The cab-door was flung open and out sprang an utter stranger to Harry Ringrose. This was a middle-aged man of the medium height, wearing a somewhat shabby tall hat and a frock-coat which shone unduly in the strong sunlight. He had a fresh complexion, a reddish moustache streaked with grey, a sharp-pointed nose, and a very deep chin which needed shaving; but what struck Harry first and last were the keen, decisive eyes, twinkling behind glasses with gold rims, which went straight to the broken window and surveyed it critically before their owner had set foot on the steps. It seemed that the cabman saw it too and made some remark; for the fare turned upon him, paid him and slammed his door, and ordered him off in a very peremptory voice which Harry heard distinctly. The cab turned in the sweep and disappeared among the trees. Then the stranger came slowly up the steps, with his eyes once more fixed upon the broken window. In another moment they had run like lightning over the face of the house, and, before Harry had time to move, had met his own.
The stranger raised his eyebrows, shook his head, and pointed to the front door. Harry went to it, shot the bolts back, turned the key, and flung the door wide open. He was trembling now with simple terror. His tongue would not ask what had happened. It was like standing to be shot, and having to give the signal to the firing party.
The other seemed to feel it almost equally: his fresh face was pale, and his quick eyes still with sorrow and compunction. It was evident he knew the worst. If only he would tell it unasked!
“My name is Lowndes,” he began at last. “Gordon Lowndes — you must have heard of me?”
“I — I don’t remember it,” stammered Harry at the second attempt.
“I stayed here several times while you were in Africa. I was here in February.”
“Yes, now I remember your name: it was in the last letter I had.”
He could say this calmly; and yet his lips could not frame the question whose answer would indeed be life or death.
“Two years ago I did not know your people,” resumed the other. “But for two years I have been their most intimate friend.”
“Tell me,” at length whispered Harry: “is — either of them — dead?” And he awaited the worst with a sudden fortitude.
Mr. Lowndes shook his head.
“Not that I know of,” said he.
“Thank God!” the boy burst out, with the first break in his voice. “Nothing else matters — nothing — nothing! I made sure it was that! Can you swear that my father is all right?”
The other winced. “To the best of my knowledge,” said he almost sharply.
“And my mother?”
“Yes, yes, I was with her three days ago.”
“Where?”
“In London.”
“London! And I passed through London last night! You saw her, you say, three days ago, and she was all right then?”
“I never knew her look better.”
“Then tell me the worst and let us have it over! I can see that we have lost our money — but that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters if they are all right; won’t you come in, sir, and tell me all?”
Harry did not know it, for in his deep emotion he had lost sight of self; but there was something infinitely touching in the way the young man stood aside and ushered his senior into the hall as though it were still his home. Mr. Lowndes shook his head at the unconscious air, and he entered slowly, with it bent. Harry shut the doors behind them, and they turned into the first room. It was the room with the empty bookshelves; and it still smelt of Harry’s father’s cheroots.
“You may wonder at my turning up like this,” said Lowndes; “but for those fools at the shipping-office I should have met you at the docks. I undertook to do so, and to break the news to you there.”
“But how could you know my ship?”
The other smiled.
“Cable,” said he; “that was a very simple matter. But if your shipping fellows hadn’t sworn you’d be reported from the Lizard, in lots of time for me to get up from Scotland to meet you, I should never have run down there as I was induced to do on business the night before last. I should have let the business slide. As it was the telegram reached me last night in Glasgow, when I knew it was too late to keep you out of this. Still, I timed myself to get here five minutes before you, and should have done it if my train hadn’t been forty minutes late. It — it must have been the devil’s own quarter-of-an-hour for you, Ringrose! Have a drop of this before we go on; it’ll do you good.”
He took a flask from his pocket and half filled the cup with raw whisky, which Harry seized gratefully and drained at a gulp. In truth, the shock of the morning, after the night’s excitement, had left him miserably faint. The spirit revived him a little.
“You are very kind to me,” he said, returning the cup. “You must be a great friend of my parents for them to give you this job, and a good friend to take it on! Now, if you please, tell me every mortal thing; you will tell me nothing I cannot bear; but I am sure you are too kind to keep anything back.”
Lowndes was gazing with a shrewd approval upon the plucky young fellow, in whom, indeed, disappointment and disaster had so far awakened only what was best. At the last words, however, the quick eyes fell behind the gold-rimmed glasses in a way that made Harry wonder whether he had indeed been told the worst. And yet there was already more than enough to account for the other’s embarrassment; and he determined not to add to it by unnecessary or by impatient questions.
“You are doubtless aware,” began Lowndes, “that the iron trade in this country has long been going from bad to worse? You have heard of the bad times, I imagine, before to-day?”
Harry nodded: he had heard of the bad times as long as he could remember. But because the happy conditions of his own boyhood had not been affected by the cry, he had believed that it was nothing else. He was punished now.
“The times,” proceeded Lowndes, “have probably been bad since your childhood. How old are you now?”
“Twenty-one to-day.”
“To-day!”
“Go on,” said Harry, hoarsely. “Don’t be sorry for me. I deserve very little sympathy.” His hands were in the pockets he had wilfully emptied of every coin.
“When you were five years old,” continued Lowndes, “the pig-iron your father made fetched over five pounds a ton; before you were seven it was down to two-pounds-ten; it never picked up again; and for the last ten years it hasn’t averaged two pounds. Shall I tell you what that means? For these ten years your father has been losing a few shillings on every ton of pig-iron produced — a few hundred pounds every week of his life!”
“And I was enjoying myself at school, and now in Africa! Oh,” groaned Harry Ringrose, “go on, go on; but don’t waste any pity on me.”
“You may be a very rich man, but that sort of thing can’t last for ever. The end is bound to come, and in your father’s case it came, practically speaking, several years ago.”
“Several years? I don’t follow you. He never failed?”
“It would have been better for you all if he had. You have looked upon this place as your own, I suppose, from as far back as you can remember down to this morning?”
“As my father’s own — decidedly.”
“It has belonged to his bankers for at least five years.”
“How do you know?” cried Harry hotly.
“He told me himself, when I first came down here, now eighteen months ago. We met in London, and he asked me down. I was in hopes we might do business together; but it was no go.”
“What sort of business?”
“I wanted him to turn the whole thing into a Limited Liability Company,” said Gordon Lowndes, reeling off the last three words as though he knew them better than his own name; “I mean those useless blast-furnaces! What good were they doing? None at all. Three bob a ton on the wrong side! That’s all the good they’d done for years, and that’s all they were likely to do till times changed. Times never will change — to what they were when you were breec
hed — but that’s a detail. Your father’s name down here was as sweet as honey. All he’d got to do was to start an extra carriage or two, put up for Parliament on the winning side, and turn his works into a Limited Liability Company. I’d have promoted it. I’d have seen it through in town. The best men would have gone on the board, and we’d have done the bank so well in shares that they wouldn’t have got out of it if they could. We’d have made a spanking good thing of it if only the governor would have listened to reason. He wouldn’t; said he’d rather go down with the ship than let in a lot of shareholders. ‘Damn the shareholders!’ says I. ‘Why count the odds in the day of battle?’ It’s the biggest mistake you can make, Ringrose, and your governor kept on making it! It was in this very room, and he was quite angry with me. He wouldn’t let me say another word. And what happens? A year or so later — this last February — he wires me to come down at once. Of course I came, but it was as I thought: the bank’s sick of it, and threatens to foreclose. I went to see them; not a bit of good. Roughly speaking, it was a case of either paying off half the mortgage and reconstructing the whole bag of tricks, or going through the courts to beggary. Twenty thousand was the round figure; and I said I’d raise it if it was to be raised.”
This speech had barely occupied a minute, so rapidly was it spoken; and there was much of it which Harry, in his utter ignorance of all such matters, would have found difficult to follow at a much slower rate of utterance. As it was, however, it filled him with distrust of his father’s friend, who, on his own showing, had made some proposal dishonourable in the eyes of a high-principled man. Moreover, it came instinctively to Harry that he had caught a first glimpse of the real Gordon Lowndes, with his cunning eyes flashing behind his pince-nez, the gestures of a stump orator, and this stream of unintelligible jargon gushing from his lips. The last sentences, however, were plain enough even to Harry’s understanding.
“You said you’d raise it,” he repeated dryly; “yet you can’t have done so.”
“I raised ten thousand.”
“Only half; well?”
“It was no use.”
“My father would refuse to touch it?”
“N-no.”
“Then what did he do?”
Lowndes drew back a pace, saying nothing, but watching the boy with twitching eyelids.
“Come, sir, speak out!” cried Harry, “He will tell me himself, you know, when I get back to London.”
“He is not there.”
“You said he was!”
“I said your mother was.”
“Where is my father, then?”
“On the Continent — we think.”
“You think? And the — ten thousand pounds?”
“He has it with him,” said Lowndes, in a low voice. “I’m sorry to say he — bolted with the lot!”
CHAPTER III.
THE SIN OF THE FATHER.
“It’s a lie!”
The word flew through Harry’s teeth as in another century his sword might have flown from its sheath; and so blind was he with rage and horror that he scarcely appreciated its effect on Gordon Lowndes. Never was gross insult more mildly taken. The elder man did certainly change colour for an instant; in another he had turned away with a shrug, and in yet another he was round again with a sad half-smile. Harry glared at him in a growing terror. He saw that he was forgiven; a blow had disconcerted him less.
“I expected you to jump down my throat,” observed Lowndes, with a certain twitching of the sharp nose which came and went with the intermittent twinkle in his eyes.
“It is lucky you are not a younger man, or you would have got even more than you expected!”
“For telling you the truth? Well, well, I admire your spirit, Ringrose.”
“It is not the truth,” said Harry doggedly, his chest heaving, and a cold sweat starting from his skin.
“I wish to God it were not!”
“You mean to tell me my father absconded?”
“That is the word I should have used.”
“With ten thousand pounds that did not belong to him?”
“Not exactly that; the money was lent to him, but for another purpose. He has misapplied rather than misappropriated it.”
Harry felt his head swimming. Disaster he might bear — but disaster rooted in disgrace! He gazed in mute misery upon the stripped but still familiar room; he breathed hard, and the stale odour of his father’s cheroots became a sudden agony in his dilated nostrils. Something told him that what he had heard was true. That did not make it easier to believe — on the bare word of a perfect stranger.
“Proofs!” he gasped. “What proofs have you? Have you any?”
Lowndes produced a pocket-book and extracted a number of newspaper cuttings.
“Yes,” sighed he, “I have almost everything that has appeared about it in the papers. It will be cruel reading for you, Ringrose; but you may take it better so than from anybody’s lips. The accounts in the local press — the creditors’ meetings and so forth — are, however, rather long. Hadn’t you better wait until we’re on our way back to town?”
“Wait? No, show me something now! I apologise for what I said; I made use of an unpardonable word; but — I don’t believe it yet!”
“Here, then,” said Lowndes, “if you insist. Here’s a single short paragraph from the P.M.G. It would appear about the last day in March.”
“The day I sailed!” groaned Harry. He took the cutting and read as follows: —
THE MISSING IRONMASTER.
The Press Association states that nothing further has been ascertained with regard to the whereabouts of Mr. Henry J. Ringrose, the Westmoreland ironmaster, who was last seen on Easter Eve. He has been traced, however, as already reported in these columns, to the Café; Suisse in Dieppe, though no further. The people at the café; persist in stating that their visitor only remained a few hours, so that he would appear to have walked thence into thin air. The police, as usual, are extremely reticent; but inquiry at Scotland Yard has elicited the fact that considerable doubt exists as to whether the missing man’s chief creditors will, or can, owing to the character of their claim, take further action in the matter.
“Who are the chief creditors?” asked Harry, returning the cutting with an ashy face.
“Four business friends of your father’s, from whom I raised the money in his name.”
“Here in the neighbourhood?”
“No, in London; they advanced two thousand five hundred each.”
“It was no good, you say?”
“No; the bank was not satisfied.”
“So my father ran away with their money and left the works to go to blazes — and my mother to starve?”
Lowndes shrugged his shoulders.
“I apologise again for insulting you, Mr. Lowndes,” said the boy, holding out his hand. “You have been a good friend to my poor father, I can see, and I know that you firmly believe what you say. But I never will! No; not if all his friends, and every newspaper in the kingdom, told me it was true!”
“Then what are you to believe?”
“That there has been foul play!”
The elder man turned away with another shrug, and it was some moments before Harry saw his face; when he did it was grave and sympathetic as before, and exhibited no trace of the irritation which it had cost an apparent effort to suppress.
“I am not surprised at that entering your head, Ringrose.”
“Has it never entered yours?”
“Everything has; but one weeds out the impossibilities.”
“Why is it impossible?” Harry burst out. “It is a good deal likelier than that my father would have done what it’s said he did! There’s an impossibility, if you like; and you would say so, too, if you had known him better.”
Mr. Lowndes shook his head, and smiled sadly as he watched the boy’s flaming face through his spectacles.
“You may have known your father, Ringrose, but you don’t know human nature, or you wo
uldn’t talk like that. Nothing is impossible — no crime — not even to the best of us — when the strain becomes more than we can bear. It is a pure question of strain and strength: which is the greater of the two. Every man has his breaking-point; your father was at his for years; it’s a mystery to me how he held out so long. You must look at it sensibly, Ringrose. No thinking man will blame him, for the simple reason that every man who thinks knows very well that he might have done the same thing himself under the same pressure. Besides — give him a chance! With ten thousand pounds in his pocket — —”
“You’re sure he had it in his pocket?” interrupted Harry. These arguments only galled his wounds.
“Or else in a bag; it comes to the same thing.”
“In what shape would he have the money?”
“Big notes and some gold.”
“Yet foul play’s an impossibility!”
“The numbers of the notes are known. Not one of them has turned up.”
“I care nothing about that,” cried the boy wildly, “though it shows he hasn’t spent them himself. Listen to me, Mr. Lowndes. I believe my father is dead, I believe he has been murdered: and I would rather that than what you say! But you claim to have been his friend? You raised this money for him? Very well; take my hand — here in his room — where I can see him now, all the time I’m talking to you — and swear that you will help me to clear this mystery up! We’ll inspan the best detective in town, and take him with us to Dieppe, and never leave him till we get at the truth. I mean to live for nothing else. Swear that you will help me ... swear it here ... in his own room.”
The wild voice had come down to a broken whisper. Next moment it had risen again: the man hesitated.
“Swear it! Swear it! Or you may have been my father’s friend, but you are none from this hour to my mother and me.”
Lowndes spread his hands in an indulgent gesture.
“Very well! I swear to help you to clear up this — mystery — as long as you think it is one.”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 129
