"Did ye notice the dust on top o' that cupboard? Was it disturbed?"

Hesitating an instant, Rachel answered firmly, without turning her head--

"I did ... It was ... Of course."

Mrs. Maldon made no sign of interest.

Mr. Batchgrew's boots creaked to and fro in the room.

"And what's Julian got to say for himself?" he asked, not addressing either woman in particular.

"Julian wasn't here. He didn't stay the night. Louis stayed instead,"

answered Mrs. Maldon, faintly, without opening her eyes.

"What? What? What's this?"

"Tell him, dear, how it was," said Mrs. Maldon, still more faintly.

Rachel obeyed, in agitated, uneven tones.

CHAPTER VI

THEORIES OF THE THEFT

I

The inspiring and agreeable image of Rachel floated above vast contending forces of ideas in the mind of Louis Fores as he bent over his petty-cash book amid the dust of the vile inner office at Horrocleave's; and their altercation was sharpened by the fact that Louis had not had enough sleep. He had had a great deal more sleep than Rachel, but he had not had what he was in the habit of calling his "whack" of it. Although never in a hurry to go to bed, he appreciated as well as any doctor the importance of sleep in the economy of the human frame, and his weekly average of repose was high; he was an expert sleeper.

He thirsted after righteousness, and the petty-cash book was permeated through and through with unrighteousness; and it was his handiwork. Of course, under the unconscious influence of Rachel, seen in her kitchen and seen also in various other striking aspects during the exciting night, he might have bravely exposed the iniquity of the petty-cash book to Jim Horrocleave, and cleared his conscience, and then gone and confessed to Rachel, and thus prepared the way for the inner peace and a new life. He would have suffered--there was indeed a possibility of very severe suffering--but he would have been a free man--yes, free even if in prison, and he would have followed the fine tradition of rect.i.tude, exhorting the respect and admiration of all true souls, etc. He had read authentic records of similar deeds. What stopped him from carrying out the programme of honesty was his powerful worldly common sense. Despite what he had read, and despite the inspiring image of Rachel, his common sense soon convinced him that confession would be an error of judgment and quite unremunerative for, at any rate, very many years. Hence he abandoned regretfully the notion of confession, as a beautifully impossible dream. But righteousness was not thereby entirely denied to him; his thirst for it could still be a.s.suaged by the device of an oath to repay secretly to Horrocleave every penny that he had stolen from Horrocleave, which oath he took--and felt better and worthier of Rachel.

He might, perhaps, have inclined more effectually towards confession had not the petty-cash book appeared to him in the morning light as an admirably convincing piece of work. It had the most innocent air, and was markedly superior to his recollection of it. On many pages he himself could scarcely detect his own traces. He began to feel that he could rely pretty strongly on the cleverness of the petty-cash book.

Only four blank pages remained in it. A few days more and it would be filled up, finished, labelled with a gummed white label showing its number and the dates of its first and last entries, shelved and forgotten. A pity that Horrocleave's suspicions had not been delayed for another month or so, for then the book might have been mislaid, lost, or even consumed in a conflagration! But never mind! A certain amount of ill luck fell to every man, and he would trust to his excellent handicraft in the petty-cash book. It was his only hope in the world, now that the mysterious and heavenly bank-notes were gone.

His att.i.tude towards the bank-notes was, quite naturally, illogical and self-contradictory. While the bank-notes were in his pocket he had in the end seen three things with clearness. First, the wickedness of appropriating them. Second, the danger of appropriating them--having regard to the prevalent habit of keeping the numbers of bank-notes.

Third, the wild madness of attempting to utilize them in order to replace the stolen petty cash, for by no ingenuity could the presence of a h.o.a.rd of over seventy pounds in the petty-cash box have been explained. He had perfectly grasped all that; and yet, the notes having vanished, he felt forlorn, alone, as one who has lost his best friend--a prop and firm succour in a universe of quicksands.

In the matter of the burning of the notes his conscience did not accuse him. On the contrary, he emerged blameless from the episode. It was not he who first had so carelessly left the notes lying about. He had not searched for them, he had not purloined them. They had been positively thrust upon him. His intention in a.s.suming charge of them for a brief s.p.a.ce was to teach some negligent person a lesson. During the evening Fate had given him no opportunity to produce them. And when in the night, with honesty unimpeachable, he had decided to restore them to the landing, Fate had intervened once more. At each step of the affair he had acted for the best in difficult circ.u.mstances. Persons so ill-advised as to drop bank-notes under chairs must accept all the consequences of their act. Who could have foreseen that while he was engaged on the philanthropic errand of fetching a doctor for an aged lady Rachel would light a fire under the notes?... No, not merely was he without sin in the matter of the bank-notes, he was rather an ill-used person, a martyr deserving of sympathy. And, further, he did not regret the notes; he was glad they were gone. They could no longer tempt him now, and their disappearance would remain a mystery for ever. So far as they were concerned, he could look his aunt or anybody else in the face without a tremor. The mere destruction of the immense, undetermined sum of money did not seriously ruffle him. As an ex-bank clerk he was aware that though an individual would lose, the State, through the Bank of England, would correspondingly gain, and thus for the nonce he had the large sensation of a patriot.

II

Axon, the factotum of the counting-house, came in from the outer office, with a mien composed of mirth and apprehension in about equal parts. If Axon happened to be a subject of a conversation and there was any uncertainty as to which Axon out of a thousand Axons he might be, the introducer of the subject would always say, "You know--sandy-haired fellow." This described him--hair, beard, moustache. Sandy-haired men have no age until they are fifty-five, and Axon was not fifty-five. He was a pigeon-flyer by choice, and a clerk in order that he might be a pigeon-flyer. His fault was that, with no moral right whatever to do so, he would treat Louis Fores as a business equal in the office and as a social equal in the street.

He sprang upon Louis now as one grinning valet might spring upon another, enormous with news, and whispered--

"I say, guv'nor's put his foot through them steps from painting-shop and sprained his ankle. Look out for ructions, eh? Thank the Lord it's a half-day!" and then whipped back to his own room.

On any ordinary Sat.u.r.day morning Louis by a fine frigidity would have tried to show to the obtuse Axon that he resented such demeanour towards himself on the part of an Axon, a.s.suming as it did that the art-director of the works was one of the servile crew that scuttled about in terror if the ferocious Horrocleave happened to sneeze. But to-day the mere sudden information that Horrocleave was on the works gave him an unpleasant start and seriously impaired his presence of mind. He had not been aware of Horrocleave's arrival. He had been expecting to hear Horrocleave's step and voice, and the rustle of him hanging up his mackintosh outside (Horrocleave always wore a mackintosh instead of an overcoat), and all the general introductory sounds of his advent, before he finally came into the inner room. But, now, for aught Louis knew, Horrocleave might already have been in the inner room, before Louis. He was upset. The enemy was not attacking him in the proper and usual way.

And the next instant, ere he could collect and reorganize his forces, he was paralysed by the footfall of Horrocleave, limping, and the bang of a door.

And Louis thought--

"He's in the outer office. He's only got to take his mackintosh off, and then I shall see his head coming through this door, and perhaps he'll ask me for the petty-cash book right off."

But Horrocleave did not even pause to remove his mackintosh. In defiance of immemorial habit, being himself considerably excited and confused, he stalked straight in, half hopping, and sat down in his frowsy chair at his frowsy desk, with his cap at the back of his head.

He was a spare man, of medium height, with a thin, shrewd face and a constant look of hard, fierce determination.

And there was Louis staring like a fool at the open page of the petty-cash book, incriminating himself every instant.

"h.e.l.lo!" said Louis, without looking round. "What's up?"

"What's up?" Horrocleave scowled. "What d'ye mean?"

"I thought you were limping just the least bit in the world," said Louis, whose tact was instinctive and indestructible.

"Oh, _that_!" said Horrocleave, as though nothing was farther from his mind than the peculiarity of his gait that morning. He bit his lip.

"Slipped over something?" Louis suggested.

"Aye!" said Horrocleave, somewhat less ominously, and began to open his letters.

Louis saw that he had done well to feign ignorance of the sprain and to a.s.sume that Horrocleave had slipped, whereas in fact Horrocleave had put his foot through a piece of rotten wood. Everybody in the works, upon pain of death, would have to pretend that the employer had merely slipped, and that the consequences were negligible. Horrocleave had already nearly eaten an old man alive for the sin of asking whether he had hurt himself!

And he had not hurt himself because two days previously he had ferociously stopped the odd-man of the works from wasting his time in mending just that identical stair, and had a.s.serted that the stair was in excellent condition. Horrocleave, though Napoleonic by disposition, had a provincial mind, even a Five Towns mind. He regarded as sheer loss any expenditure on repairs or renewals or the processes of cleansing. His theory was that everything would "do" indefinitely. He pa.s.sed much of his time in making things "do." His confidence in the theory that things could indeed be made to "do" was usually justified, but the steps from the painting-shop--a gimcrack ladder with hand-rail, attached somehow externally to a wall--had at length betrayed it. That the accident had happened to himself, and not to a lad balancing a plankful of art-l.u.s.tre ware on one shoulder, was sheer luck. And now the odd-man, with the surrept.i.tious air of one engaged in a nefarious act, was putting a new tread on the stairs. Thus devoutly are the Napoleonic served!

Horrocleave seemed to weary of his correspondence.

"By the by," he said in a strange tone, "let's have a look at that petty-cash book."

Louis rose, and with all his charm, with all the elegance of a man intended by Nature for wealth and fashion instead of a slave on a foul pot-bank, gave up the book. It was like giving up hope to the last vestige, like giving up the ghost. He saw with horrible clearness that he had been deceiving himself, that Horrocleave's ruthless eye could not fail to discern at the first glance all his neat dodges, such as additions of ten to the shillings, and even to the pounds here and there, and ingenious errors in carrying forward totals from the bottom of one page to the top of the next. He began to speculate whether Horrocleave would be content merely to fling him out of the office, or whether he would prosecute. Prosecution seemed much more in accordance with the Napoleonic temperament, and yet Louis could not, then, conceive himself the victim of a prosecution.... Anybody else, but not Louis Fores!

Horrocleave, his elbow on the table, leaned his head on his hand and began to examine the book. Suddenly he looked up at Louis, who could not move and could not cease from agreeably smiling.

Said Horrocleave in a still more peculiar tone--

"Just ask Axon whether he means to go fetch wages to-day or to-morrow.

Has he forgotten it's Sat.u.r.day morning?"

Louis shot away into the outer office, where Axon was just putting on his hat to go to the bank.

Alone in the outer office Louis wondered. The whole of his vitality was absorbed in the single function of wondering. Then through the thin slit of the half-open door between the top and the middle hinges, he beheld Horrocleave bending in judgment over the book. And he gazed at the vision in the fascination of horror. In a few moments Horrocleave leaned back, and Louis saw that his face had turned paler.

It went almost white. Horrocleave was breathing strangely, his arms dropped downward, his body slipped to one side, his cap fell off, his eyes shut, his mouth opened, his head sank loosely over the back of the chair like the head of a corpse. He had fainted. The thought pa.s.sed through Louis' mind that stupefaction at the complex unrighteousness of the petty-cash records had caused Horrocleave to lose consciousness. Then the true explanation occurred to him. It was the pain in his ankle that had overcome the heroic sufferer. Louis had desired to go to his aid, but he could not budge from his post.

Presently the colour began slowly to return to Horrocleave's cheek; his eyes opened; he looked round sleepily and then wildly; and then he rubbed his eyes and yawned. He remained quiescent for several minutes, while a railway lorry thundered through the archway and the hoofs of the great horse crunched on shawds in the yard. Then he called, in a subdued voice--