“My name’s Done Brown—that’s what it is,” he muttered, thickly.
He lifted a shaking hand to wipe the cold sweat from his forehead, and started as the strap of the sword-belt dangled before his eyes. He lowered his hand and looked intently at the narrow band of tough, doubled buff-leather; pipeclayed, and having a solid gilt-brass ring stitched and riveted in the loop at either end. As he turned it musingly about in his fingers, he found that, doubled, and pushed through one of the gilt rings, it made a slip-noose. Then Imagination suggested the thing that he might do. No thought of the dowdy woman weeping for her son in the lonely house at Market Drowsing came to stay him. She had never been anything to Thompson Jowell but the mother of his son....
The thought of Mortimer spurred him to the act of desperation. He got up and went to the door that led from the bedroom into the luxuriously-furnished apartment adjoining, where the Stars of the Ballet and the Beauties of the Harem simpered from the walls. He measured its height with his eye—rolled an ottoman, worked in Berlin wools by Mortimer’s mother, to the right position—got heavily upon it—threw an end of the buff strap over the top of the door—shut the door, and put the noose about his short, thick neck. Then, supporting himself by the wooden molding of the upper framework—he drove the ottoman from him with a clumsy kick and flourish of his stumpy legs....
Lights danced before his eyes that might have been the fires of a distant camp. There were explosions in his ears that might have been the thirty-four pounders speaking from the batteries. There was a hissing as of steam from flooded engine-furnaces—and a crying and shouting as of men packed and crowded together upon the bursting decks of a great transport that was going down....
And then there was nothing but the dead body of a gross stout man in shiny broadcloth—hanging behind the door of the bedroom—waiting to scare the life out of the housekeeper when she looked in at seven upon a bright November morning to pull up the window-blinds.
The decision of the Coroner’s jury was that grief for the death of his son had temporarily unhinged the mind of the great Contractor, and there were many expressions of sympathy for the widow, and there was a pompous Funeral.
Cowell, Sowell, and the rest of the fraternity attended the solemnity. They shook their heads regretfully, and the water stood in their eyes. They said that he had been the very devil, sir! and that there never had been a man like him, and that there might never be another; and added that they were surprised he had left as little as three millions behind him—considering his opportunities!—and that they shouldn’t wonder if the gross amount turned out to be a great deal more!
It did; much to the benefit of the various charities among which the great fortune was divided by his widow, carrying out the expressed wishes of the son who would never have been his heir.
But even from the grave, his gross and greedy hand bore heavily upon the Army; nor has his spirit been altogether exorcised up to the present day. A Jowell was mixed up in the Forage and Remount scandals—which occupied the attention of a Commission of Inquiry—subsequently to the close of the most recent South African War.