CHAPTER X
A MAN ABOUT TOWN PAYS A DEBT
The people in the luxurious smoking-room of the great Palace Hotel saw apale, ascetic-looking and very distinguished man come in to thecomfortable place and sit down upon a lounge.
"Do you know who that is?" one man whispered to another, flicking theash off a cigar.
"No; who is he?" his companion answered.
"That's Sir William Gouldesbrough."
"Oh, the great scientific Johnny, you mean."
"Yes, they say that he is going to turn the world topsy-turvy beforehe's done."
"The world's good enough for me," was the reply, "and if I'd my way,these people who invent things should all be taken out and shot. I'mtired of inventions, they make life move too quickly. The good old timeswere best, when it took eight hours to get from Brighton to London, andone could not have telegrams from one's office to worry one."
"Perhaps you're right," said the first man. "But still, people look atthings differently now-a-days. At any rate, Gouldesbrough is said to beone of the leading men in England to-day."
"He doesn't look happy over it," replied his companion. "He looks like adeath's-head."
"Well, you know, he's mixed up in the Rathbone mystery in a sort ofway."
"Oh yes, of course; he was engaged to the girl who chucked him over forthe Johnny who has disappeared, wasn't he?"
"That's it. Just watch him, poor wretch; doesn't he look pipped?"
"Upon my word, the perspiration's standing out on his forehead in beads.He seems as if----"
"As if he had been overworking and overeating. He wants a Turkish bath,I expect. Now then, Jones, what do you really think about the fall inSouth Africans? Will they recover in the next two months? That's what Iwant to know; that's what I want to be certain of."
Sir William had just left the up-stairs apartments of the Pooles. He hadrung for the lift and entered, without a word to the attendant, who hadglanced fearfully at the tall, pale man with the flashing eyes and thewet face. Once or twice the lift-man noticed that the visitor raised hishand to his neck above the collar and seemed to press upon it, and itmay have been fancy on the lift-man's part--though he was not animaginative person--but he seemed to hear a sound like a drum beatingunder a blanket, and he wondered if the gentleman was troubled withheart-disease.
Gouldesbrough pressed the little electric bell upon the oak table infront of him, and in a moment a waiter appeared.
"Bring me a large brandy and soda," he said in a quiet voice.
The waiter bowed and hurried away.
The waiter did not know, being a foreigner, and unacquainted with thetittle-tattle of the day, that Sir William Gouldesbrough, the famousscientist, was generally known to be a practical teetotaller, and onewho abhorred the general use of alcoholic beverages.
When the brandy came, amber in the electric lights of the smoking-room,and with a piece of ice floating in the liquid, Sir William took a smallwhite tabloid from a bottle in his pocket and dropped it into the glass.It fizzed, spluttered, and disappeared.
Then he raised the tumbler to his lips, and as he did so the floatingice tinkled against the sides of the glass like a tiny alarum.
"Nerves gone," the stock-broking gentleman close by said to his friend,with a wink.
In five minutes or so, after he had lit a cigarette, Gouldesbrough roseand left the smoking-room. He put on his coat in the hall and went outof the front door.
It was not yet late, and the huge crescent of electric lights, whichseemed to stretch right away beyond Hove to Worthing, gleamed like agigantic coronet.
It was a clear night. The air was searching and keen, and it seemed tosteady the scientist as he walked down the steps and came out from underthe hotel portico on to the pavement.
A huge round moon hung over the sea, which was moaning quietly. Thelights in front of the Alhambra Music Hall gleamed brightly, and on thepromenade by the side of the shore innumerable couples paced andre-paced amid a subdued hum of talk and laughter.
The pier stretched away into the water like a jewelled snake. It wasBrighton at ten o'clock, bright, gay, and animated.
Sir William was staying at the Brighton Royal, the other great hotelwhich towers up upon the front some quarter of a mile away from thePalace, where Marjorie and Lady Poole were.
He strode through the crowds, seeing nothing of them, hearing nothingbut the beat of his own heart.
Even for a man so strong as he, the last hour had been terrible. Neverbefore in all his life, at the moment of realization when some greatscientific theory had materialized into stupendous fact, when firstMarjorie had promised to marry him--at any great crisis of his life--hadhe undergone so furious a strain as this of the last hour.
He came out of the Palace Hotel, knowing that he had carried out hisintentions with the most consummate success. He came out of it,realizing that not half-a-dozen men in England could have done what hehad done, and as the keen air smote upon his face like a blow from theflat of a sword, he realized also that not six men in England, walkingthe pleasant, happy streets of any town, were so unutterably stained andimmeasurably damned as he.
As he passed through the revolving glass doors of his own hotel, and thehall-porters touched their caps, he exerted all the powers of his will.
He would no longer remember or realize what he had done and what itmeant to him. He would only rejoice in his achievement, and he banishedthe fear that comes even to the most evil when they know they havecommitted an almost unpardonable sin.
He did not use the lift to go to his sitting-room on the second floor;he ran lightly up the stairs, wanting the exercise as a means ofbanishing thought.
He entered his own room, switched on the electric light, took off hiscoat, and stood in front of the fire, stretching his arms in purephysical weariness.
Yes! That was over! Another step was taken. Once more he had progresseda step towards his desire, in spite of the most adverse happenings andthe most forbidding aspects of fate.
The unaccustomed brandy at the Palace Hotel, and the bromide solution hehad dropped into it, had calmed his nerves, and suddenly he laughedaloud in the rich, silent room, a laugh of pure triumph and excitement.
Even as the echoes of his voice died away, his eyes fell upon the tableand saw that there was a letter lying there addressed to him. Theaddress was written in a well-known handwriting. He took it up, toreopen the envelope and read the communication.
It was this--
"I have been down here for several days, trying to escape from London and the thoughts which London gives me. But it has been quite useless. I saw to-day, quite by chance, in the hotel register, that you have arrived here. I did not think that we were ever likely to meet again, except in the most casual way. I hope not. Since I have been here, the torture of my life has increased a thousand-fold, and I have come to the conclusion that my life must stop. I am not fit to live. I don't blame you too much, because if I hadn't been a scoundrel and a wastrel all my life, I should never have put myself in your hands. As far as your lights go, you have acted well to me. You have paid me generously for the years of dirty work I have done at your bidding. For what I have done lately, you have made me financially free, and I shall die owing no man a penny, and with no man, save you only, knowing that I die without hope--lost, degraded and despairing. Don't think I blame you, William Gouldesbrough, because I don't. When I was at Eton, I was always a pleasure-loving little scug. I was the same at Oxford. I have been the same in all my life in town. I have never been any good to myself, and I have disappointed all the hopes my people had for me. It's all been my own fault. Then I became entangled with you, and I was too weak to resist the money you were prepared to pay me for the things I have done for you.
"But it's all over now. I have gone too far. I have helped you, and am equally guilty with you, to commit a frightful crime. Lax as I have always been, I
can no longer feel I have any proper place among men of my own sort. All I can say is that I am glad I shall die without anybody knowing what I really am.
"I write this note after dinner, and, finding the number of your room from the hotel clerk, I leave it here for you to see. I am going to make an end of it all in an hour or two, when I have written a few notes to acquaintances and so on. I can't go on living, Gouldesbrough, because night and day, day and night, I am haunted by the thought of that poor young man you have got in your foul house in Regent's Park. What you are doing to him I don't know. The end of your revenge I can only guess at. But it is all so horrible that I am glad to be done with life. I wish you good-bye; and I wish to God--if there is really a God--that I had never crossed your path and never been your miserable tool.
"EUSTACE CHARLIEWOOD."
As Sir William Gouldesbrough read this letter, his whole tall figurebecame rigid. He seemed to stiffen as a corpse stiffens.
Then, quite suddenly, he turned round and pushed the letter into thedepths of the glowing fire, pressing the paper down with the poker untilevery vestige of it was consumed.
He strode to the door of the room, opened it, came out into the widecarpeted corridor and hurried up to the lift.
He pressed the button and heard it ring far down below.
In a minute or two there came the clash of the shutting doors, the"chunk" of the hydraulic mechanism, and he saw the shadow of thelift-roof rising up towards him.
The attendant opened the door.
"Will you take me up to the fourth floor, please," he said, "to Mr.Eustace Charliewood's room?"
"Mr. Charliewood, sir?" the man replied. "Oh, yes, I remember, number408. Tall, clean-shaved gentleman."
"That's him," Sir William said. "I have only just learnt that he hasbeen staying in the hotel. He is an old friend, and I had no idea he washere."
The iron doors clashed, the lift shot upward, and the attendant and SirWilliam arrived at the fourth floor.
"Down the corridor, sir, and the first turning on the right," thelift-man said. "But perhaps I'd better show you."
He ran the ironwork gates over their rollers and hurried down thecorridor with Sir William. They turned the corner, and the man pointedto a door some fifteen yards away.
"That's it, sir," he said. "That's Mr. Charliewood's room."
Even as he spoke there was a sudden loud explosion which seemed to comefrom the room to which he had pointed--a horrid crash in the warm,richly-lit silence of the hotel.
The man turned to Sir William with a white face.
"Come on," he said, forgetting his politeness. "Something has happened.Come, quick!"
When they burst into the room they found the man about town lying uponthe hearth-rug with a little blue circle edged with crimson in thecentre of his forehead. The hands were still moving feebly, but what hadbeen Eustace Charliewood was no longer there.