CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Next day the crash came. The papers revelled in it; the Pallinders' affairs occupied the place of honour (or at least of supreme notoriety) in the first column of the first page; the Pallinders' creditors assembled and filled the air with thunder; Muriel was incontinently recalled to Washington; excited Gwynnes rushed upon the scene. And when at last the smoke of conflict lifted, where were the Pallinders? Nobody knew; nobody cared—except Scheurmann and Goldstein Brothers, and perhaps a few others. Within a fortnight there was a red flag, flaunting garishly on the lawn among the budding lilacs and faintly greening beeches. Templeton had out sandwich-men and yard-long posters announcing an auction in the house—"everything without reserve to the highest bidder."
The Armenians reappeared, and various other greasy-looking, dark-skinned birds of prey flocked through the rooms, rapping on the mirrors, testing the peacock-blue and old-gold draperies between their dirty talons. I met Mrs. Maginnis coming out of Doctor Vardaman's yard, boo-hooing and calling on all the saints to bless him, with a tribe of little Maginnises at her heels. What had the doctor done? I do not know. The old gentleman went quite shabby that summer in an old linen duster we had not seen on him for years; and it is certain he bought no more first editions for a long while.
And here closes the episode—for episode it truly was, and no story, as must have been discovered by this time. A story, properly conceived and executed, must have a beginning and an end, and this lacks both; it even lacks a hero and heroine. Fiction would have demanded, and a conscientious storyteller would have supplied, a much more picturesque and appropriate final act. The diamonds should have been restored, and (let us hope) the bill paid; Muriel should have married J. B.; Bob should have married Mazie; the curtain should have gone down on the lovers embracing and everyone else shaking hands. I have not been a novel-reader all these years for nothing, and nobody need remind me how a romance should end; if this narrative finishes in open defiance of all the proprieties, I can only offer the mean apology that it is all, or nearly all, true. Pars minima fui! Some of it I saw, some heard, some merely guessed, and alas, none of the beautiful things mentioned above came to pass! Looking back on it now, with the compliant wisdom of forty-odd, I am satisfied it is as well those marriages did not take place. Muriel would hardly have been a success transplanted; and the Pallinder connection would inevitably have proved disastrous to poor Bob.
As for Huddesley, I cannot sincerely say I was ever sorry that that entertaining and original scoundrel escaped; in other and more gallant days, he and the Pallinders alike might have figured as a sort of pirates, differing in degree and methods perhaps, hardly at all in kind. There is humour in the spectacle of one of them preying on the other. And, for the soul of me, I cannot be angry with either. Bon voyage, oh ye adventurers! What shores have you not coasted, and what men essayed in all these twenty-five years! At least I did not suffer by you, and therefore, with a noble generosity, I wish you well!
I fell in with J. B. the other day, after a long interval; and he had a good deal to tell me in the pleasant hour we spent of, "Don't you remember——" and "Whatever has become of——?" J. B. goes up and down the world, and knows many men and their cities these days; he is getting a little bald and massive, yet is still a notable figure, not greatly changed; and, "What do you think?" he said, "I've seen Huddesley, and he knew me at once! It was the year of the St. Louis Fair; that's the last time I was West, you know. I went from there to the town of Joliet, Illinois, where you know the Government runs an elegant home for ladies and gentlemen whose society and services the community doesn't need all the time.
"I went out there—voluntarily," he added, with a chuckle. "It was the Fourth of July and blazing hot, and I had three hours to put in before my train left. The man I went to see told me I'd find the Pen 'very instructive.' But when I got there, they were giving all these wretches a holiday, in honour of Uncle Sam's birthday, and I tell you they were a pretty hard-looking set. The guard was showing me through a yard, when suddenly one of these jolly, cursing, sky-larking parties in stripes dropped out of a bunch of them, and, says he, getting in the way, and staring hard at me: 'Mr. Breckinridge, don't you know me?' I didn't at all, for a minute, although really, considering his age, and the kind of life he must have led, he hasn't changed much. Then: 'Will you 'ave 'ock with your hoysters, sir?' said the scoundrel with a wink—and it flashed on me who he was! 'Huddesley!' I shouted out. The attendant was perfectly petrified; he thought I must be some old pal of Huddesley's—I had to explain before he would let us talk. Eh? Why, sure! As the children say, sure! I talked to him, and he asked after everybody with the greatest interest. He even got quite autobiographical and confidential after a while; told me he was up for five years this time (for a little trouble he got into in New Orleans, he said delicately), but he had served two-thirds of the sentence, and would be out in six months, his time having been shortened for good behaviour. 'There's nothin' to it, anyway, Mr. Breckinridge,' says he, in a serious manner. 'I guess I ought to know, I've tried both ways. It's me for the simple life after this; my eyes are kind of troubling me, and I'm getting along in years. I'm goin' to square it after I get out this time——' He meant he was going to live honestly, you know. 'In all I've spent eighteen years in the stir'—that's slang for the prison, it seems—'with a sentence here and a sentence there, since the first time of all in Pentonville, 'long back in '72. That's a good while out of a man's life that ain't but fifty-five years old. I'm going to cut it out after this. I begun pretty young and I'm through now.' He told me he was London-born, Seven Dials, some slum, I suppose—'That's where Hi got the haccent,' he said, grinning again. He had a chequered career before we knew him, footman, errand-boy, sneak-thief, actor, preacher, insurance-agent, confidence-man—it would be hard to say what he hadn't been. There was an interval when he was apprentice to a pastry-cook—I think he was honest then, for about a year, until the till was left open one evening. He said that was where he learned the trade of cook—'But I was always was one to pick up things quick, you know that, Mr. Breckinridge,' he said with a funny swagger. I asked him if he had had an eye on Mrs. Pallinder's diamonds from the first, or whether he just took the chance when it came. He gave me an odd look. 'Say, you don't mind asking questions, do you?' he said. And then, quickly with a half-laugh: 'Oh, well, Mr. Taylor, you're straight, I know you wouldn't throw me down, and it's twenty years, anyhow.' He went on to say that he had landed in town just about the time of the Charity Ball, when the papers were full of the diamonds—you remember, don't you? The Pallinders were It then. 'I thought I might get the job of butler at the house, and applied,' he said. 'Nothin' doin'—their help was all coloured. The very next day Doctor Vardaman's advertisement came out; say, I was right there with the goods. He was easy, the old gent was. I hadn't spieled my little spiel five minutes before I saw it was 'M' lud, the carriage waits,' for mine. And let me tell you, Mr. Taylor, I was wise to the Pallinder game from the start; I knew Pallinder was due to blow up any day, and your Uncle James would have to hustle to get those diamonds, or somebody else would. That's why I went after 'em by the Romeo-and-Juliet route, 'stead of taking it slow and easy, and getting to be like a son of the house like I'd planned. Well, you know that deal fell through owing to Mrs. Pallinder's neuralgia; if you and the colonel and everybody else had stepped a little livelier, you'd 'a' nipped me. As it was, I just barely had time to get back home; and then what does the faithful, devoted, all-to-the-square-dealing Huddesley do but wake up Doctor Vardaman, and lodge an information against himself——' 'What?' I cried. 'You were the burglar?' To tell the truth, I hadn't quite been able to follow Huddesley's flights of metaphor for the last few sentences, until all at once it come over me what he meant. 'You mean you were the burglar all the time?' I asked him. He grinned with a queer kind of pride. 'Sure I was. But, say, didn't I play it smooth? Couldn't I give Hen. Irving cards and spades, though? Next day I did have a sore throat—I'm subject to 'em—but I wasn't sick like Doctor Vardaman thought. I kept up the game—stayed in bed and passed up the cops and the high-brows with the stylographic pens—I couldn't risk seein' 'em, you know. I don't know how that fellow Judd got on the trail—I guess he had a little more grey matter than the rest of 'em. Of course they had photos and descriptions of me all over the country. Anyway, when he turned up, peddlin' collar-buttons about six weeks later, I was next right off. I knew I'd better beat it for the tall and waving—but I did hate like poison to go without those rhinestones—after all the trouble I'd took, too.' The fellow's persistence and patience were something astonishing," said J. B., with wonder. "Enough to have insured his success at any honest undertaking, you'd think. He told me it was very hard to keep up the rôle. 'Sometimes I'd forget—about the talk, and all, you know,' he said. 'And then I'd lay awake at nights in a cold sweat for fear somebody had noticed it. Yes, sir, I'd been studying and studying, making myself solid with everybody, and playing the faithful-and-devoted racket until I was sick of it—and no diamonds in sight yet! Then "Mrs. Tankerville" came up, and all at once I began to see a ray o' light. But just as things was going like greased rollers on a toboggan-slide, hanged if the doctor didn't sour on the Pallinders! Said he was never going there again. 'Stead of shooting the chutes, looked like I was due to bump the bumps.'