‘I’ll tell you,’ said the other. ‘I’ll tell you everything. Take me somewhere and let me tell you.’
The young man laid his hand upon the old man’s arm, and led him back, feeling somehow his heart melt towards the unresistant sinner. Montressor stood at the door watching this pursuit and capture. He waited for them as they came forward, his face expressing a sort of stupefication of wonder. John only remembered the spectator when he reached the door with his prisoner, and found this startled countenance confronting him.
‘Why, May!’ cried he, turning from one to another. ‘Why, May!’
CHAPTER V.
THE CULPRIT.
John’s amanuensis, whom he had so rashly trusted, had carried away his copy of John’s scheme with, in reality, little or no idea of cheating, and none at all of injuring John. His faculties were confused by long courses of meditative sophistry, such as had been his amusement in the years when he had no other, and by the criminal atmosphere in which he had lived, in which the deception or spoiling of your neighbour was the most natural matter, the best sign of talent and originality, at once the excitement and the amusement of the perverted mind. The man who called himself March had a more than usual share of that confusion which so often accompanies breaches of the moral law. He had gone through far more than usual of those mental exercises by which all but the most stupid and degraded attempt to prove themselves right, or at least not so far wrong, in those offences which to the rest of the world are beyond excuse. And his mental ingenuity was such that he could make a wonderful plea to himself in favour of any course which fancy or temptation suggested. In the present case the effort had not been at all a difficult one. He had really meant no harm to John. He intended, in fact, to recommend John warmly, to put a good thing in his way. In all probability the young man would not prove a good advocate for himself. He might be shy of pushing his own interests: most inventors were shy and retiring, easily discouraged: and what he meant to secure would not in reality be more than a percentage on the trouble he would take in recommending John. A percentage—that was what in reality it would be—and well earned: for had he not been at the trouble of copying, and indeed adding something of his own to the young man’s dry plans and calculations, besides the service he would do him in carrying his goods as it were to market and securing a sale for them, and a profitable job for their inventor. Nothing could be more self-evident than this. At the end he came to be quite sure that he was doing his young benefactor a real service, and that nothing in his conduct wanted excusing at all.
He was a little shaken, however, by his reception at the office of Messrs. Spender and Diggs, and by their instant recognition of John’s name, and their curious questions on the subject. Had the plan been rejected by Barretts, they asked—and he did not even know what ‘Barretts’ meant. He was still more dismayed when he found (though he ought to have known very well it must be so) that no answer would be given him on the subject till the papers were examined, and that it would be necessary that Sandford should come himself to elucidate and explain them. There was quite a little excitement in the office, evidently, about Sandford’s work and its presentation there. The partner who seemed to him to be Diggs (he could not tell why, from his appearance), came and looked over the shoulder of the partner who must be Spender, and one or two others were called into the council and questions asked as to whether young Sandford had left Barretts, whether there had been a quarrel, what had happened. The ignorance he showed about all this, brought suspicious looks upon him, looks which disturbed all his calculations: for it had never occurred to him that any suspicion could attach to him in respect of a document written in his own hand, and which by that very fact surely belonged to him, more or less. He was glad at last to get away, feeling a certain distrust involved in the questions that were addressed to him, and beginning to wonder what they could do to him if it were discovered to be without John’s permission that the papers were brought here. Pooh! he said to himself, but only when he had got away—nothing could be done to him; it was no wrong to John or anyone. He had a right, a moral right, to the work of his own hands: and it was in kindness he had done it; kindness qualified by a percentage which is what the very best of friends demand.
But if he was disturbed and troubled by this contretemps, Joe, who was really throughout the matter his inspiring influence, was much more so. He was angry and disappointed beyond description. He had expected, being so much more ignorant than his principal, money immediate, a sum down, for the papers which young Sandford had said were his fortune. He was furious with the feebleness of his ‘mate,’ who had left those papers without getting anything for them.
‘I’d not a’ bin such a blooming fool,’ said Joe, whose adjectives are generally left out in this record. ‘I’d a’ up and spoken. Money down or ye gets nothin’ from me. Lor, if I had a ’ansom coat to my back like you, and could speak like as them swells would listen to me, d’ye think I’d a’ come back empty-handed like that?’
March was still more confused by this vituperation. It was in vain, he knew, to convince Joe that such a rapid transaction was impossible in the nature of things, for neither Joe nor his kind know anything of the nature of things. They know that when they have anything to sell, money is to be got for it, and that is all. Joe made his patron and dependent (for the poor man was both) very uncomfortable on this subject: and other things too made him uncomfortable; the necessity for communicating with John, and informing him that he must see Spender & Diggs, and explain his scheme to them; and the necessity for going back to Spender & Diggs, which Joe had pressed upon him, incapable of hearing reason. What was he to do? The poor man hung about the street in which John lived, half hoping for an encounter which might clear up the matter one way or other. When he saw John his heart gave a jump of pleasure and relief in the first instance, and then the instinct of the offender came upon him and he turned and fled. But what was his flight worth before the pursuit of the active and impassioned youth who could have outstripped his swiftest pace in a stride or two? And then the fugitive said to himself that he was not really guilty, that he had done nothing to be afraid of. Kindness, qualified by a percentage. The rueful smile which was in his eyes when he turned to John was half conciliatory and half made up of self-approbation and amusement at the success of that phrase. Naturally, John was aware of neither of these sentiments. He pushed his prisoner before him into his sitting-room, taking no heed of the exclamations of Montressor. It was a trouble to him at all times to hear that name of May from the actor’s lips, but it was his own fault, and he could blame nobody. He thrust the culprit into his sitting-room, and pushed him into a chair without saying a word. He was breathless, not with the exertion so much as with the tumult in his mind, the eagerness, and passion. He had not expected to find thus the means of exonerating himself so soon, nor could he help a certain blaze of wrath against the man who had done him so ill a turn.
‘There!’ he said, waving Montressor aside with his hand. ‘Tell me first why you did it. What induced you to steal my papers and try to ruin me? Was not I kind to you?—was I not——’