The bell in the darkened chambers rang with the insistent clamour of mechanism responding with blind obedience to a human hand, but Mr. Anthony Brimsdown suffered it to pass unnoticed. As an elderly bachelor, living alone, he was sufficiently master of his own affairs to disregard the arrival of the last post, leaving the letters as they were tumbled through the slit in the door downstairs until he felt inclined to go and get them.
He was standing in the centre of the room examining an unusual trinket—a gold hoop like a bracelet, with numbers and the zodiac signs engraved on the inner surface. Mr. Brimsdown had discovered it in a Kingsway curiosity shop a week before. It was a portable sun-dial of the sixteenth century. A slide, pushed back a certain distance in accordance with the zodiac signs, permitted the sun to fall through a slit on the figures of the hours within—a dainty timekeeper for mediaeval lovers. Mr. Brimsdown was no gallant, nor had he sufficient imagination to prompt him to wonder what dead girl’s dainty fingers had once held up the bright fragile circle to the sun to see if Love’s tryst was to be kept. His joy in the sun-dial was the pride of the collector in the possession of a rare thing.
But that night it failed to interest him. He put it down with a sigh, and resumed his restless pacing of the room.
It was his office, but he preferred it to his chambers at the end of the passage. He said the air was better, but it is doubtful whether that was the reason. Perhaps Mr. Brimsdown felt less lonely among his legal documents, meditating over battles he had won for dead legatees. As a solicitor he was “strong on the Chancery side” and had gained some famous judgments for notorious litigants—men who had loved the law so well that their souls might well have been found—knowing no higher heaven—in the office where the records of their forgotten lawsuits were buried. And in death, as in life, they would have been glad to confide their affairs to the man whose lot it had been to add “Deceased” to so many of the names on the black steel deed-boxes which lined the shelves.
Mr. Brimsdown lived for the law. As a family lawyer he was the soul of discretion, an excellent fighter, wary and reticent, deep as the grave, but far safer. The grave sometimes opens and divulges a ghastly secret from its narrow depths. There was no chance of getting anything out of Mr. Brimsdown, dead or alive. He had no wife to extract bedroom confidences from him, no relations to visit in expansive moments, he trusted nothing to paper or diary, and he did not play golf. He was a solitary man, of an habitual secretiveness deepened by years of living alone.
His lips moved now, and he spoke aloud. His voice sounded sharply in the heavy silence.
“A calamity—nothing less. How did it happen? Was it grief for his wife?”
His face showed unusual agitation—distress even. It was well his clients could not see him at that moment. To them he was a remote enigmatic figure of conveyances and legal deeds; one deeply versed in human follies and foibles, but impervious to human feeling, independent of human companionship. The reserved glance of his cold grey eye betokened that he guarded his own secrets as closely as he guarded the secrets entrusted to him professionally. But there was human nature in him—deep down. It was not much—a lock of hair in a sealed packet in his pocket-book. The giver was dead and gone to dust, sleeping in an old churchyard near the Strand, forgotten by all who had ever known her—except one. Sometimes in the twilight a tall figure would stand musing beside that forgotten grave for awhile, then turn away and walk swiftly up the narrow river street, across the Strand, and through the archway to Grey’s Inn.
“Thirty years!” he murmured. Then his mind seemed to hark back to his previous thought, after the fashion of a man who thinks aloud—“No, no; not his wife. He did not care enough for her for that. Thirty years—wasted. My heart bleeds when I think of it. Ought I to go down? Did he wish for me? I wonder—”
His distress as he paced the room was more apparent than ever. Again, his clients would have been astonished if they had witnessed it. In their opinion he was hard as nails and a stranger to the softer feelings of the heart. They would as soon thought of attributing sentiment to one of the japanned deed-boxes. But they would have accepted the surprising revelation with well-bred English tolerance for eccentricity, not allowing it to affect their judgment that Mr. Brimsdown was one of the soundest and safest lawyers in England.
His agitation arose from the death of Robert Turold—his client. He had gathered that piece of news from an evening newspaper in the restaurant where he had dined. Mr. Brimsdown had reached an age when the most poignant events of human life seem little more than trifles. It was in the nature of things for men to die. As a lawyer he had prepared many last wills and testaments—had helped men into their graves, as it were—unmoved. But that unexpected announcement of Robert Turold’s death had come to him as an over-whelming shock. He had left his meal unfinished, and returned to his chambers to seek consolation, not in prayer, but in his collection of old clocks and watches. In the dusk he had set out his greatest treasures—the gold sun-dial, a lamp clock, an early French watch in blue enamel, and a bed repeating clock in a velvet case. But the solace had failed him for once. Even the magic name of Dan Quare on the jewelled face of the repeater failed to stir his collector’s heart.
His regard for Robert Turold was deep and sincere. His dead client had been his ideal of a strong man. Strong and unyielding—like a rock. That was the impression Robert Turold had conveyed at their first interview many years before, and his patience and tenacity in pursuit of his purpose had deepened the feeling since. The object of his search had the lawyer’s sympathy. Mr. Brimsdown had a reverence for titles—inherited titles, not mere knighthoods, or Orders of the British Empire. For those he felt nothing but contempt. He drew the sharpest distinction between such titled vulgarians and those who were born into the world with the blood running blue in their veins. He regarded Robert Turold as belonging to this latter class. It was nothing to him that he was a commoner in the eyes of the world, with no more claim to distinction than a golf-playing city merchant. He had believed in his story from the first, and had helped him in that belief. Turrald of Missenden! It was a great old name. Mr. Brimsdown rolled it round his tongue as though it were a vintage port—pronounced it lingeringly, rolling the “rr’s” sonorously, and hissing the “ss’s” with a caressing sibilant sound.
Turrald of Missenden! Robert Turold was the lineal descendant of the name, and worthy of the title. Mr. Brimsdown had always felt that, from the very first. There was something noble and dominating in his presence. Blood told; there could be no doubt of that.
What stronger proof of it could be found than the dogged strength with which the dead man had persisted for thirty years in his effort to claim as his rightful due a baronial title which had been in abeyance for four hundred years?
And he would have succeeded—was on the verge of success—but for this unlucky stroke of Death’s.
With a sigh for the frailty of human hopes, Mr. Brimsdown put an end to his reflections and went downstairs for the post.
By the dim light of the lowered hall gas he saw an envelope lying on the floor—a thick grey envelope addressed to himself in a thin irregular hand. The sight of that superscription startled him like a glimpse of the unseen. For it was the handwriting of the subject of his thoughts—Robert Turold.
With the stiff movement of an ageing man he picked up the letter and went upstairs again. In some subtle way the room seemed changed. He had a sudden inexplicable sensation of nervousness and depression. Shaking it off with an effort, he opened the envelope in his hand with an odd reluctance—the feeling that he was prying into something which was no concern of his. He drew out the single grey sheet and unfolded it. The letter was dated from Flint House on the previous day. There was but a few lines, but the lawyer was pulled up at the beginning by the unusual familiarity of the address. “My dear Brimsdown” was unusual in one so formal as Robert Turold. But the handwriting was his—undoubtedly. Mr. Brimsdown had seen it too often to be mistaken. With the growing idea that the whole thing was confounding to sober sense and reason, he read on—
"Can you postpone all your other engagements and come to Cornwall on receipt of this? If you will telegraph the train you travel by I will have a conveyance to meet you at Penzance and bring you to Flint House. This is a matter of importance."
A postscript followed in the strangest contrast to the formal note—a postscript hasty and blotted, which had evidently been added in extreme agitation of mind—
"For God's sake lose no time. Come at once."
The tremulous urgent words stared out from the surface of the grey paper in all the piteous futility of an appeal made too late. Glancing up, Mr. Brimsdown’s eye rested on the shelf where the deed box of Robert Turold reposed, and he mechanically reflected that it would be necessary to have the word “Deceased” added to the white-lettered inscription on the black surface. Mr. Brimsdown sighed. Then, shaking off the quiescence of mind which his brooding had engendered, he applied his faculties to the consideration of a situation which at first sight seemed fantastic as a nightmare.
The letter was not more remarkable than its despatch after the writer’s death, but the summons to Cornwall was not in itself surprising. He recalled a similar visit to Norfolk some years before, and the recent correspondence between them made it clear that the claim had reached a stage which required careful legal handling. Robert Turold had forwarded copies of the final proofs of the family descent discovered in Cornwall, and Mr. Brimsdown had prepared the claim for the termination of abeyance which was to be heard by the House of Lords. Mr. Brimsdown was also aware of the summoning of the other members of the family to Cornwall to impart the news to them. A very natural and proper proceeding on Robert Turold’s part, he had deemed it.
He believed he knew every intimate detail of the ambition on which Robert Turold had immutably set his heart. Had they not been discussed between them, ag............