The Ivory Gate, a new edition. Walter Besant
and cart-horses, without taking the least notice of them. When he reached home, he dashed into the drawing-room, where he found his two sisters – Hilda and Elsie – one of them a girl of eighteen, the other of thirteen. With flaming cheeks and fiery eyes he delivered himself of his story; he hurled it at their heads; he called upon them to share his indignation, and to join with him in scorn and contempt of the man – their supposed best friend, Trustee, Guardian, Adviser – their father's best friend – who had done this thing – who had accused him, on the bare evidence of two or three circumstantial facts, of such a crime!
There is something magnetic in all great emotions: one proof of their reality is that they are magnetic. It is only an actor who can endow an assumed emotion with magnetism. Elsie, the younger girl, fell into a corresponding sympathy of wrath: she was equal to the occasion: passion for passion, she joined him and fed the flame. But – for all persons are not magnetic – the elder sister remained cold. From time to time she wanted to know exactly what Mr. Dering had said: this her brother was too angry to remember: she was pained and puzzled: she neither soothed him nor sympathised with him.
Then the mother returned, and the whole story was told again, Elsie assisting. Now, Mrs. Arundel was a woman of great sense: a practical woman: a woman of keen judgment. She prided herself upon the possession of these qualities, which are not supposed to be especially feminine. She heard the story with disturbed face and knitted brow.
'Surely,' she said, 'what you tell me, Athelstan, is beyond belief. Mr. Dering, of all men, to accuse you – you – of such a thing! It is impossible.'
'I wish it was impossible. He accuses me of forging that cheque for 720l. He says that while I was working in his office for him, a fortnight ago, I took a certain cheque book out of the safe, forged his writing on a cheque, and returned the cheque book. This is what he says. Do you call that accusing, or don't you?'
'Certainly. If he says that. But how can he – Mr. Dering – the most exact and careful of men? I will drive to Lincoln's Inn at once and find out. My dear boy, pray calm yourself. There is – there must be – some terrible mistake.'
She went immediately; and she had a long interview with the solicitor.
Mr. Dering was evidently much disturbed by what had happened. He did not receive her as he usually received his clients, sitting in his arm-chair. He pushed back the chair and stood up, leaning a hand on the back of it, a tall, thin, erect figure, gray-haired, austere of face. There was little to reassure the mother in that face. The very trouble of it made her heart sink.
'I certainly have not accused Athelstan,' he said. 'It is, however, quite true that there has been a robbery here, and that of a large sum of money – no less than 720l.'
'But what has that to do with my boy?'
'We have made a few preliminary inquiries. I will do for you, Mrs. Arundel, what I did for your son, and you shall yourself understand what connection those inquiries have with him.'
He proceeded coldly and without comment to set forth the case so far as he had got at the facts. As he went on, the mother's heart became as heavy as lead. Before he finished, she was certain. There is, you see, a way of presenting a case without comment which is more efficacious than any amount of talk; and Mrs. Arundel plainly perceived – which was indeed the case – that the lawyer had by this time little doubt in his own mind that her son had done this thing.
'I thought it right,' he continued, 'to lay before him these facts at the outset. If he is innocent, I thought, he will be the better able to prove his innocence, and perhaps to find the guilty person. If he is guilty, he may be led to confession or restitution. The facts about the cheque book and the safe are very clear. I am certain that the safe has not been opened by any other key. The only persons who have had access to it are Checkley and your son Athelstan. As for Checkley – he couldn't do it, he could not possibly do it. The thing is quite beyond him.'
Mrs. Arundel groaned. 'This is terrible!' she said.
'Meantime, the notes are numbered: they may be traced: they are stopped: we shall certainly find the criminal by means of those notes.'
'Mr. Dering' – Mrs. Arundel rose and laid her hand on his – 'you are our very old friend. Tell me – if this wretched boy goes away – if he gives back the money that remains – if I find the rest – will there be – any further – investigation?'
'To compound a felony is a crime. It is, however, one of those crimes which men sometimes commit without repentance or shame. My dear lady, if he will confess and restore – we shall see.'
Mrs. Arundel drove home again. She came away fully persuaded in her own mind that her son – her only son – and none other, must be that guilty person. She knew Mr. Dering's room well: she had sat there hundreds of times: she knew the safe: she knew old Checkley. She perceived the enormous improbability of this ancient clerk's doing such a thing. She knew, again, what temptations assail a young man in London: she saw what her Trustee thought of it: and she jumped to the conclusion that her son – and none other – was the guilty person. She even saw how he must have done it: she saw the quick look while Mr. Dering's back was turned: the snatching of the cheque book: the quick replacing it. Her very keenness of judgment helped her to the conviction. Women less clever would have been slower to believe. Shameful, miserable termination of all her hopes for her boy's career! But that she could think of afterwards. For the moment the only thing was to get the boy away – to induce him to confess – and to get him away.
He was calmer when she got home, but he was still talking about the thing: he would wait till the right man was discovered: then he would have old Dering on his knees. The thing would be set right in a few days. He had no fear of any delay. He was quite certain that it was Checkley – that old villain. Oh! He couldn't do it by himself, of course – nobody could believe that of him. He had accomplices – confederates – behind him. Checkley's part of the job was to steal the cheque book and give it to his confederates and share the swag.
'Well, mother?' he asked.
His mother sat down. She looked pale and wretched.
'Mother,' cried Hilda, the elder sister. 'Quick! What has happened? What does Mr. Dering say?'
'He accuses nobody,' she replied in a hard dry voice. 'But – '
'But what?' asked Hilda.
'He told me everything – everything – and – and – Oh!' She burst into sobs and crying, though she despised women who cry. 'It is terrible – It is terrible – It is incredible. Yet, what can I think? What can any one think? Leave us, Hilda. Leave us, Elsie.' The two girls went out unwillingly. 'Oh! my son – how can I believe it? And yet – on the one hand, a boy of two-and-twenty exposed to all the temptations of town: on the other, an old clerk of fifty years' service and integrity. And when the facts are laid before you both – calmly and coldly – you fly into a rage and run away, while Checkley calmly remains to await the inquiry.'
Mrs. Arundel had been accustomed all her life to consider Mr. Dering as the wisest of men. She felt instinctively that he regarded her son with suspicion: she heard all the facts: she jumped to the conclusion that he was a prodigal and a profligate: that he had fallen into evil ways, and spent money in riotous living: she concluded that he had committed these crimes in order to get more money for more skittles and oranges.
'Athelstan ' – she laid her hand upon his arm, but did not dare to lift her eyes and behold that guilty face – 'Athelstan' – confess – make reparation so far as you can – confess – oh! my son – my son! You will be caught and tried and found guilty, and – oh! I cannot say it – through the notes which you have changed. They are all known and stopped.'
The boy's wrath was now changed to madness.
'You!' he cried. 'You! My own mother! You believe it, no! Oh! we are all going mad together. What? Then I am turned out of this house, as I am turned out of my place. I go, then – I go; and' – here he swore a mighty oath, as strong as anybody out of Spain can make them – 'I will never – never – never come home again till you come yourself to beg forgiveness – you – my own mother!'
Outside, in the hall, his sisters stood, waiting