Read Ebook: The Strange Visitation by Corelli Marie

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Ebook has 488 lines and 30140 words, and 10 pages

"A mistake, Pitt!--quite a mistake! Large families merely make the world more difficult to live in and money scarcer to get! Money needs to be kept in close quarters--close, very close quarters! It has a habit of running away unless it is imprisoned, Pitt! It runs away much faster than it runs in! Governments know that!--and kings! And when governments and kings find it slipping through their fingers, they come to Me!--to me, Josiah McNason!--and I tell you what it is, Pitt, I've enough to do with lending money to Big Persons and taking securities on Big Things without bothering myself concerning Little Commercials! See? I lend to Royalties, Titles and Magnificences of all classes and all nations,--and I've done so much lately in this line that I'm short of money myself just now, Pitt!--ha, ha!--I'm short of money!"

Mr. Pitt stared, and was for a moment speechless. He had often thought that Mr. McNason was certainly a very ugly man, but he had never seen him look uglier than at the present moment. Such a mouthing, wrinkled mask of a face as the firelight now flashed upon was surely not often seen among living humanity. Even the grey-white goatee beard that adorned Josiah's sharp chin, wagged up and down with its possessor's silent mirth in a fashion which made its expression abnormally atrocious.

"I'm short of money!" repeated the millionaire, rubbing his hands pleasantly together--"I don't mind lending this Willie Dove five pounds, as you say he served the firm well a quarter of a century ago,--but two hundred! Now, Mr. Pitt, you're a sensible man,--a man of business,--and you know that to ask such a sum on loan for a decayed and diseased commercial traveller is absurd! He would never be able to 'work it back' as he says. And as for your being his security, I have too much respect for you to allow you to put yourself into such an awkward position. You'd regret it,--you really would, Pitt! Besides, why not let Dove go to one of the Hospitals and take his chance among the young students and general cutters-up of bodies, eh? They'd charge him very little--perhaps nothing--especially if they found his disease complex enough for good 'practice'!"

Mr. Pitt gave an unconscious gesture of physical repulsion.

"Mrs. Dove has a nervous horror of her husband's being separated from her,"--he said, slowly--"She says that if he is taken away to a hospital she feels sure he will never come back. Then again, she has great faith in the doctor who has been attending Dove for the past six months--and he strongly recommends a private operation."

"Of course! He wants to put the money into his own pocket,"--said McNason, calmly--"Well! I can't be of any assistance in this business--so if that's all you came about, you may consider that you have done your duty, and that the interview is finished. Good-night, Mr. Pitt!"

But Pitt still hesitated.

"It is. I have been reminded of that fact several times to-day. What of it?"

He paused. The millionaire had half risen from his chair, and was gripping its cushioned elbows hard with both hands.

"How dare you!" he muttered in choked accents--"How dare you use the memory of my dead son to urge a beggar's plea! Why do you presume to probe an old grief--a cureless sorrow--in an attempt to get money out of me! Because it is Christmas Eve? Curse Christmas Eve!"

His voice sank to a hiss of rage, and Mr. Pitt, nervously shrinking within himself, sought for his hat and made towards the door. A terrific gust of rain just then swept against the windows like a shower of small stones, accompanied by the shrieking yowl of the wind.

"Good-night, sir,"--and Mr. Pitt, hat in hand, stood for a moment facing his employer--"I am sorry if I have troubled you--or--or offended you! I did not mean to do so. I hope you will excuse my boldness! I made a mistake--I thought you might be pleased to do something for an old servant of the firm;--I--I--er--Good-night!"

The door opened and closed softly. He was gone.

McNason looked after him with a frown.

"Like his impudence!" he muttered--"Like his damned impudence! Following me up here all the way from the city and begging me to lend two hundred pounds to a man I hardly ever saw--except--except once or twice when my boy was alive. Among the hundreds and hundreds of travellers for the firm, how the devil should I be expected to remember Willie Dove!"

He settled himself once more in his elbow-chair, and poked the fire vigorously till the bright blaze spread a brilliant glow well over the room, flashing ruddily on the rows of well-bound books, on the marble busts of poets and historians, on the massive desk strewn with letters and papers and lit with electric reading-lamps at either end, and on all the luxurious appurtenances for the study of either Ledgers or Literature which, in these days of superfluous comfort and convenience, assist in furnishing the library of a millionaire. He had dined in town, and there was nothing for him to do except to read,--write,--or sit and meditate. He was alone,--but that was his customary condition when in his own house, unless on those occasions when he chose to invite a select party of persons, often including Royalty itself, to stay with him as guests, and graze on him, as it were, like sheep on a particularly fat pasture. But he never asked people to visit him at all unless for the ulterior purpose of making use of them in business; and just now he had no important object in view that could be served by dining or wining anybody. It was an awkward time of year,--Christmas-time, in fact. It is always an awkward time for anyone who is incurably selfish. Those who have homes and love them, go to such homes and stay there with their families,--those who are callous concerning home-ties and home-affections, have been known to start for the Riviera with "tourist" tickets or otherwise;--in short, everybody has a way of doing as they like, or, if not quite as they like, as near to what they like as they can, at that so-called "festive" season. One naturally thinks that a multi-millionaire would surely have all the amusements and gaieties of the world at his command,--but it seemed that Josiah McNason could find nothing wherewith to amuse himself, all business being at a standstill for a few days,--while as for gaiety!--dear me, the very word could barely have been uttered by the boldest person after one glance at his face! He sat, or rather huddled himself in the depths of his chair with a kind of dull satisfaction in his mind to think that in a couple of hours or so he would be going to bed. There was a damp and chilly feeling in the air; the cry of the incessant wind was teasing and shrewish--and he drew himself nearer to the fire, finding comfort in its warmth and dancing flame. He began to con over certain imposing figures representing the huge sums realized by his firm during the past half-year,--and, with furrowed brows,--so harshly wrinkled that his grey eyebrows met across a small chasm of yellow sunken flesh,--he calculated that his own personal fortune had accumulated to the colossal height of nearly twelve millions sterling. He moistened his lips with his tongue, drawing that member between his teeth with a sharp smacking sound as of satisfactory nut cracking.

Here the heavy frown again made an abyss of his brow. He stared into the fire with a kind of melancholy sullenness, and began to think. His thinking was half involuntary, for he was not a man who cared to dwell on memories of the past or possibilities of the present. Yet, despite himself, he found his mind wandering through various byways of reminiscence back to the time when he was young, with all the world before him,--when, through the crafty instruction of an over-moneyed American capitalist he had learned by heart that celebrated paraphrase of a well-known divine text--"'Do' others as you would not be 'done.'" He saw himself practically adopting this rule of life and conduct with brilliant results. He traced the beginning of the great inflow of gold which now encrusted him and rolled him up as it were in a yellow metallic shroud, a singular and separate creature, apart from other men. He recalled against his own will an incident in his career which he would fain have forgotten, when at about thirty-seven years of age he had won the first affections of a sweet and beautiful girl of seventeen whom afterwards he had heartlessly jilted, for no fault of her own, but merely because her father had through sad mischance suddenly lost his fortune. Then,--his mind persisting in its abnormal humour of harking back like a hunted hare to old covers,--he reviewed the circumstances of his loveless marriage with the daughter of a millionaire who was at that time half as rich again as himself,--and even now, though she was dead, it was not without a sense of angry pique and nervous irritation that he remembered her utter callousness and indifference to his personality,--her light regard for his wealth, which she scattered recklessly on every sort of foolish extravagance and dissipation,--and her want of natural care and affection for the one child which she gave him,--a promising boy on whom he lavished what infinitesimal vestiges of love still remained in his rapidly fossilizing moral composition. He thought of all the anxiety and cost which the education of this, his sole heir, had entailed upon him,--anxiety which was futile, and cost which was wasted. For Death cannot be bribed off by bullion. Typhoid fever in its most virulent form had snatched away the boy when he was barely eleven years old, and though the piles of gold still continued to accumulate and ever accumulate with the workings of the great McNason firm, there was no one to inherit the monster millions that came to birth with every fresh turn of the business wheel. And with his disappointment, Josiah had adopted an opposition front towards Deity. The "ways of Providence" were to him subject for the bitterest acrimony; and though, as has been said, he went to Church regularly on Sundays, and was, indeed, exceptionally careful to make a public show of himself as a man vitally interested in all Church matters, his action in this regard may be truly represented as having been taken on the foundations of unbelief and godless mockery. It tickled his particular vein of humour to think that all the people in the parish where he had his country seat thought him a really religious man. It had been so easy to get this reputation! A few subscriptions to the rector's pet charities; occasional assistance in taking round the collection-plate on Sundays; and a solemn demeanour during the sermon, had done it. But beneath that solemn demeanour what acrid depths of diabolical atheism lurked, only the diabolical agencies knew! He had worked his way through the world by a judicious use of the world's follies, obstinacies and credulities,--he had over-reached his neighbours by making capital out of their confidences,--and now, as much as concerned the world's chief god, Cash, he was at the top of the tree. True, he was getting on for seventy, but in these days when "the microbe of old age" is on the point of being discovered and exterminated, that was nothing. And the toiling engine of his brain having shunted its way thus far into the Long-Ago on a side line of its own, now came rushing swiftly back again into the present brilliant terminus of Wealth and Power which he had so successfully attained. And again the idea of a Peerage commended itself to him.

"It could easily be managed--quite easily!" he mused; "And then--perhaps--I might marry again--and marry well! Some young woman of aristocratic birth and high connections, who wants money. There are scores of them to be had for the asking!"

Just then the clock on the mantelpiece struck a sharp ting!-ting!-ting! Josiah glanced at its enamelled dial and saw that it had chimed the quarter-past eleven. The fire was burning beautifully bright and clear,--and the warmth thrown out by the glowing coals was grateful to his shrunken legs, loosely cased in their too ample trousers. He decided that he would wait a little while longer before retiring to rest. Stretching out one hand he touched the button of an electric bell within his reach. Almost instantaneously his major-domo, the majestic Towler, appeared.

"Towler!"

"Yessir!"

"I shall want nothing more to-night. You can go to bed."

"Very good, sir!"

"Wake me at seven to-morrow morning."

"Yessir! To-morrow's Christmas Day, sir."

"Well, what's that to me?"

"Beg pardon, sir! Thought you might like to sleep a little later, sir."

Josiah gazed at him grimly.

"Sleep a little later! What do you take me for, eh? D'ye think I'm such a fool and sluggard as to want to stay in bed longer on Christmas Day than on any other day? You ought to know me better than that! I have plenty of work to do just the same, Christmas Day or no Christmas Day, and I mean to do it!"

"Certainly, sir. Yessir. Seven o'clock, sir!"

"Seven o'clock, sharp!" And McNason's thin lips closed upon the word "sharp" like the lid of a spring matchbox.

Thereupon Towler backed deferentially towards the door.

"Good-night, sir. Merry Christmas, sir!"

And with this salutation,--which, offered to a person so distinctly removed from merriment as was his master, seemed almost a satire,--he disappeared.

McNason, uttering a sound between a grunt and a curse, poked the fire again viciously, and flung on two logs from a wood-basket beside him,--chumpy resinous logs which began to splutter and crackle directly the heat touched them, and soon started flaring flames up the chimney with quite a lurid torchlight glow. The storm outside had increased in fury,--and hailstones were now mingled with the rain which dashed threateningly against the windows with every wild circling rush of the wind.

"Glad I'm not going to a Christmas Eve party!" thought Josiah, as he listened to the hurrying roar of the gale--"A great many young fools will probably catch their deaths of cold to-night,--a wise dispensation of Nature for getting rid of surplus population!"

He stretched each end of his mouth as far as it would go, and showed his crooked yellow teeth to the fire, this effort being his way of laughing. The clock struck half-past eleven,--and scarcely had its final chime died away on the air when another and unexpected sound startled him. Ring-ting-ting-ting!--ting-ring-ting-ting-ting!--Ring-ting-TING-TING!

"Someone at the telephone!" he said, getting out of his comfortable chair, and hurrying to that doubtfully useful modern instrument, which, if once fixed in a private house puts the owner of it at the disposal of all his friends and business acquaintances who may be inclined to "call him up" on the most trivial excuses for wasting his time--"Who wants me at this hour, I wonder!"

He soon had his ear to the receiver, and a small, shrill and quite unfamiliar voice came sharply across the wire.

"Hello!"

"Hello!" he rejoined.

"Hell-oh! McNason! Are you there?"

"Yes. I'm here. Who are you?"

"That's telling!" And the shrill piping accents broke into fragments of falsetto laughter that ran vibratingly into McNason's ear and gave him cold shivers down his back--"Are you at home?"

"Of course I am! Going to bed."

"Oh! Don't go to bed! Hell-oh! McNason, don't go to bed! I want you!"

"Want me? What for?"

Again the broken laughter quavered along the wire in uncanny snatches.

"On business! Very important! Government loan! No delay! Great chance for you! Peerage! Christmas Eve! Don't go to bed!"

Josiah's temper rose. He put his mouth to the transmitter and spoke softly, deliberately and with concentrated viciousness.

"You're a humbug! You're some fool playing with the telephone because it's Christmas Eve, and you don't know what else to do with yourself! Probably you're drunk! I don't know you, and I don't want to know you. Get off my private wire!"

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