“You can put your case before Leonard, if you like. He won’t give you much, because he hasn’t got much to give. I think he has a few hundreds a year from his mother. He might advance on his reversions, but he isn’t that sort of man at all.”
“I’ll try. But, look you, Christopher, if he refuses I’ll take it out of you. How would you like all the world to know how you live? And, by the Lord, sir, if I have to tell all the world, I will.”
“I was a great fool, Fred, to let you into the secret. I might have known, from old experience, what you would do with it to suit your own purpose. Always the dear old uncalculating, unselfish, truthful brother—always!”
Fred took another drink and another cigar. Then he invoked a blessing upon his brother with all the cordiality proper for such a blessing and retired.
CHAPTER XIV
CONSULTATION
THE rôle of coincidence in the history of the Individual is much more important than any writer of fiction has ever dared to represent. Not the coincidence which is dear to the old-fashioned dramatist, when at the very nick and opposite point of time the long-lost Earl returns; the coincidence of real life does not occur in this way. A man’s mind is much occupied, and even absorbed, by one subject: he goes about thinking upon that subject and upon little else. Then all kinds of things happen to him which illustrate this subject. That is what coincidence means.
For instance, I was once endeavouring to reconstruct for a novel a certain scene among the overgrown byways and the secluded and forgotten lanes of history. I had nothing at first to help me: worse still, I could find nothing, not even in the British Museum. The most profound knowledge of the books and pamphlets in that collection, in the person of the greatest scholar, could not help me. I was reluctantly making up my mind to abandon the project (which would have inflicted irreparable damage on my novel) when a sheaf of second-hand catalogues came to me. It was by the last evening post. I turned over two or three, without much curiosity, until among the items I lit upon one which caught my eye. It was only the title of a pamphlet, but it promised to contain the exact information which I wanted. The promise was kept. I was too late to buy the pamphlet, but I had the title, and it was found for me in the British Museum, and it became my “crib.” Now that, if you please, was a coincidence; and this kind of coincidence happens continually to every man who thinks about anything.
It is said of a most distinguished numismatist that he cannot cross a ploughed field without picking up a rose noble. That is because his thoughts are always turned to rose nobles and other delightful coins. If one is studying the eighteenth century, there is not a museum, a picture-gallery, a second-hand catalogue, which does not provide the student with new information. Every man absorbed in a subject becomes like a magnet which attracts to itself all kinds of proofs, illustrations, and light.
These things are mentioned only to show that the apparently miraculous manner in which external events conspired together to keep up the interest in this case was really neither remarkable nor exceptional. For the interest itself, the grip with which the story of the newspaper cuttings caught and held both these readers, was a true miracle. In every group of situations there is the central event. In this case, the mystery of the wood was the central event.
“It is my murder, Leonard,” Constance repeated, “as much as yours. It was my great-grandfather who was murdered, if it was your great-grandmother who was also killed by that crime. Let me sit with you while you work it out.”