Young Mr. Barters Repentance | Page 8

related to other things than the fear of any fall from honour. Bommaney had evidently been very queer. Bommaney had been horribly cut up about something, even before he heard the news the young solicitor had to give him. But was he so disturbed as to be likely to forget where he had last secured so considerable a sum of money? This mental inquiry naturally set young Mr. Barter to work to discover how considerable the sum of money actually was. He laid the notes upon the table, and tried to wet his thumb upon his lips. There was no moisture there, and his mouth was as dry as touchwood. He drank a little water, and then began to count the notes. He made them eighty-one at first; and then, recounting, made them seventy-nine. Counting them a third time, he made them eighty.
'Damn it all!' said young Mr. Barter, 'can't I count? I suppose the old buffer will come back for them.' He tried a fourth time, and confirmed his third counting. 'They'll get stopped at the Bank,' he said. 'They'll be no use to anybody.' He sat for a while thinking, with his eyes half-closed, drumming out a tune upon the table with the tips of his fat white fingers, then he folded the notes with great precision and delicacy, put them into his pocket, found his hat, overcoat, and walking-stick, and made ready for the streets. In the quiet of these legal chambers many chance noises from without had from time to time been clearly audible. He heard now a hurrying step upon the pavement of the quadrangle, and, with a palpitation at the heart, he moved swiftly to put out the light, and listened. The step stumbled at the entrance to the staircase, at the foot of which the outer door stood closed. Young Mr. Barter's heart beat, if possible, faster than before; and the veins in his head so throbbed, that only the confining rim of his hat seemed to keep his head itself from bursting. There came an eager summons at the door, an imperative rapping with the head of a stout walking-stick. He set his teeth, and, drawing back his lips with a horrible smile in the dark, breathed noiselessly. The rapping grew more and more imperative and urgent, and then came a preternatural silence, with an undercurrent of distant sound in it, and the sudden blare of a cornet in the street, which sounded to his nerves like the trumpet of the herald of the day of judgment He heard the hurrying feet plunge down the steps again, and cross the quadrangle, and listened until their sound merged into the dull noises of the London night. He stood in the dark after this for what seemed a long time, learning that his features twitched, and teaching himself to control them. Then he left his chambers with great secrecy, and broke into a cold sweat to think, as he stood half through the doorway, how narrowly he had escaped from slamming the door behind him. This was an act which might have been suicidal in its stupidity; for to give any sign of his presence there after that thundering summons at the door would have been to betray himself beyond redemption. He inserted his latch-key noiselessly, and, crouching to escape imagined observers, drew the door gently after him, and turned the key slowly in the lock. As he did this he heard a footstep and a cough together close at hand, and, turning with a start, beheld a pale and slender man of brief stature, who scraped his lantern jaws with apologetic thumb and finger, and looking at him with a startled meekness, as if he would fain propitiate anger for a possible intrusion, sidled to the foot of the stairs, mounted the stairway with a backward glance and a second cough of apology, and so disappeared.
Young Mr. Barter, with his nerves already shaken by this small episode, walked into the main thoroughfare and merged with the crowd, bearing Mr. Bommaney's eight thousand pounds with him. When he had walked for a while he hailed a cab, and was driven home. He had, or prided himself on having, an exceptional eye for horseflesh, but it was not his faculty in this direction which had led him to choose a cab horsed by a brute of unusual symmetry and swiftness. This was an accident, but, like other accidents in this perplexed world, it served its purpose. It landed him at the paternal door in Harley Street almost at the instant at which Bommaney arrived there in pursuit of him.
Now, although young Mr. Barter had not calculated on meeting Bommaney so soon, and although the meeting was naturally something of a shock to him, he had