Mr. St. George Le Mesurier Hector Northcote had a weak child's voice, which he cultivated because it separated him from the common herd—most effectually. It made all ordinary people wish to kick him every time he opened his mouth. He liked to be thought to have ideas about art, and he talked sweetly about the furniture of "ma mothah" (my mother.)
Geoffrey walked past this specimen with but little ceremony. The brandy and coffee and another brandy without coffee had succeeded in putting him into just the same state in which he had gone to bed on the previous night. He could talk to any person and could do his work, but fumes of alcohol and abandonment of recklessness had for a time driven out all the morality he ever possessed; and where some ideas of justice had generally reigned there flourished, in the fumes of the liquor which he had drunk, noxious weedy outgrowths of a debased intelligence unchecked by the self-respect of civilization. To-day, he was, to himself, the victim of a public that had robbed him. Society owed him a debt.
They all went to work in the usual way. About a quarter-past eleven o'clock Jack put his head to Geoffrey's wicket and they whispered together:
Jack said, "Time for me to be off?"
"Yes, just leave everything as if you were coming back. If you put away anything, or close the ledger, they may ask where you are before you get fairly off. By the way, how are you carrying your money?"
"By Jove! I forgot that," said Jack, "or I might have made the package smaller by exchanging for larger bills. It makes a terrible 'wollage' in my pocket."
Geoffrey stepped back a moment and picked two American bills for one-thousand dollars each from a package of fifty of them lying beside him.
"Here," he said. "Take these two and pin them in the watch-pocket of your waistcoat. Don't give me back your money here. Just run up to our chambers and leave your two thousand under my bed-clothes. I don't want any one to see you paying me the money here, or they will think I connived at your going. I can get it during the afternoon and make my cash all right."
Jack did not quite see the necessity of this, but he had not time to think it out, and even if he had, he would have done what Geoffrey told him.
"All right," he said, "thank you. That will make two 'one-thousands' and seven 'one hundreds,' and the rest small, for immediate use."