“I wonder if you can and will help me,” said he, with a courteous salute. “I wish to call on an acquaintance, and I have forgotten his address. It is in some court, but the name of that court has escaped me for the moment. My friend’s name is Bellingham. I suppose you don’t chance to know it? Doctors know a great many people, as a rule.”
“Do you mean Mr. Godfrey Bellingham?”
“Ah! Then you do know him. I have not consulted the oracle in vain. He is a patient of yours, no doubt?”
“A patient and a personal friend. His address is Forty-nine Nevill’s Court.”
“Thank you, thank you. Oh, and as you are a friend, perhaps you can inform me as to the customs of the household. I am not expected, and I do not wish to make an untimely visit. What are Mr. Bellingham’s habits as to his evening meal? Would this be a convenient time to call?”
“I generally make my evening visits a little later than this—say about half-past eight; they have finished their meal by then.”
“Ah! Half-past eight, then? Then I suppose I had better take a walk until that time. I don’t want to disturb them.”
“Would you care to come in and smoke a cigar until it is time to make your call? If you would, I could walk over with you and show you the house.”
“That is very kind of you,” said my new acquaintance, with an inquisitive glance at me through his spectacles. “I think I should like to sit down. It’s a dull affair, mooning about the streets, and there isn’t time to go back to my chambers—in Lincoln’s Inn.”
“I wonder,” said I, as I ushered him into the room lately vacated by Miss Oman, “if you happen to be Mr. Jellicoe.”
He turned his spectacles full on me with a keen, suspicious glance. “What makes you think I am Mr. Jellicoe?” he asked.
“Oh, only that you live in Lincoln’s Inn.”
“Ha! I see. I live in Lincoln’s Inn; Mr. Jellicoe lives in Lincoln’s Inn; therefore I am Mr. Jellicoe. Ha! ha! Bad logic, but a correct conclusion. Yes, I am Mr. Jellicoe. What do you know about me?”
“Mighty little, excepting that you were the late John Bellingham’s man of business.”
“The ‘late John Bellingham,’ hey! How do you know he is the late John Bellingham?”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t; only I rather understood that that was your own belief.”
“You understood! Now from whom did you ‘understand’ that? From Godfrey Bellingham? H’m! And how did he know what I believe? I never told him. It is a very unsafe thing, my dear sir, to expound another man’s beliefs.”
“Then you think that John Bellingham is alive?”
“Do I? Who said so? I did not, you know.”
“But he must be either dead or alive.”
“There,” said Mr. Jellicoe, “I am entirely with you. You have stated an undeniable truth.”
“It is not a very illuminating one, however,” I replied, laughing.
“Undeniable truths often are not,” he retorted. “They are apt to be extremely general. In fact, I would affirm that the certainty of the truth of a given proposition is directly proportional to its generality.”
“I suppose that is so,” said I.
“Undoubtedly. Take an instance from your own profession. Given a million normal human beings under twenty, and you can say with certainty that a majority of them will die before reaching a certain age, that they will die in certain circumstances and of certain diseases. Then take a single unit from that million, and what can you predict concerning him? Nothing. He may die tomorrow; he may live to be a couple of hundred. He may die of a cold in the head or a cut finger, or from falling off the cross of St. Paul’s. In a particular case you can predict nothing.”
“That is perfectly true,” said I. And then realizing that I had been led away from the topic of John Bellingham, I ventured to return to it.
“That was a very mysterious affair—the disappearance of John Bellingham, I mean.”
“Why mysterious?” asked Mr. Jellicoe. “Men disappear from time to time, and when they reappear, the explanations that they give (when they give any) seem more or less adequate.”
“But the circumstances were surely rather mysterious.”
“What circumstances?” asked Mr. Jellicoe.
“I mean the way in which he vanished from Mr. Hurst’s house.”
“In what way did he vanish from it?”
“Well, of course, I don’t know.”
“Precisely. Neither do I. Therefore I can’t say whether that way was a mysterious one or not.”
“It is not even certain that he did leave it,” I remarked, rather recklessly.
“Exactly,” said Mr. Jellicoe. “And if he did not, he is there still. And if he is there still, he has not disappeared—in the sense understood. And if he has not disappeared, there is no mystery.”
I laughed heartily, but Mr. Jellicoe preserved a wooden solemnity and continued to examine me through his spectacles (which I, in my turn, inspected and estimated at about minus five dioptres). There was something highly diverting about this grim lawyer, with his dry contentiousness and almost farcical caution. His ostentatious reserve encouraged me to ply him with fresh questions, the more indiscreet the better.
“I suppose,” said I, “that, under these circumstances, you would hardly favor Mr. Hurst’s proposal to apply for permission to presume death?”
“Under what circumstances?” he inquired.
“I was referring to the doubt you have expressed
