"If so—and not because I admit you've any right!—but because I choose to show it you—you may read this!" went on the late Mr. Mustey's chief creditor, pulling a rather worn and crumpled oblong envelope out of his pocket and exhibiting the direction written on it in a flowing, old-fashioned, legal hand.
"'P. C. Breagh, Esq., care of Frau Busch, Jaeger Strasse, Schwärz-Brettingen, N. Germany.' ... But I really shouldn't have dreamed—" began Mr. Chown.
"Read it!" said the owner of the letter, savagely thrusting it upon him, and the head-clerk with another protest, nipped in mid-utterance by another order to read it, mastered the contents.
The writer acknowledged the receipt of Mr. P. C. Breagh's letter, and begged to remind him that he was quite well acquainted with the terms of his late mother's Marriage Settlement. He congratulated his young friend on having so nearly attained the age of discretion decided under the provisions of the instrument referred to; and appointed the hour of nine o'clock upon the morning of the 3d of January, to discharge his trust and hand over the cash, deposit-notes, and securities....
"While all the time he knew—none better, except his precious partner!—that I should leave his office as poor as I'd come there. It would have been decent," snarled Patrick Carolan Breagh, "to have owned the truth."
"And accused his own son!—And now I look at the date of this it was written on the day before that affair of the false Bramah.... Do him justice, Mr. Breagh! ... Try to think he meant fair by you. Wherever he's gone..." Mr. Chown looked vaguely up at the monochromatic sky—now darkening as though it meant to rain in earnest—and then down at the cobblestones, "he'll be no worse for that, and you'll be the better here, I dare to say! You'll give me your address, sir? I don't know but that as you were the first to discover the body, you'll be expected to give evidence before the Coroner."
"Damn the Coroner!" said P. C. Breagh. "Whether he wants it or not I haven't an address to give. I paid my bill at a thundering beastly cheap hotel in the Euston Road by handing over my trunks of clothes, and books and instruments to the landlord.... He promised to keep them for three weeks—to give me a chance to redeem them!—and he grunted when I said I'd be back with money enough to buy his bug-ridden lodging-house before two days were over his head. And I pawned my coat for dinner yesterday and a coffee-house bed last night.... That's why you saw shirt-sleeves when I pulled off this old wrap-rascal.... But I'll look in here again to-morrow—unless I—change my mind!"
He had passed under the archway and was gone before Mr. Chown had recovered himself sufficiently to call after him. To follow would have been no use. So the head-clerk went sorrowfully back to write and dispatch those urgent telegraphic messages.
And Carolan, shouldering through the double torrent of pedestrian humanity rolling east and west along the worn pavements of Holborn, plunged through the roaring traffic of the cobblestoned roadway, and with his chin well down upon his chest, and his hands rammed deep into his pockets, turned down Fetter Lane, knowing that he, who had been heir to a goodly sum in thousands, was, by this sudden turn of Fortune's wheel, a beggar.