A Man of Means | Page 4

had passed over the ten shillings; and there, as far as he had known, the matter
had ended.
And now, after all this time, that simple action had borne fruit in the shape of Gelatine
and a check for five hundred pounds.
Roland's next emotion was triumph. The sudden entry of checks for five hundred pounds
into a man's life is apt to produce this result.
For the space of some minutes he gloated; and then reaction set in. Five hundred pounds
meant marriage with Muriel.
His brain worked quickly. He must conceal this thing. With trembling fingers he felt for
his match-box, struck a match, and burnt the telegram to ashes. Then, feeling a little
better, he sat down to think the whole matter over. His meditations brought a certain
amount of balm. After all, he felt, the thing could quite easily be kept a secret. He would
receive the check in due course, as stated, and he would bicycle over to the neighboring
town of Lexingham and start a bank-account with it. Nobody would know, and life would
go on as before.
He went to bed, and slept peacefully.
* * * * *
It was about a week after this that he was roused out of a deep sleep at eight o'clock in the
morning to find his room full of Coppins. Mr. Coppin was there in a nightshirt and his
official trousers. Mrs. Coppin was there, weeping softly in a brown dressing-gown.
Modesty had apparently kept Muriel from the gathering, but brothers Frank and Percy
stood at his bedside, shaking him by the shoulders and shouting. Mr. Coppin thrust a
newspaper at him, as he sat up blinking.
These epic moments are best related swiftly. Roland took the paper, and the first thing
that met his sleepy eye and effectually drove the sleep from it was this head-line:
ROMANCE OF THE CALCUTTA SWEEPSTAKES
And beneath it another in type almost as large as the first:
POOR CLERK WINS £40,000
His own name leaped at him from the printed page, and with it that of the faithful
Gelatine.

Flight! That was the master-word which rang in Roland's brain as day followed day. The
wild desire of the trapped animal to be anywhere except just where he was had come
upon him. He was past the stage when conscience could have kept him to his obligations.
He had ceased to think of anything or any one but himself. All he asked of Fate was to
remove him from Bury St. Edwards on any terms.
It may be that some inkling of his state of mind was wafted telepathically to Frank and
Percy, for it can not be denied that their behavior at this juncture was more than a little
reminiscent of the police force. Perhaps it was simply their natural anxiety to keep an eye
on what they already considered their own private gold-mine that made them so adhesive.
Certainly there was no hour of the day when one or the other was not in Roland's
immediate neighborhood. Their vigilance even extended to the night hours, and once,
when Roland, having tossed sleeplessly on his bed, got up at two in the morning, with the
wild idea of stealing out of the house and walking to London, a door opened as he
reached the top of the stairs, and a voice asked him what he thought he was doing. The
statement that he was walking in his sleep was accepted, but coldly.
It was shortly after this that, having by dint of extraordinary strategy eluded the brothers
and reached the railway-station, Roland, with his ticket to London in his pocket and the
express already entering the station, was engaged in conversation by old Mr. Coppin,
who appeared from nowhere to denounce the high cost of living in a speech that lasted
until the tail-lights of the train had vanished and Brothers Frank and Percy arrived,
panting.
A man has only a certain capacity for battling with Fate. After this last episode Roland
gave in. Not even the exquisite agony of hearing himself described in church as a
bachelor of this parish, with the grim addition that this was for the second time of asking,
could stir him to a fresh dash for liberty.
Altho the shadow of the future occupied Roland's mind almost to the exclusion of
everything else, he was still capable of suffering a certain amount of additional torment
from the present; and one of the things which made the present a source of misery to him
was the fact that he was expected to behave more like a mad millionaire than a sober
young man with a knowledge of the value of money. His mind, trained from infancy to a
decent respect for the pence, had