“Stand out of my way!” cried the voice, apparently infuriated. “Let me get at him!”
The professional man looked up wonderingly. Apparently a row on the stairs. But his own door burst open, and a young man, quite a little man, with hot cheeks and eyes aflame, rushed in brandishing a stick. The orator sprang to his feet, seizing the office ruler. He leaned over his table, six feet three in height, with this formidable weapon in his hand, and he faced the intruder with calm, cold face.
We must not blame the assailant; doubtless he was of tried and proved courage, but he was only five feet five. Before that calm face of inquiry, on which there was no line of terror or of repentance, his eyes fell. The fire and fury went out of him quite suddenly. Perhaps he had not developed his æsthetic frame by rude exercise. He dropped his stick, and stood irresolute.
“Oh,” said his enemy quietly, “you think better about the stick, do you? The horse-whipping is to stand over, is it? Now, sir”—he rapped the table horribly with the ruler, so that the little man trembled all over; the adventure unexpectedly promised pain as well as humiliation—“what do you mean? What do you come here for, making this infernal racket? What——”
Here he stopped short, because to his unspeakable dismay he saw standing in the doorway none other than his own son, Algernon, and Algernon’s face was not good to look at, being filled with shame, amazement, and bewilderment—with shame because he understood, all in a moment, that his father’s life had been one long lie, and that by this way, and none other, the family income had been earned. Had not his friend on the way told him that the man Crediton was known in certain circles as the provider of good after-dinner speeches for those who could afford to pay for them?—how it was whispered that the rare and occasional evenings on which the speeches were crisp and fiery and witty and moving all through were those for which Crediton had supplied the whole?—and how for his own speech, about which he had been most shamefully treated, he had paid twenty guineas? So that he understood without more words, and looked on open-mouthed, having for the moment no power of speech or utterance.
The father first recovered. He went on as if his son was not present.
“Who are you, sir, I say, who come to my quiet office with this blackguard noise? If you don’t tell me on the spot, I will take you by the scruff of your miserable little neck and drop you over the banisters.”
“I—I—I wrote to you for a speech.”
“What speech? What name? What for?”
His client, whose eyes at first were blinded by excess of wrath, now perceived to his amazement that Mr. Crediton was none other than his friend’s father, whom, indeed, he had met at the family mansion in Pembridge Crescent.