The Ivory Gate, a new edition

by Walter Besant

'As soon as this other business is over, the Chief must tell your mother, Athelstan. It ought to come from him. I shall say nothing to Elsie just yet. She shall learn that you are home again, and that your name is clear again, at the same moment.'

'I confess that I should be pleased to make them all confess that their suspicions were hasty and unfounded. At the same time I did wrong to go away; I ought to have stuck to my post. As for this other business, one thinks with something like satisfaction of the wise old lawyer losing forty thousand pounds. It made him sit up, did it? For such a man to sit up indicates the presence of deep emotion. Lost forty thousand pounds! And he who holds so strongly to the sanctity of Property! Forty thousand pounds!'

'Well; but we shall recover the certificates, or get new ones in their place.'

'I suppose so. Shares can't be lost or stolen, really—can they? Meantime, there may be difficulty, and you must try to find the forger. Has it yet occurred to you that Checkley is the only man who has had control of the letters and access at all times to the office?'

'It has.'

'Checkley is not exactly a fox: he is a jackal: therefore he does somebody's dirty work for him at a wage. That is the way with the jackal, you know. Eight years ago he tried to make a little pile by a little forgery—he did not commit the forgery, I am sure—but he did the jackal; only he forgot that notes are numbered: so when he remembered that, he put them back. Now, his friend the forger, who is no doubt a begging-letter writer, has devised an elaborate scheme for getting hold of shares—ignorant that they are of no value.'

'Well, he has drawn the dividends for four months.'

'That is something, you see; but he hoped to get hold of thirty-eight thousand pounds. It is the same hand at work, you infer from the writing. You are quite sure of that?'

'There can be no doubt of it. How could two different hands present exactly the same curious singularities?'

'And all the letters, cheques, and transfers for the same person. What is his name?'