Читать книгу Golden Ballast - Henry De Vere Stacpoole - Страница 3

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On the morning of the first of April, 1921, Mr. Isaac Forsythe, of the firm of Forsythe, Forsythe & Clove, was seated at his desk in Old Serjeant’s Inn opening his morning correspondence. He was a grey man with side whiskers and glasses that seemed always on the point of tumbling off his nose, a perfect specimen of the old-time family lawyer and the last of a firm that had held and practised in Old Serjeant’s Inn for one hundred and ten years.

Clove, whose name still stuck to the business, had died somewhere about the time of Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne, and on the tin deed boxes on the office shelves were names and titles that to a student of the petty history of the nineteenth century would have recalled scandals and deeds and actions forgotten or half forgotten in a world trampled by the Great War.

Envelope after envelope as it was opened was held up to the light, to see that no inclosure had been missed, torn in two and cast into the waste-paper basket, letter after letter when read was placed under an agate paper weight to be dealt with later on. The blue day—it was a blue day, if you remember—looked in through the dusty windows, but without finding any response in the mind or soul of the grey man at the desk, who was in the act of opening the last of his correspondence when a knock at the door was followed by the announcement:

“Mr. Richard Sebright to see you, sir.”

“Show him in,” said the lawyer.

A fresh-faced, bright-looking boy in grey tweed came in, one of the sort that fell in thousands and thousands in the war that has put an end to all wars, a creature pleasant to look at as April; clean, with black, brilliantined hair, but wearing an anxious look.

He held a bowler in one hand and a stick in the other, but he did not seem to know exactly what to do with them.

“Take a seat,” said the lawyer. “You are Mr. Richard Sebright?”

“Yes, my name is Sebright,” said the other, taking a chair and placing his hat and stick on the floor while he produced a letter from his pocket. “I got this letter from you and I thought it better to turn up at once, in case it was anything important, you know. I got it first post this morning, sent on from Cox’s.”

“Born at Hildersditch, I believe, Mr. Sebright?”

“Yes, we lived there. I mean I was born there—all right.”

“And educated—”

“At Malvern—schoolhouse.”

“Just so,” said the lawyer, opening a drawer and taking out some papers. “You had an aunt?”

“I had an aunt, but I’ve never seen her. She was dotty—I mean she never got on with the mater; she was her sister and lived at Folkestone—”

“And her name?”

“Masters—that was my mother’s name before she married.”

“Your mother and father are—er—no longer living, I believe?”

“No, they are dead.”

“Just so. Now can you give me any papers of identity?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Anything to show that in a legal sense you are Mr. Sebright?”

Dicky Sebright pondered a moment over this proposition, then brightening:

“Cox’s know me and there’s my army papers.”

“And a birth certificate?”

“Oh, yes, I can get that.”

“That’s all right,” said Mr. Forsythe. “That I am sure will be quite all right, and now to our business, Mr. Sebright. Your aunt, I regret to tell you, died last Monday week and has left you heir to what small property she possessed, which, deducting death duties and legal expenses, will amount to some seven hundred and fifty pounds—as nearly as possible.”

“Seven hundred and fifty!” cried Dicky, light leaping to his eyes and a fresher color to his cheeks. “I say, you aren’t making an April fool of me, are you?—I mean, what made her do it? She hated us all—seven hundred and fifty—pounds?”

“Pounds,” replied Mr. Forsythe, who seemed scarcely to hear all Dicky’s talk and who was turning over the legal documents with the tips of his fingers while he scanned them through his tilted glasses. “Pounds. And the money will be at your disposal in a few days when the necessary formalities have been complied with. Meanwhile,” with an up glance that took in Dicky’s worn tweed suit, “if you are at all in need of money I can help you with an advance—without interest,” he finished, and put away the papers, laughing as if at some subtle legal joke.

“Thanks,” said the other. He could say nothing more for the moment, though it was not grief that stayed his tongue, but good fortune. He had never seen his aunt, so how could he grieve for her? And he didn’t pretend to. He picked up his hat and his stick, but he did not rise from his seat, and the lawyer, having locked up his papers, dropped his legal manner and turned in his chair for a chat. All at once the legal machine had become a man.

“And how long have you left the air force?” he asked.

Dicky told him.

“What are you doing now?”

“Nothing. You see when I was demobed, I—well, I bust all the money they gave me—it didn’t last long. Then I got a job, but I couldn’t stick it.”

“Oh, you couldn’t stick it?”

“No; it was in an office. The money was all right, but it was being stuck all day at a desk that got me. I couldn’t breathe in the place—but I was there eight months.”

The lawyer said nothing for a moment, contemplating the flying man, this eagle who had been tossed from the nest of a public school into the sky and dropped from the sky into a place where sparrows had a better chance of picking up a decent living than eagles.

“I understand. I ought, of course, to say to you that in ‘busting’ your money you acted foolishly, that in not retaining your post in that office you acted more than foolishly, and so forth and so on, but I understand. Well now, I just want to say to you about this legacy; here is a small sum that may yet be a big sum if you apply it rightly. And if you will take an old man’s advice, I would say to you, follow where your instinct leads you. London is no use for you. Get into the open.”

“That’s what I want,” cried the other.

“Go to the colonies.”

“No,” said Dicky suddenly and firmly. “I’m not going to the colonies. At least not now—not yet a bit.”

“Not yet a bit. And what, may I ask, do you propose to do now?”

“I’m going to have a good time.”

“Oh, you are going to have a good time—a good time.” Old Forsythe disturbed some papers on his desk almost in an irritable manner and as though he were looking for some documentary reply to the outrageous statement.

“But, my dear sir, a good time is all very well in its time, which is not at the outset of a young man’s career, if you will permit me to say so. Look at me. For forty-seven years I have worked in this office. I did not set out to have a good time; work was my one object, work, that is to say, duty to myself and to the business I found to my hand.” He paused as though he had slightly lost the thread of his argument, and Dicky, whose eyes had been downcast at the pattern of the Turkish carpet, looked up.

“I think, somehow, things are different now, sir,” said he. “I’m not talking of going on the racket or anything like that when I’m talking of a good time, but I’ve seen a lot of things in the last few years and the chaps that were always bothering about the future were the ones usually that never came home in the morning. You see, a chap like me that ought to have been dead half a dozen times, when he gets a bit of luck, wants to grab it and enjoy it unless something snatches it away. I want to get down to the sea for a few months. It’s the only thing I care for much. I want to get a boat and get out. After that it will be different.”

The grim and grey legal man turned, and taking a check book from a drawer began to write. Then he handed an open check for fifty pounds to the other.

“Cash that and put the money in Cox’s,” he commanded. “Perhaps you are right. I didn’t know. Send me your address and I will notify you when the rest of the business wants finishing. Go and enjoy yourself, and don’t get drowned”—with a kindly touch of the hand on Dicky’s shoulder as he went out.

Then, alone again, he returned to the old grind, the eternal round of business that he called life.