there was a great sensation among the frequenters of the house in elephant court when they were told that wilkinson had sold the business, and the new proprietor would come in at once. the feeling among those who were in his debt was one of absolute dismay, for it seemed to them certain the amounts would be at once called in. to their surprise and relief wilkinson went round among the foreigners, whose debts in no case exceeded five pounds, and handed to them their notes of hand.
"i am going out of the business," he said, "and shall be leaving for abroad in a day or so. i might, of course, have arranged with the new man for him to take over these papers, but he might not be as easy as i have been, and i should not like any of you to get into trouble. i have never pressed anyone since i have been here, still less taken anyone into court, and i should like to leave on friendly terms with all. so here are your papers; tear them up, and don't be fools enough to borrow again."
towards his english clients, whose debts were generally from ten to twenty pounds, he took the same course, adding a little good advice as to dropping billiards and play altogether and making a fresh start.
"you have had a sharp lesson," he said, "and i know that you have been on thorns for the last year. i wanted to show you what folly it was to place yourself in the power of anyone to ruin you, and i fancy i have succeeded very well. there is no harm in a game of billiards now and then, but if you cannot play without betting you had better cut it altogether. as for the tables, it is simply madness. you must lose in the long run, and i[pg 78] am quite sure that i have got out of you several times the amount of the i. o. u.'s that i hold."
never were men more surprised and more relieved. they could hardly believe that they were once more free men, and until a fresh set of players had succeeded them the billiard rooms were frequently almost deserted. to dawkins wilkinson was somewhat more explicit.
"you know," he said, "the interest i took in that will of general mathieson. it was not the will so much as the man that i was so interested in. it showed me that he was most liberally disposed to those who had done him a service. now, it happens that years ago, when he was at benares, i saved his life from a tiger, and got mauled myself in doing so. i had not thought of the matter for many years, but your mention of his name recalled it to me. i had another name in those days—men often change their names when they knock about in queer places, as i have done. however, i called upon him, and he expressed himself most grateful. i need not say that i did not mention the billiard room to him. he naturally supposed that i had just arrived from abroad, and he has offered to introduce me to many of his friends; and i think that i have a good chance of being put down in his will for a decent sum. i brought money home with me from abroad and have made a goodish sum here, so i shall resume my proper name and go west, and drop this affair altogether. i am not likely to come against any of the crew here, and, as you see," and he removed a false beard and whiskers from his face, "i have shaved, though i got this hair to wear until i had finally cut the court. so you see you have unintentionally done me a considerable service, and in return i shall say nothing about that fifty pounds you owe me. now, lad, try and keep yourself straight in future. you may not get out of another scrape as you have out of this. all i ask is that you will not mention what i have told you to anyone else. there is no fear of my being recognized, with a clean-shaven face and different toggery altogether, but at any rate it is as well that everyone but yourself should believe that, as[pg 79] i have given out, i have gone abroad again. i shall keep your i. o. u.'s, but i promise you that you shall hear no more of them as long as you hold your tongue as to what i have just told you. possibly i may some day need your assistance, and in that case shall know where to write to you."
it was not until after a great deal of thought that john simcoe had determined thus far to take dawkins into his confidence, but he concluded at last that it was the safest thing to do. he was, as he knew, often sent by the firm with any communications that they might have to make to their clients, and should he meet him at the general's he might recognize him and give him some trouble. he had made no secret that he had turned his hand to many callings, and that his doings in the southern seas would not always bear close investigation, and the fact that he had once kept a billiard room could do him no special harm. as to the will, dawkins certainly would not venture to own that he had repeated outside what had been done in the office. the man might be useful to him in the future. it was more than probable he would again involve himself in debt, and was just the weak and empty-headed young fellow who might be made a convenient tool should he require one.
so elephant court knew mr. wilkinson no more, and certainly none of the habitués could have recognized him in the smooth-shaven and faultlessly dressed man whom they might meet coming out of a west end club. dawkins often turned the matter over in his mind, after his first relief had passed at finding the debt that had weighed so heavily upon him perfectly wiped out.
"there ought to be money in it," he said to himself, "but i don't see where it comes in. in the first place i could not say he had kept a gambling place without acknowledging that i had often been there, and i could not say that it was a conversation of mine about the general's will that put it into his head to call upon him, and lastly, he has me on the hip with those i. o. u.'s. possibly if the general does leave him money, i may manage to get[pg 80] some out of him, though i am by no means sure of that. he is not a safe man to meddle with, and he might certainly do me more harm than i could do him."
the matter had dropped somewhat from his mind when, three months later, general mathieson came into the office to have an interview with his principals.
after he had left the managing clerk was called in. on returning, he handed dawkins a sheet of paper.
"you will prepare a fresh will for general mathieson; it is to run exactly as at present, but this legacy is to be inserted after that to miss covington. it might just as well have been put in a codicil, but the general preferred to have it in the body of the will."
dawkins looked at the instruction. it contained the words: "to john simcoe, at present residing at 132 jermyn street, i bequeath the sum of ten thousand pounds, as a token of my gratitude for his heroic conduct in saving my life at the cost of great personal injury to himself from the grip of a tiger, in the year 1831."
"by jove, he has done well for himself!" dawkins muttered, as he sat down to his desk after the managing clerk had handed him the general's will from the iron box containing papers and documents relating to his affairs. "ten thousand pounds! i wish i could light upon a general in a fix of some sort, though i don't know that i should care about a tiger. it is wonderful what luck some men have. i ought to get something out of this, if i could but see my way to it. fancy the keeper of a billiard room and gaming house coming in for such a haul as this! it is disgusting!"
he set about preparing a draft of the will, but he found it difficult to keep his attention fixed upon his work, and when the chief clerk ran his eye over it he looked up in indignant surprise.
"what on earth is the matter with you, mr. dawkins? the thing is full of the most disgraceful blunders. in several cases it is not even sense. during all the time that i have been in this office i have never had such a[pg 81] disgraceful piece of work come into my hands before. why, if the office boy had been told to make a copy of the will, he would have done it vastly better. what does it mean?"
"i am very sorry, sir," dawkins said, "but i don't feel very well to-day, and i have got such a headache that i can scarcely see what i am writing."
"well, well," his superior said, somewhat mollified, "that will account for it. i thought at first that you must have been drinking. you had better take your hat and be off. go to the nearest chemist and take a dose, and then go home and lie down. you are worse than of no use in the state that you are. i hope that you will be all right in the morning, for we are, as you know, very busy at present, and cannot spare a hand. tear up that draft and hand the will and instructions to mr. macleod. the general will be down here at ten o'clock to-morrow to see it; he is like most military men, sharp and prompt, and when he wants a thing done he expects to have it done at once."
"you are feeling better, i hope, this morning?" he said, when dawkins came into the office at the usual hour next day, "though i must say that you look far from well. do you think that you are capable of work?"
"i think so, sir; at any rate my head is better."
it was true that the clerk did not look well, for he had had no sleep all night, but had tossed restlessly in bed, endeavoring, but in vain, to hit on some manner of extracting a portion of the legacy from the ex-proprietor of the gambling house. the more he thought, the more hopeless seemed the prospect. john simcoe was eminently a man whom it would be unsafe to anger. the promptness and decision of his methods had gained him at least the respect of all the frequenters of his establishment, and just as he had sternly kept order there, so he would deal with any individual who crossed his path. he held the best cards, too; and while a disclosure of the past could hardly injure him seriously, he had the means[pg 82] of causing the ruin and disgrace of dawkins himself, if he ventured to attack him.
the clerk was himself shrewd in his own way, but he had the sense to feel that he was no match for john simcoe, and the conclusion that he finally came to was that he must wait and watch events, and that, so far as he could see, his only chance of obtaining a penny of the legacy was to follow implicitly the instructions simcoe had given him, in which case possibly he might receive a present when the money was paid.
about a fortnight after he knew the will had been signed by general mathieson, simcoe went down to a small house on pentonville hill, where one of the ablest criminals in london resided, passing unsuspected under the eyes of the police in the character of a man engaged in business in the city. a peculiar knock brought him to the door.
"ah, is it you, simcoe?" he said; "why, i have not seen you for months. i did not know you for the moment, for you have taken all the hair off your face."
"i have made a change, harrison. i have given up the billiard rooms, and am now a swell with lodgings in jermyn street."
"that is a change! i thought you said the billiards and cards paid well; but i suppose you have got something better in view?"
"they did pay well, but i have a very big thing in hand."
"that is the right line to take up," the other said. "you were sure to get into trouble with the police about the card-playing before long, and then the place would have been shut up, and you might have got three months; and when you got out the peelers would have kept their eyes upon you, and your chances would have been at an end. no, i have never had anything to do with small affairs; i go in, as you know, for big things. they take time to work out, it is true; and after all one's trouble, something may go wrong at the last moment, and the[pg 83] thing has to be given up. some girl who has been got at makes a fool of herself, and gets discharged a week before it comes off; or a lady takes it into her head to send her jewels to a banker's, and go on to the continent a week earlier than she intended to do. then there is a great loss in getting rid of the stuff. those sharps at amsterdam don't give more than a fifth of the value for diamonds. it is a heart-rending game, on the whole; but there is such excitement about the life that when one has once taken it up it is seldom indeed that one changes it, though one knows that, sooner or later, one is sure to make a slip and get caught. now, what will you take? champagne or brandy?"
"i know that your brandy is first-rate, harrison, and i will sample it again."
"i have often thought," went on the other, after the glasses had been filled and cigars lighted, "what a rum thing it was that you should come across my brother bill out among the islands. he had not written to me for a long time, and i had never expected to hear of him again. i thought that he had gone down somehow, and had either been eaten by sharks or killed by the natives, or shot in some row with his mates. he was two years older than i was, and, as i have told you, we were sons of a well-to-do auctioneer in the country; but he was a hard man, and we could not stand it after a time, so we made a bolt for it. we were decently dressed when we got to london. as we had been at a good school at home, and were both pretty sharp, we thought that we should have no difficulty in getting work of some sort.
"we had a hard time of it. no one would take us without a character, so we got lower and lower, till we got to know some boys who took us to what was called a thieves' kitchen—a place where boys were trained as pick-pockets. the old fellow who kept it saw that we were fit for higher game than was usual, and instead of being sent out to pick up what we could get in the streets we were dressed as we had been before, and sent to picture-galleries and museums and cricket matches, and we soon[pg 84] became first-rate hands, and did well. in a short time we didn't see why we should work for another man, and we left him without saying good-by.
"it was not long before he paid us out. he knew that we should go on at the same work, and dressed up two or three of his boys and sent them to these places, and one day when bill was just pocketing a watch at lord's one of these boys shouted out, 'thief! thief! that boy has stolen your watch, sir,' and bill got three months, though the boy could not appear against him, for i followed him after they had nabbed bill, and pretty nearly killed him.
"then i went on my travels, and was away two or three years from london. bill had been out and in again twice; he was too rash altogether. i took him away with me, but i soon found that it would not do, and that it would soon end in our both being shut up. so i put it fairly to him.
"'we are good friends, you know, bill,' i said, 'but it is plain to me that we can't work together with advantage. you are twenty and i am eighteen, but, as you have often said yourself, i have got the best head of the two. i am tired of this sort of work. when we get a gold ticker, worth perhaps twenty pounds, we can't get above two for it, and it is the same with everything else. it is not good enough. we have been away from london so long that old isaacs must have forgotten all about us. i have not been copped yet, and as i have got about twenty pounds in my pocket i can take lodgings as a young chap who has come up to walk the hospitals, or something of that sort. if you like to live with me, quiet, we will work together; if not, it is best that we should each go our own way—always being friends, you know.'
"bill said that was fair enough, but that he liked a little life and to spend his money freely when he got it. so we separated. bill got two more convictions, and the last time it was a case of transportation. we had agreed between ourselves that if either of us got into trouble the other should call once a month at the house of a woman we knew to ask for letters, and i did that regularly after[pg 85] he was sent out. i got a few letters from him. the first was written after he had made his escape. he told me that he intended to stay out there—it was a jolly life, and a free one, i expect. pens and paper were not common where he was; anyhow he only wrote once a year or so, and it was two years since i had heard from him when you wrote and said you had brought me a message from bill.
"ever since we parted i have gone on the same line, only i have worked carefully. i was not a bad-looking chap, and hadn't much difficulty in getting over servant girls and finding out where things were to be had, so i gradually got on. for years now i have only carried on big affairs, working the thing up and always employing other hands to carry the job out. none of them know me here. i meet them at quiet pubs and arrange things there, and i need hardly say that i am so disguised that none of the fellows who follow my orders would know me again if they met me in the street. i could retire if i liked, and live in a villa and keep my carriage. why, i made five thousand pounds as my share of that bullion robbery between london and brussels. but i know that i should be miserable without anything to do; as it is, i unite amusement with business. i sometimes take a stall at the opera, and occasionally i find a diamond necklace in my pocket when i get home. i know well enough that it is foolish, but when i see a thing that i need only put out my hand to have, my old habit is too strong for me. then i often walk into swell entertainments. you have only to be well got up, and to go rather late, so that the hostess has given up expecting arrivals and is occupied with her guests, and the flunky takes your hat without question, and you go upstairs and mix with the people. in that way you get to know as to the women who have the finest jewels, and have no difficulty in finding out their names. i have got hold of some very good things that way, but though there would have been no difficulty in taking some of them at the time, i never yielded to that temptation. in a crowded room one never can say whose eyes may happen to be looking in your direction.[pg 86]
"i wonder that you never turned your thoughts that way. from what you have told me of your doings abroad, i know that you are not squeamish in your ideas, and with your appearance you ought to be able to go anywhere without suspicion."
"i am certainly not squeamish," simcoe said, "but i have not had the training. one wants a little practice and to begin young, as you did, to try that game on. however, just at present i have a matter in hand that will set me up for life if it turns out well, but i shall want a little assistance. in the first place i want to get hold of a man who could make one up well, and who, if i gave him a portrait, could turn me out so like the original that anyone who had only seen him casually would take me for him."
"there is a man down in whitechapel who is the best hand in london at that sort of thing. he is a downright artist. several times when i have had particular jobs in hand, inquiries i could not trust anyone else to make, i have been to him, and when he has done with me and i have looked in the glass there was not the slightest resemblance to my own face in it. i suppose the man you want to represent is somewhere about your own height?"
"yes, i should say that he is as nearly as may be the same. he is an older man than i am."
"oh, that is nothing! he could make you look eighty if you wanted it. here is the man's address; his usual fee is a guinea, but, as you want to be got up to resemble someone else, he might charge you double."
"the fee is nothing," simcoe said. "then again, i may want to get hold of a man who is a good hand at imitating handwriting."
"that is easy enough. here is the address of a man who does little jobs for me sometimes, and is, i think, the best hand at it in england. you see, sometimes there is in a house where you intend to operate some confoundedly active and officious fellow—a butler or a footman—who might interrupt proceedings. his master is in london, and he receives a note from him ordering him to[pg 87] come up to town with a dressing case, portmanteau, guns, or something of that kind, as may be suitable to the case. i got a countess out of the way once by a messenger arriving on horseback with a line from her husband, saying that he had met with an accident in the hunting-field, and begging her to come to him. of course i have always previously managed to get specimens of handwriting, and my man imitates them so well that they have never once failed in their action. i will give you a line to him, saying that you are a friend of mine. he knows me under the name of sinclair. as a stranger you would hardly get him to act."
"of course, he is thoroughly trustworthy?" simcoe asked.
"i should not employ him if he were not," the other said. "he was a writing-master at one time, but took to drink, and went altogether to the bad. he is always more or less drunk now, and you had better go to him before ten o'clock in the morning. i don't say that he will be quite sober, but he will be less drunk than he will be later. as soon as he begins to write he pulls himself together. he puts a watchmaker's glass in his eye and closely examines the writing that he has to imitate, writes a few lines to accustom himself to it, and then writes what he is told to do as quickly and as easily as if it were his own handwriting. he hands it over, takes his fee, which is two guineas, and then goes out to a public-house, and i don't believe that the next day he has the slightest remembrance of what he has written."
"thank you very much, harrison; i think that, with the assistance of these two men, i shall be able to work the matter i have in hand without fear of a hitch."
"anything else i can do for you? you know that you can rely upon me, simcoe. you were with poor bill for six years, and you stood by him to the last, when the natives rose and massacred the whites, and you got bill off, and if he did die afterwards of his wounds, anyhow you did your best to save him. so if i can help you i will do it, whatever it is, short of murder, and there is my[pg 88] hand on it. you know in any case i could not round on you."
"i will tell you the whole business, harrison. i have thought the matter pretty well out, but i shall be very glad to have your opinion on it, and with your head you are like to see the thing in a clearer light than i can, and may suggest a way out of some difficulties."
he then unfolded the details of his scheme.
"very good!" the other said admiringly, when he had finished. "it does credit to you, simcoe. you risked your life, and, as you say, very nearly lost it to save the general's, and have some sort of a right to have his money when he has done with it. your plan of impersonating the general and getting another lawyer to draw out a fresh will is a capital one; and as you have a list of the bequests he made in his old one, you will not only be able to strengthen the last will, but will disarm the opposition of those who would have benefited by the first, as no one will suffer by the change. but how about the boy?"
"the boy must be got out of the way somehow."
"not by foul play, i hope, simcoe. i could not go with you there."
"certainly not. that idea never entered my mind; but surely there can be no difficulty in carrying off a child of that age. it only wants two to do that: one to engage the nurse in talk, the other to entice the child away, pop him into a cab waiting hard by, and drive off with him."
"i doubt whether the courts would hand over the property unless they had some absolute proof that the child was dead."
"they would not do so for some time, no doubt, but evidence might be manufactured. at any rate i could wait. they would probably carry out all the other provisions of the will, and with the ten thousand pounds and the three or four thousand i have saved i could hold on for a good many years."
"how about the signature to the will?"
"i can manage that much," simcoe said. "i had some[pg 89] work in that way years ago, and i have been for the last three months practicing the general's, and i think now that i can defy any expert to detect the difference. of course, it is a very different thing learning to imitate a signature and writing a long letter."
the other agreed, and added, "i should be careful to employ a firm of lawyers of long standing. if you were to go to shady people it would in itself cause suspicion."
"yes, i quite feel that, and i want, if possible, to get hold of people who just know the general by sight, so as to have a fairly good idea of his face without knowing him too well. i think i know of one. at the club the other day colonel bulstrode, a friend of the general's, said to him, 'i wish you would drive round with me to my lawyers'; their place is in the temple. i want someone to sign as a witness to a deed, and as it is rather important, i would rather have it witnessed by a friend than by one of the clerks. it won't take you a minute.'"
"i should think that would do very well; they would not be likely to notice him very particularly, and probably the general would not have spoken at all. he would just have seen his friend sign the deed, and then have affixed his own signature as a witness. well, everything seems in your favor, and should you need any help you can rely upon me."
