“Supposing the case should come to a favorable termination, would you allow me to settle your fees in the ordinary way?”
“If the choice lay with me,” replied Thorndyke, “I should say ‘yes’ with pleasure. But it does not. The attitude of the profession is very definitely unfavorable to ‘speculative’ practise. You may remember the well-known firm of Dodson and Fogg, who gained thereby much profit, but little credit. But why discuss contingencies of this kind? If I bring your case to a successful issue I shall have done very well for myself. We shall have benefited one another mutually. Come now, Miss Bellingham, I appeal to you. We have eaten salt together, to say nothing of pigeon pie and other cakes. Won’t you back me up, and at the same time do a kindness to Doctor Berkeley?”
“Why, is Doctor Berkeley interested in our decision?”
“Certainly he is, as you will appreciate when I tell you that he actually tried to bribe me secretly out of his own pocket.”
“Did you?” she asked, looking at me with an expression that rather alarmed me.
“Well, not exactly,” I replied, mighty hot and uncomfortable, and wishing Thorndyke at the devil with his confidences. “I merely mentioned that the—the—solicitor’s costs, you know, and that sort of thing—but you needn’t jump on me, Miss Bellingham; Doctor Thorndyke did all that was necessary in that way.”
She continued to look at me thoughtfully as I stammered out my excuses, and then said: “I wasn’t going to. I was only thinking that poverty has its compensations. You are all so very good to us; and, for my part, I should accept Doctor Thorndyke’s generous offer most gratefully, and thank him for making it so easy for us.”
“Very well, my dear,” said Mr. Bellingham; “we will enjoy the sweets of poverty, as you say—we have sampled the other kind of thing pretty freely—and do ourselves the pleasure of accepting a great kindness, most delicately offered.”
“Thank you,” said Thorndyke. “You have justified my faith in you, Miss Bellingham, and in the power of Dr. Berkeley’s salt. I understand that you place your affairs in my hands?”
“Entirely and thankfully,” replied Mr. Bellingham. “Whatever you think best to be done we agree to beforehand.”
“Then,” said I, “let us drink success to the cause. Port, if you please, Miss Bellingham; the vintage is not recorded, but it is quite wholesome, and a suitable medium for the sodium chloride of friendship.” I filled her glass, and when the bottle had made its circuit, we stood up and solemnly pledged the new alliance.
“There is just one thing I would say before we dismiss the subject for the present,” said Thorndyke. “It is a good thing to keep one’s own counsel. When you get formal notice from Mr. Hurst’s solicitors that proceedings are being commenced, you may refer them to Mr. Marchmont of Gray’s Inn, who will nominally act for you. He will actually have nothing to do, but we must preserve the fiction that I am instructed by a solicitor. Meanwhile, and until the case goes into court, I think it very necessary that neither Mr. Jellicoe nor anyone else should know that I am connected with it. We must keep the other side in the dark, if we can.”
“We will be as secret as the grave,” said Mr. Bellingham; “and, as a matter of fact, it will be quite easy, since it happens, by a curious coincidence, that I am already acquainted with Mr. Marchmont. He acted for Stephen Blackmore, you remember, in that case that you unraveled so wonderfully. I knew the Blackmores.”
“Did you?” said Thorndyke. “What a small world it is. And what a remarkable affair that was! The intricacies and cross-issues made it quite absorbingly interesting; and it is noteworthy for me in another respect, for it was one of the first cases in which I was associated with Doctor Jervis.”
“Yes, and a mighty useful associate I was,” remarked Jervis, “though I did pick up one or two facts by accident. And, by the way, the Blackmore case had certain points in common with your case, Mr. Bellingham. There was a disappearance and a disputed will, and the man who vanished was a scholar and an antiquarian.”
“Cases in our specialty are apt to have certain general resemblances,” Thorndyke said; and as he spoke he directed a keen glance at his junior, the significance of which I partly understood when he abruptly changed the subject.
“The newspaper reports of your brother’s disappearance, Mr. Bellingham, were remarkably full of detail. There were even plans of your house and that of Mr. Hurst. Do you know who supplied the information?”
“No, I don’t,” replied Mr. Bellingham. “I know that I didn’t. Some newspaper men came to me for information, but I sent them packing. So, I understand, did Hurst; and as for Jellicoe, you might as well cross-examine an oyster.”
“Well,” said Thorndyke, “the pressmen have queer methods of getting ‘copy’; but still, someone must have given them that description of your brother and those plans. It would be interesting to know who it was. However, we don’t know; and now let us dismiss these legal topics, with suitable apologies for having introduced them.”
“And perhaps,” said I, “we may as well adjourn to what we call the drawing-room—it is really Barnard’s den—and leave the housekeeper to wrestle with the debris.”
We migrated to the cheerfully shabby little apartment, and, when Mrs. Gummer had served coffee, with gloomy resignation (as who should say: “If you will drink this sort of stuff I suppose you must, but don’t blame me for the consequences”), I settled Mr. Bellingham in Barnard’s favorite lopsided easy chair—the depressed seat of which suggested its customary use by an elephant of sedentary habits—and opened the diminutive piano.
“I wonder if Miss Bellingham would give us a little music?” I said.
“I wonder if she could?” was
