time before eleven. I was immediately taken out by him again upon an errand which he refused to explain. We arrived at length at an office in the City which from the name on the door proved to be that of
Mr. Thalberg, Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths. We were ushered into
Mr. Thalberg’s private room, and it immediately appeared that Callaghan had come to give instructions for the making of his will. He explained my being there by saying there was a point in his will about which he desired to consult both of us. I was thus compelled to be present at what for a while struck me as a very tedious farce. Callaghan, after consulting
Mr. Thalberg upon the very elementary question whether or not he thought it an advisable thing that a man should make a will, and after beating about the bush in various other ways, went on to detail quite an extraordinary number of bequests, some of them personal, some of a charitable kind, which he desired to make. There was a bequest, for example, of the Sèvres porcelain in his chambers to his cousin, Lady Belinda McConnell (there was no Sèvres porcelain in his chambers, and I have never had the curiosity to look up Lady Belinda McConnell in the Peerage). So he went on, disposing, I should think, of a great deal more property than he possessed, till at last the will appeared to be complete in outline, when he seemed suddenly to bethink him of the really difficult matter for which he had desired my presence. By this time, I should say, it had begun to dawn upon me that the pretended will-making was not quite so idle a performance as I had at first thought. Callaghan must in the course of it have produced on a person, who knew him only slightly, the impression of a good-natured, eccentric fellow, wholly without cunning and altogether unformidable. This was one point gained, but moreover,
Mr. Thalberg was rapidly falling into that nervous and helpless condition into which a weak man of business can generally be thrown by the unkind expedient of wasting his time. It now appeared that the real subject on which
Mr. Thalberg and I were to be consulted was the disposal of Callaghan’s papers in the event of his death. Callaghan explained that he would leave behind him if he died (and he felt, he said, that he might die suddenly) a great quantity of literary work which he should be sorry should perish. He would leave all his papers to the discretion of certain literary executors (he thought these would perhaps be
Mr. George Meredith and
Mr. Ruskin), but there were memoirs among them relating to a sad affair in which persons living, including
Mr. Thalberg and myself, were in a manner concerned. He referred to the lamented death of
Mr. Peters, the circumstances connected with which had been for him a matter of profound and he trusted not unprofitable study. He felt that in any directions he might leave in regard to these memoirs it was only fair that he should consult the gentlemen present.
Mr. Thalberg by this time was in a great state of expectation, when Callaghan pulled out his watch and, observing that it was later than he thought, asked if there was a Directory in the office, that he might find the address of a certain person to whom he must telegraph to put off an appointment with him. A clerk brought the London Directory from an outside room, and was about to retire. “Stop a moment,
Mr. Clerk, if you don’t mind,” said Callaghan, and he slightly edged back his chair, so as to block the clerk’s going out, “perhaps it is the Suburban Directory that I want. Let us just look,” and he began turning over the leaves. “Ferndale Avenue,” he said, “that’s not it; Ferndale Terrace—you see,
Mr. Thalberg,” he said, “I would like to talk this matter out with you before I go—Ferndale Crescent—right side,
No. 43, 44,
No.” (all this time his finger was running down a column under the letter
B in the Trades Directory) “45, 46, 47; I thought he was thereabouts. Here’s the name,” he said. “You see,
Mr. Thalberg, your own movements, if they were not explained, would look rather curious—47, 49, no, that’s not it—look rather curious, as I was saying, in connection with that murder of Peters—look ugly, you know—51 Ferndale Crescent, that’s it. Thank you,
Mr. Clerk,” and he shut the Directory with a bang and handed it back to the clerk with a bow, and made way for him to leave the room.
Mr. Thalberg bounded from his chair and collapsed into it again. “Stop, Mr. Manson,” he cried to the clerk, “you must be present at whatever else this gentleman may have to say.” He sat for a moment breathing hard, more I thought with alarm than with anger. He did not seem to me to have any presence of mind or any of the intellectual attributes, at any rate, of guile, and I could not help wondering as I watched him, whether this really was the man whom Vane-Cartwright chose for his agent in employments of much delicacy. “Do you come here to blackmail me, sir?” cried Mr. Thalberg, forcing himself to assume a voice and air of fury. There was never seen anything more innocent or more surprised and pained than the countenance of Callaghan as he replied. He was amazed that his motive could be so misunderstood; it was the simple fact that what he was forced in his memoirs to relate might hereafter suggest suspicions of everyone who was in the neighbourhood of the crime, himself and his friend Mr. Driver in particular, and, though in a less degree of course, Mr. Thalberg. He was giving Mr. Thalberg precisely the same opportunity as he had given to Mr. Driver, of explaining those passages in his (Callaghan’s)
