Derby Day Page 12

  All this Mr Pardew read with great interest. He traced with his finger a little pencilled mark that someone had made beneath Mr Gallentin’s encomium to the safe. He smiled very much over the difficulties of the safe-breaker, and when he came to the mention of Captain McTurk he gave a little start, as if he knew the name but did not wish to be reminded of it. Then, putting the article to one side, he picked up the other slips of paper that had fallen out of the envelope. One of these, he instantly saw, was a ferry ticket from Boulogne to Dover. The other was a letter, bound up in a neat little blue envelope, not very lengthy, as it consisted of no more than a couple of pages of foolscap, with no address or date above it and no signature beneath it, but containing one or two suggestions and pieces of advice that Mr Pardew looked at very keenly. He was a thorough man, and the reading of the article and the letter took him a good quarter of an hour. Then he put article, letter and steamer ticket back into the larger envelope, placed it in the drawer of a little lacquered desk – about the only thing of value in the room – and sat down in the armchair. Grey rain was coming in from the sea – the first drops were already scudding against the window – and he watched it as it fell, and listened to the wind whistling through the ships’ masts in the harbour.

  Presently there came the noise of footsteps descending the stair and Jemima appeared in the room beside him.

  ‘Your friend has gone?’

  ‘He is not my friend, but he has gone. I daresay he will be on the boat by now. Heaving his stomach over the side, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘He looked rather a timid little man.’

  ‘Timid? I daresay he is. No doubt when he gets home to his wife and children he is as bold as a lion. It is always the same. Did I ever tell you of the time I met the Earl of Littlehampton?’

  ‘I don’t think you did,’ said Jemima, the look on whose face suggested that she loved stories of this kind.

  ‘A man who makes a great noise in the world, of course. But put him in a public room, or with fellows who don’t know him, and he’s as docile as a lamb. They say he eats the countess for his breakfast, though. By the by,’ he went on, the tone of his voice changing as he did so, ‘how much is owing just now?’

  ‘I think it is about a hundred francs,’ Jemima said, with a readiness that suggested she was quite as interested in domestic economy as the Earl of Littlehampton. ‘And there is that money to the baker.’

  Mr Pardew thought – or perhaps did not think – about the money owing to the baker, staring into the embers of the fire. He shot another little glance at the lacquered desk, and then rose to his feet and began to put on a coat that he retrieved from a hook behind the door.

  ‘You are not going out, surely?’

  ‘It is only a little rain. There is something I need to do.’

  Jemima accepted this with her customary meekness. ‘Shall you be long?’

  ‘An hour, perhaps. Is there anything in the house?’

  ‘There is not.’

  ‘Then I had better get something,’ Mr Pardew said, with his great hand on the door-knob.

  Beyond the row of cottages and the marram grass there was a track that followed the line of the sea for a hundred yards or so before rising to the distant cliffs. This Mr Pardew began to follow. He had taken a stick in his hand as he left the house and as he walked he slashed at the bushes that lined his path. The rain fell in torrents around him, driving into his face as he marched, but it could not be said that he noticed it. As he walked, certain incidents in his past life rose unbidden into his head and he found himself thinking about them: a little house he had once rented in St John’s Wood with a princely drawing room ornamented by Mr Etty’s cupids; a meeting in a room in Carter Lane with policemen’s whistles sounding in the street outside; a man who had been Mr Pardew’s business partner, and who had unaccountably died, and whom people said that Mr Pardew had murdered. Mr Pardew remembered them all, and as each bygone face and domicile rose into his consciousness he made another slash with his stick.

  For all his pride and his savagery, Mr Pardew was a clever man, and he knew, as he stalked along the clifftop with a flock of seabirds whirling above him quite as if he were their chieftain and they meant to follow him to the ends of the earth, that the sealed room in which he fancied that he lived his life had now been opened to admit a chink of light. He had been gone from England two years, and his wanderings in that time would have astonished even one of Mr Cook’s dragomen. He had spent some months in Italy by the lakes; he had gone to Geneva; he had been seen as far afield as Leipzig. But somehow the schemes he had designed to sustain him on his travels had come to nothing. It would take a history to explain the journeyings that Mr Pardew had made in Old Europe those past two years, the odd places he went to and the queer company he kept. Perhaps Mr Pardew was part of that queer company himself, yet he looked at the shabby French counts he saw taking the cure at Baden, or the knowing gentlemen he played écarté with at Munich, with a thoroughgoing contempt. He was a tourist, passing through, and they were a picturesque spectacle got up for his entertainment.

  It was the same when he met English people – the half-pay majors solemnly eating their dinners in the Dresden hotels; the jaunty foreign correspondents sending back their six-line despatches to the newspapers at home; Miss Jetsam, who was such a hit at the Drury Lane theatre thirty years ago but now finds it convenient to live abroad. Mr Pardew knew what they were worth, and his valuation was never very high. But this knowledge did not make him happy. He fancied that here, on the shores of Lake Como, in the Munich beershops, at the faro tables in Dresden, he was losing a vital part of himself, and the suspicion pained him. And meanwhile, gnawing at him all the time, there had been the question of how to live. Mr Pardew had brought a sizeable sum of money with him from London two years before – how the money was got it is not necessary to go into – and the money had been intended as the foundation stone of a towering fortune.

  The things Mr Pardew had meant to do with that money! It was going to buy German mining stocks. It was going to sit in a great vault at Leipzig and bring him 7 per cent. It was going to underwrite a new process for distilling sherry wine in Cordova. Somehow it had done none of these things. There had been a commercial venture or two with certain of the English people met upon the way, but for some reason these had not prospered. Mr Pardew had distrusted the people with whom he had gone into partnership and they had returned the compliment. So Mr Pardew had shaken his head and decided that this was not the Europe of his salad days, and that people were too cautious and hidebound. And now the money was gone and there was a hundred francs owing to the tradesmen of Boulogne.

  By this time Mr Pardew had nearly reached the summit of the cliff. He stood for a moment on the sodden grass, a yard or so from the edge, with the birds whirling above his head, looking out at the mutinous sea. To return to England would, he knew, be fraught with peril. Certain hounds who had been straining for a scent of him these past two years would be on his tail as soon as he landed. There would be places he could not safely go and friends to whom he could not safely speak. But Mr Pardew knew that in his heart he wished to see England again, that Paris, Munich and Dresden were nothing to Oxford Street. Even Captain McTurk, he thought, could not deny him England if he went about it in the right way. But he should have to be careful and he should have to ensure that the persons who employed him were careful too. Care, in fact, should be his watchword.

  When he came back to the cottage half an hour later, having made one or two purchases in the town and carrying a brown-paper parcel under his arm, he found Jemima sitting half-asleep in front of the fire. He thought, as he watched her, that she was very loyal and that another woman might not have stood the fisherman’s hut and the hundred francs owing.

  ‘How should you like to go back to London?’ he asked, not meaning to speak so boldly but finding that the words came out in a rush almost without his having wished them.

  ‘I should like it above all things.�
�� Jemima did not love the French, who hung songbirds up for sale in their shop windows and slaughtered poor horses on their butchers’ blocks.

  ‘Well, there is a chance that we shall go.’ He saw her enthusiasm and was more cautious. ‘In a week, perhaps. Or maybe two.’ He watched her as he said this, knowing that she would be recalling certain other things he had said in the past two years.

  ‘I thought you said it was an impossibility?’

  ‘Did I? Well, perhaps I did. But this Mr Lythgoe has brought me a letter.’ It was a weakness in him, but he could not suppress his delight in conveying to Jemima any interest that the world took in him. ‘There are some gentlemen in London who think that I may be able to help them.’

  ‘And we could live there?’

  ‘It would have to be very quietly done,’ Mr Pardew said, and Jemima, who was by no means as ignorant of his position in life as she sometimes appeared, nodded her head. After that nothing further was said about London, or the gentlemen that he might be able to help, and they ate their supper very companionably together over the fire.

  *

  And over the next fortnight the business was done. A second letter arrived with a London frank on it, which may well have contained a bank note, as Mr Pardew was known to have spent money renewing his credit in the town. The contents of the fisherman’s cottage were packed into a couple of trunks – very little there was of it when all assembled – and taken off to the ferry office, and a second ticket bought for Jemima. There cannot have been very much remaining from the banknote, as a donkey-cart came to carry the trunks away to the harbour and the human cargo walked. And a couple of hours later the pair of them might have been sitting with sundry other passengers – a clergyman in a collar and a soft hat, a bag-man with a sample-case under his arm, four little giggling girls being hushed by their governess – on the front deck of the Dover packet. But it might have been noticed, by anyone who knew Mr Pardew of old, that he had allowed a beard to grow over his jutting jaw and that his hair possessed a tint of blackness that had not previously been there. As for Jemima, she was in raptures, having been promised a carriage-ride in the park and a house at Richmond.

  VIII

  What The Sportman’s Magazine thought about it

  Stable-yard jottings from ‘The Lounger at the Rail’

  TO BE SURE it is that season of the year in which the equine world is in meek hibernation. Towcester track is, we hear, under three feet of water, and the only thing seen on it is a flotilla of ducks. But if no horse in England has put its nose outside a stall since Christmas, the most interesting intelligence continues to reach us about the Derby, which we are pleased to set before our readers. Mr Burnett’s MUTINEER will not figure, having been over-run in the autumn. Mr Burnett always over-runs his animals, which would be better left to the sweet otiums of their paddock. BOSKY BOY: still Mr Hamilton persists with this benighted quadruped, which would be better off put to drag a mail cart. WARWICK LAD (Mr Coveney) – our correspondent saw him at a gallop at Lambourn and remarked his want of style. The same, alas, may be said of his owner … There is talk of CHAUNTICLEER coming forward, in which case a vet had better be got to examine his teeth, for all Mr Tackaberry will insist that he is three years old …

  PENDRAGON: a nice horse, a nice owner, a picturesque study, certainly, for the manufacturers of sporting prints, but what has he ever done? Is Mr Duchesne’s TELEMACHUS still living? We have heard no report of him: he may be cat’s-meat by now for all we know. TIBERIUS: in this animal (lately purchased by Mr G. Happerton) we repose the highest hopes. There are good reports of SEPTUAGINT, although it has been suggested that Lord Trumpington, that prudent and resourceful ornament of the Upper House, is playing a waiting game. Will HIBERNIAN be fetched over from Wicklow? It seems scarcely worth his owner’s trouble. FELIX; EMPEROR’S FRIEND; AVOIRDUPOIS – there is simply no point in the gentlemen responsible entering these animals, and we implore them to desist. BALDINO: no word yet on the foreleg that he damaged at Lingfield. SKYLARK, PERICLES, THE COALMAN: all thought certain to run …

  IX

  Mr Happerton’s Haunts and Homes

  The newly married young lady, fresh from her wedding tour, will generally find that the first few months in her new home are not a time of unalloyed pleasure. A wife will very properly devote her full attention to her husband, but a man will, necessarily, have a dozen extraneous interests: his business; his profession; his club; his stable; his acquaintance. Prudent is the wife who can accommodate herself to these schemes and happy the young woman who can survey them with a fond and conciliating eye …

  A New Etiquette: Mrs Carmody’s Book of Genteel Behaviour (1861)

  HOW DOES A man possessed of a moderate income, a comfortable house – albeit a house belonging to someone else – and no very definite occupation spend his time in London? And how does he spend it if that man is Mr George Happerton, late of Cursitor Chambers, Berwick Street, W., now (for the time being) of Belgrave Square? Let us follow Mr Happerton through the first half-dozen hours of his day.

  It was about nine o’clock in the morning and Mr Happerton was at breakfast – not with the wife of his bosom in Belgrave Square but in the downstairs parlour of Mr Finucane’s establishment in Wellington Street, Strand. Quite how long he had been there only Mr Happerton and the meek waitress knew, but there were two empty coffee cups by the edge of his plate, not to mention the remains of some devilled ham and half a dish of kidneys. He was alone – or rather not quite alone, for there was an old Irishman with red eyes and a furze of grey hair escaping from under the brim of his hat who stood a little way off to whom Mr Happerton occasionally made sotto voce remarks. The Irishman muttered in return, the steam rose from the great urns that Mr Finucane kept in his window to beguile the passers-by, and whatever was said disappeared into a cacophony of rattled cutlery and scraped-back chairs.

  Anyone who saw Mr Happerton in Mr Finucane’s parlour would have guessed his familiarity with it. He knew the name of the meek waitress, and her associate who presided over the hot plates and the chafing dishes, and the damson-faced gentleman who guards the coats and hats in the vestibule. He nodded at Mr Finucane and sundry other persons taking their breakfast in other parts of the room. He knew where the little bowl of toothpicks was, and the spittoon, and was sufficiently regarded by Mr Finucane as not to have to settle his bill – over which there was almost a struggle between the attendants as to who should have the pleasure of bringing it to him – on the spot, but to have it taken away behind the counter for future reckoning. Having ordered that this should be done, drunk off his coffee, presented the meek waitress with a florin and told her with a grin that she looked younger than ever and would she do him the favour of marrying him next Thursday week, he took his hat and walked out into the street. The old Irishman sat down at the empty table and began to eat the remaining kidneys.

  Outside in Wellington Street it was a bright April morning, with carts and wagonettes passing back and forth and a very lugubrious tumbler trying to get up a collection on the pavement’s edge. Mr Happerton headed north. Covent Garden market was in full swing and he browsed among the barrows with the greatest interest, examined a pineapple and nearly bought it, paused to remove some mud that had attached itself to his shiny top-boots, and by degrees took himself to the cab rank that stands on the corner of Langley Street and had himself taken off in the direction of the City. Descending onto the kerb at Lothbury, he made his way to a small, black-bricked building with a profusion of brass plates on the door advertising the presence of attorneys, black-lead companies, insurance agents and the like, took out a key, admitted himself and, making a great noise with his boots, walked up to the topmost floor.

  Here there was a tiny landing, a portrait of the Queen in her Coronation robes on an otherwise bare wall and a tiny office, not more than eight feet square, in which sat Mr Happerton’s clerk. ‘Well, how are we, Sikes?’ Mr Happerton wondered, and Mr Sikes said that he was very well. He was a thin, st
ooped man with a tremor on one side of his face and looked anything but. ‘And has anything come in?’ Mr Happerton enquired, his eye turning to the equally tiny window where the dome of St Paul’s tyrannised the skyline, and Mr Sikes murmured that something had come in. There was only one chair, so Mr Happerton sat on it while Mr Sikes fussed over him, brought out some loose papers that were hidden in an old brown envelope and some others crushed into conformity by the paperweight on his desk. ‘So it is all right, is it?’ Mr Happerton asked at one point, and Mr Sikes said, with a very mirthless laugh, that it was quite all right. ‘There are bills, I suppose, from Lincolnshire,’ Mr Happerton continued, and Mr Sikes agreed that there were bills from Lincolnshire, and Mr Happerton, having looked at them, took out his pen and scratched at them once or twice. He had a cigar in his mouth, and even now he could not stop caressing his top-boots as they rested before him on the desk, but he did not look like the man who had eaten his breakfast in Mr Finucane’s parlour three-quarters of an hour before. A splash of ink fell on the cambric of his shirt-front and he dabbed at with his forefinger, so that a black stain like a bullet-hole lay next to his heart. ‘Raff’s account here?’ he enquired a moment later, and Mr Sikes gave him a little pile of paper fragments, which he inspected very closely, at one or two of which he laughed, and two or three of which he tore up and flung into the waste-paper basket.

  A church clock began striking the hour and Mr Happerton stood with his head on one side listening to the chimes. There was a shuffling noise from beyond the door, and an old woman who had got into the building on the pretext of selling commercial directories was discovered on the staircase and routed out by Mr Sikes. Mr Happerton smiled and said he didn’t suppose that Mr Sikes had many visitors, and Mr Sikes said that he didn’t, and they listened to the old woman bumping her way down the stairs. ‘How much do you suppose then?’ Mr Happerton wondered, and Mr Sikes wrote down some figures on a slip of paper, added them up, murmured something under his breath, struck them out and tried again. ‘Don’t come out quite, do they?’ Mr Happerton sympathised. He put the slip of paper in his notecase, rocked back and forth on the heels of his boots, so that the boards cracked beneath them, and took his leave.