Bernard Capes

“ Mist and water blended in that luminous haze which seems to obliterate the boundaries between death and existence, and to drug the soul in Lethe. Swimming within that neutral commingling of elements, air melting into liquid and liquid into air, the boat drifted like a bubble; all sense of gravity appeared lost. The world was a remote thing; the town they had left a mirage; all sounds coming from it were subdued to a soft humming and tinkling like noises in a dream. They only jarring note, to Gilead at least, was supplied by Miss Limner. ”

“ How can you bear to remain so staunch against your own inner conviction? From the moment I knew that you had seen that advertisement and the name, I knew that the end was come. And it is come, though still not, in your unswerving chivalry, at your instance. The sentence shall be mine. Your great heart shall not suffer any longer this torture of a trust that dies so hard. I will tear it out with my own hands—I daresay because its pain hurts me too, and not from any moral heroism. Mr Balm, there is no such person as Winsom Wyllie ”

“ Gilead put up a gentle hand.
“Spare yourself the pain. She was good, she was desperate—I understand—and as a final resource she decided to implore the help of strangers through the public press. The barrenness of the result, the inhuman silence, drove her in the end to her last chance of escape through self-destruction. I hold the child a heroine. Great God, the stony indifference of the world to her appeal!—no wonder it killed her heart. This man is a particular scoundrel. He shall bleed, Miss Halifax, he shall bleed, I promise you.” ”

“ She sighed, a very little sigh, and they entered the lift together. He never had a doubt of the solace he was bringing to the poor little life above with its broken wings; and, indeed, the instant the child saw Vera enter, she rose, and standing breathless a little, with her face like a white wet flower, threw herself suddenly into the warm generous arms, and abandoned herself and her cause to that lovely refuge.
Gilead turned away, and, while he stood thus, he heard the first words of understanding uttered, and of reassurance, and of mastering control. ”

“ There was the sound of a bar clanking down, of a laboured sigh, and one side of the gate opened, just a jealous aperture, through which the applicant caught glimpse of a doleful yard, with a woodshed at its further end, a block or two for chopping on, as many three-legged stools, a sawyer’s trestle, and everywhere in littered confusion chips, billets and indiscriminate debris of timber.
“Come in, can’t you,” said the voice, peevishly, and Gilead, slipping through, found himself face to face with Mr Winsom Wyllie. ”

“ It was Mr Desmund who spoke, art expert and valuer to a well-known firm of print and book sellers. He had accompanied Gilead round the room, booking his bids—an unwearying resourceful man, with a drooping light moustache, a bright complexion, and pale blue eyes, tired but interested. He wore a loose blue serge suit with a bright tie; his shoulders were bent a trifle beneath their load of specialised knowledge; he was a busy soul, but never too busy for enthusiasm in the right directions or to the right people. ”

“ THE QUEST OF THE DOG Gilead had often encountered in the Daily Post—sandwiched, say, between a heart-moving appeal on behalf of the outcast and houseless, and a last drowning cry for help from a soul almost submerged—a plea for some dog or cat seeking a kind home, and had reflected on the curious variety and varied quality of the petitions which a medium for benevolence was calculated to attract. ”

“ The apparition’s was the reassuring one of the two.
Suddenly, as he looked, the rower resumed his sculls; but he paddled slowly, his eyes on the figure on the bridge all the while. Not until the boat had vanished round a bend were they, Gilead felt, withdrawn, releasing him to his own thoughts.
Those were strange enough in all conscience—compact of wonder and perplexity. It was a certain comfort to him to find his theory vindicated; that he had run his quarry actually to earth—or water. ”

“ Mr Bundy cannot be blamed for emulating the example of those great men; and if—”
“Fat!” repeated the lady, closing her eyes, and in a voice of thrilled ecstasy: “I doat, simply doat on a fat man!”
“You do?” responded Gilead, with an air of delighted relief. “Then, Madam, a fat man doats on you, and nothing remains to me but to congratulate you both on this most happy termination to a misunderstanding.”
He bowed, as if he felt his mission accomplished.
“O, stay, sir!” cried Miss Cox. She took a quick step forward; she pressed her handkerchief to her bosom. “My Bundy!” ”

“ He was a meaty youth of some twelve summers, with an imbecile self-satisfied face and porky eyes; but his stylish white flannels and little Oxford-blue blazer with the yellow badge on its pocket spoke him quite the riverside dandy.
Gilead fell into pace with the two, and the little girl kept peeping up at him from the other side of her cavalier. She was the dearest charmer of nine, dressed in a sort of sweet Directory frock with heliotrope sprays; and the shepherd’s straw hat on her head had its mauve ribbon poked full of real daisies. ”

“ If the public likes to pay toll to a lovely face, a sweet voice, why should we disappoint it and starve? We have no other alternative, believe me?”
“The child,” said Gilead, still sternly—“is that hers?”
“No,” answered the woman; “she hires it. We have neither of us been married, and children as children are hateful to us. I do not think any man could be got to marry my sister Emile. The face behind her veil is ravaged—unsightly. She owes no debt of gratitude to man or God; we neither of us do; they are our enemies. Is that a fraud—the mystery of her veil? ”

“ Again she stopped. “Reason, I hope,” said Gilead gently. “I try to practise it. Sympathy and help, unless given in reason, are likely to defeat their own objects, are they not?”
“Yes,” said the visitor forlornly; and she seemed to droop a little.
“Does that discourage you?” asked the young man.
She raised her head.
“Is it in reason,” she said, “to expect one, however merciful, however pitiful, to save another from the just consequences of his own misdeeds?”
“That depends,” said Gilead, “whether or not mercy to the sinner entails a wrong to the sinned against.” ”

“ Behind, he bore a much greater resemblance to an exhausted elephant than to any sinister figure of melodrama. Nor was his obverse prepossessing. A lugubrious, ponderous man, who took his fleshiness badly; a man who might have figured for an over-blown clown, seeing how his grizzled hair stood up from his scalp and his whiskers out from his jaws; a man with a ridiculous lachrymose mouth, a man whose voice had suety tears in it, a man who seemed to pity himself profoundly—such was the general impression conveyed to Gilead. The creature’s adiposity, he was no less convinced, was no local rising. ”

“ He had enjoyed his incredible possessions long enough to evolve that sixth sense of omnipotence which is peculiar to plutocracy. All risks appeared easily negotiable to him, endowed with that Fortunatus’s purse. Luckily for the world, as it happened, the chances that tempted him were all on the side of chivalry and justice.
“Will you come?” said Mr Judex.
He went before, treading softly, and holding his lamp high overhead. Gilead followed as quietly, through the empty hall, to the head of the basement stairs, and down them into a vortex of reeling night. ”

“ But when I tell you, sir, in the sole attempt at self-justification which exists to me, and in response to the noble candour which has made me acquainted with your real name, that mine is Gilead Balm—”
“What! Of Lamb’s Agency?” exclaimed the stranger.
“I entreat you, sir,” continued Gilead, “to believe that I am actuated by no spirit of empty vaunting, but, on the contrary, by one of humiliation that the business of my office should have been committed to so unintelligent a representative as myself. I can plead, sir, nothing but the excuse of good intentions. ”

“ What Mr Desmund did not know about Japanese art was not, in the vernacular, worth the knowing.
“There, sir!” he said, confident of the exclamation of delight that was to follow.
It came, but in tempered form.
“Good,” said Gilead. “It is a fine example.”
He was more gratified with the print than he thought it politic to confess.
“Good!” said Mr Desmund. “There’s not another to better, or equal it, in Europe. Look at that background; look at that gauffrage. You should secure it, Mr Balm. You won’t get such an opportunity again.” ”

“ A brief silence succeeded her agonized cry, during which Gilead battled with his emotions. It was not so much the anguish, perhaps, as the heart-moving tone of its utterance which stirred the very bowels, so to speak, of his official circumspection. He made but a feeble attempt to assert his independence. This story, on the face of it, seemed to him one of the most pitifully tragic to which he had ever listened. That a man should be so cast down and trampled on in the name of fond humanity appeared to him monstrous. ”

“ WINSOM WYLLIE! Those who have followed the career of our young philanthropist will not have forgotten the name of that detestable scoundrel, the persecutor of the beautiful amanuensis. It was peculiar, one must admit—a name not likely to be borne by more than a single person in the world. So thought Gilead, as, with a deep sigh, he struggled out of his stupefaction and reread the lines. ”

“ The spiritual communion for which you crave is hardly concerned with things of the flesh.”
“It must suffer, its lustre must sink diminished in the shadow of the moral falsehood,” cried Mr Bundy, abashed and despairing.
“Then, sir,” said Gilead, “apply truth for a remedy. It is the only one. Come, be a man, Mr Bundy, and own up and ask absolution.”
“I dare not,” answered the obese gentleman, almost weeping—“I dare not. Her sensitiveness—the shock—my tongue-tied confusion! She does not even know my vocation. Sooner or later she would have to, and then—the double disillusionment!” ”

“ The emotion was essentially feminine, and Gilead had surely despised himself for even succumbing to it. He could not be such a woman as to pet a grievance before it was justified. There was no grievance at all to justify itself; with his eyes set to the truth he told himself so, and he had the will to believe it. Suspicion was a germ that once admitted destroyed the reason; only that strong will had power to keep it out. ”

“ Mr Globestein, speechless, and white to the lips, could only wave his hand renunciatory towards the pedestal.
“Dexter,” said Gilead, “have this carried down, and oblige me by calling a cab.”
He re-turned, with perfectly recovered serenity, upon the dealer.
“Mr Globestein,” he said, “you must permit me to congratulate you on the acumen which still does not fail you in a deal. You need not fear that I shall abandon you in your need of a prosperous customer. In your line you are invaluable, and no one would dream of accusing you of attempting to palm off upon inexperience a sham Pigalle. ”

“ Did you ever hear of Mr Justice Starkey?”
“Yes.”
“I am he, Mr Balm, and this is my house. You will pardon, I am sure, the deception, excusable and necessary under the circumstances. I desired to demonstrate to the world the wickedness of its conclusions in holding me primarily responsible for the man Maudsley’s suicide. Confinement in the dark cell would, I am convinced, never drive a guiltless conscience to self-destruction. It remains with you, if you have not lied to me, to substantiate that truth.”
Somewhere in his racing thoughts, Gilead found and caught at a memory. ”

“ Disorder was the order of the human race, and that being so, no monotonous perfection, once attained, would long be suffered in peace. It was the way of the world, which builds on change and destruction, and will always of choice prefer the excitement of a picturesque and dangerous situation to the security of a tame one.
Now, while exhibiting in himself as complete a justification of capital as the world could afford, Gilead had by no means any qualms about spending his money exactly as he pleased. ”