“Good heavens above! Look, Ada, look! The missing section of the clasp.”
“Exactly,” concurred Cleek. “And when you think of where I found it I fancy it will not be very difficult to reason out how the necklace came to be where Jennifer picked it up. On your own evidence, Lady Leake, you hastily laid it down on your dressing-table, when the sight of the lint bandage recalled to your mind your promise to Miss Eastman, and from that moment it was never seen again. The natural inference then is so clear I think there can hardly be a doubt that when you reached over to pick up that bandage the lace of your sleeve caught on the clasp, became entangled, and that when you left the room you carried the Ladder of Light with you. The great weight of the necklace swinging free as you ran down the staircase would naturally tell upon that weak link, and no doubt when you leaned over the banister at the landing to call Jennifer, that was, so to speak, the last straw. The weak link snapped, the necklace dropped away, and the thick carpet entirely muffled the sound of its fall. As for the rest——”
The loud jangling of the door bell cut in upon his words. He pulled out his watch and looked at it.
“That will be the Ranee’s major domo, I fancy, Sir Mawson,” he observed, “and with your kind permission Mr. Narkom and I will be going. We have, as I have already told you, a little matter of importance still to attend to in the interest of the Yard, and although I haven’t the slightest idea we shall be able to carry it to a satisfactory conclusion for a very long time—if ever—we had better be about it. Pardon? Reward, your ladyship? Oh, but I’ve had that: Sir Mawson has given me his promise to let that bonny boy have another chance. That was all I asked, remember. There’s good stuff in him, but he stands at the crossroads, and face to face with one of life’s great crises. Now is the time when he needs a friend. Now is the time for his father to be a father; and opportunity counts for so much in the devil’s gamble for souls. Get to him, daddy—get to him and stand by him—and you’ll have given me the finest reward in the world.”
And here, making his adieus to Lady Leake, whose wet eyes followed him with something of reverence in them, and shaking heartily the hand Sir Mawson held out, he linked arms with Narkom, and together they passed out, leaving a great peace and a great joy behind them.
“Gad, what an amazing beggar you are!” declared the superintendent, breaking silence suddenly as soon as they were at a safe distance from the house. “You’ll end your days in the workhouse, you know, if you continue this sort of tactics. Fancy chucking up a reward for the sake of a chap you never saw before, and who treated you like a mere nobody. Why, man alive, you could have had almost any reward—a thousand pounds if you’d asked it—for finding a priceless thing like that.”
“I fancy I’ve helped to find something that is more priceless still, my friend, and it’s cheap at the price.”
“But a thousand pounds, Cleek! a thousand pounds! God’s truth, man, think what you could do with all that money—think what you could buy!”
“To be sure; but think what you can’t! Not one day of lost innocence, not one hour of spoilt youth! It isn’t because they have a natural tendency toward evil that all men go wrong. It is not what they possess but what they lack that’s at the bottom of the downfall of four fifths of them. Given such ingredients as a young chap suffering under a sense of personal injury, a feeling that the world’s against him, that he has neither a home nor a friend to stand by him in his hour of need, and the devil will whip up the mixture and manufacture a criminal in less than no time. It is easier to save him while he’s worth the saving than it is to pull him up after he has gone down the line, Mr. Narkom, and if by refusing to accept so many pounds, shillings, and pence, a man can do the devil out of a favourable opportunity——Oh, well, let it go at that. Come on, please. We are still as far as ever from the ‘game’ we set out to bag, my friend; and as this district seems to be as unpromising in that respect as all the others—where next?”