound silence. The room immediately over Mr. Sheldon's study was Charlotte's room, and here there had been for a long time no sound of life or movement.
"Asleep, I dare say," muttered Mr. Sheldon, "invalid and nurse both."
He exchanged his boots for slippers, which he kept in a little cupboard below the bookshelves, among old newspapers, and went softly from the room. The gas was burning dimly on the stairs and on the landing above. He opened the door of the invalid's room softly, and went in.
Mrs. Woolper was seated beside the bed. She looked up at him with unwinking eyes.