Roderick drew his shoulders together and turned away. “Nothing,” he said in a low voice. “No, damn it! nothing.”
Somehow he could not utter the threat that rose to his lips. His soul revolted. It is one of the strangest facts in human psychology that there is no man so vile but that there is one thing he cannot and will not do: sometimes the thing is a hideous crime, sometimes only a comparatively trivial act of dishonour; but whatever may be its relative importance, there is always one virtuous principle to which the human soul must cling. Roderick had blackmailed the father,—for that is what his forgery came to,—but he could not blackmail the son. Nor could he drag his own father, hoary scoundrel though he knew him to be, down with him in his disgrace. So he kept silent as to the mysterious relations between the two old men, and—unutterable pathos of poor humanity—his silence was a salve to his conscience.
Sylvester turned the handle of the studio door.
“Do you accept my terms?”
“Yes,” said Roderick, suddenly.
“Good,” said Sylvester, and he closed the door behind him and went downstairs into the street. There he took a cab and drove to Scotland Yard.
He was not the man to utter idle threats. Before dictating conditions to Roderick, he had coldly calculated upon the power that he could wield. Like that of every London specialist, his practice was socially varied to a curious extent. Among his patients was a high official at Scotland Yard, who, he knew, without dereliction of duty, would courteously carry out the arrangements he intended to suggest. The official received him as he had anticipated. In order to avoid a painful scandal in society, it would be better to let the culprit fly the country. Of course there would be no talk of extradition. In the mean time, a warrant could be issued and put in force whenever Dr. Lanyon gave the word. Sylvester went home grimly satisfied with his morning's work. He found awaiting him a telegram from Simmons to the effect that his father's condition was unchanged.
Roderick went into his dining-room, as dismantled and cheerless as the studio, and drank a cup of coffee. He tried to eat, but the food choked him. He was crushed, beaten, ruined. Utter dejection was in his attitude as he sat in the straight-backed chair, staring helplessly in front of him. Even in his crimes he had failed. He had deferred paying in the forged cheque to the very last moment possible for the cheque he had written for Urquhart to be honoured by his own bankers. He had reckoned on clearing-house delay, on the half-day of Saturday, on the intervening dies non of Sunday, in fact, on the cheque not coming under Matthew's notice until after the wedding. But the cheque had passed from bank to bank with diabolical expedition, and, like the curses in the Spanish proverb, it had come home to roost with a vengeance.
What was to become of him? He could scarcely realise his sentence. Exile from England meant a bitter struggle with poverty; and yet exile was his irremediable lot. In eight or nine hours he must start. There was no escape. He knew Sylvester of old, as hard as iron and as cold as ice, a man to carry out his purpose relentlessly. To-night—to leave this dear world of London behind him; tomorrow—to be in the aimless solitude of some foreign hotel, when, if fortune had been kind, he would have been standing at the altar with the woman whom he desired above all women that had ever entered his life. It was like the blank future of the man condemned to death.
Thoughts of his own misdoing, of his banishment, faded into a vague heaviness at the back of his brain, while the pang of a great hunger gripped him. He flung his arms on the table and buried his head and clutched his hair in both hands.