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The bystanders repeated this to one another, as they followed Mr. Dunbar and his custodian from the station, loudly indignant against the minions of the law. Mr. Dunbar, the constable, and Mr. Balderby drove straight to the magistrate's house. The junior partner offered any amount of bail for his chief; but the Anglo-Indian motioned him to silence, with a haughty gesture. "I thank you, Mr.
He looked about him a little absently as he re-entered the room. "I thought I brought a cane," he said. "I think not," replied Mr. Balderby, rising from before his desk. "I don't remember seeing one in your hand." "Ah, then, I suppose I was mistaken."
There are some forged bills that are as good as genuine documents; and the Jew who discounted these knew that. If my son comes into the bank this morning send him to me." "And did the young man come?" asked the junior partner. "Yes, Mr. Balderby, sir; in less than half an hour after I left Mr. Percival Dunbar's room, in comes Mr. Henry, dashing and swaggering into the place as if it was his own.
Balderby, a confidential cashier called Clement Austin, and an old clerk, a man of about sixty-five years of age, who had been a faithful servant of the firm ever since his boyhood. This man's name was Sampson Wilmot. He was old, but he looked much older than he was. His hair was white, and hung in long thin locks upon the collar of his shabby bottle-green great coat.
The two men were inexpressibly shocked by this story. "But where is Sampson Wilmot?" exclaimed Mr. Balderby. "It was he whom I sent to meet you, knowing that he was the only person in the office who remembered you, or whom you remembered." "Sampson was taken ill upon the way, according to his brother's story," Mr. Dunbar answered. "Joseph left the poor old man somewhere upon the road."
He went from bad to worse, and three years after Mr. Henry sailed for India, my brother, Joseph Wilmot, was convicted, with two or three others, upon a charge of manufacturing forged Bank of England notes, and was transported for life." "Indeed!" exclaimed Mr. Balderby; "a sad story, a very sad story. I have heard something of it before, but never the whole truth. Your brother is dead, I suppose."
"Previous to my daughter's marriage I settled upon her the house in Portland Place and the Yorkshire property. She will have all my money when I die; and, as Sir Philip Jocelyn is a rich man, she will perhaps be one of the wealthiest women in England. So far so good. Neither Laura nor her husband will have any reason for dissatisfaction. But this is not quite enough, Mr. Balderby.
"No, indeed, Mr. Balderby; I am very comfortable in my position." The junior partner leaned back in his chair, and stared at the cashier as if he had been trying to detect the traces of incipient insanity in the young man's countenance. "You are comfortable in your position, and yet you Oh!
He had witnessed the arrival of a great many different travellers, when his attention was suddenly arrested by a little old man, wan and wizen and near-sighted, feeble-looking, but active, who alighted from a cab, and gave his small black-leather portmanteau into the hands of a porter. This man was Sampson Wilmot, the old confidential clerk in the house of Dunbar, Dunbar, and Balderby.
The three men assembled in the quiet room behind the bank on this oppressive August evening were talking together of that old story. "I never saw Henry Dunbar," Mr. Balderby said; "for, as you know, Wilmot, I didn't come into the firm till ten years after he sailed for India; but I've heard the story hinted at amongst the clerks in the days when I was only a clerk myself."
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