The Fallen Leaves. Wilkie Collins
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I beg to join.” So the letter was expressed, and so it ended.
“They needn’t be afraid of my troubling them. Calm seas and pleasure-boats! Stuff and nonsense!” Such was the first impression which his wife’s report of herself produced on Old Ronald’s mind. After a while, he looked at the letter again—and frowned, and reflected. “Please let me hear of your visit beforehand,” he repeated to himself, as if the request had been, in some incomprehensible way, offensive to him. He opened the drawer of his desk, and threw the letter into it. When business was over for the day, he went to his club at the tavern, and made himself unusually disagreeable to everybody.
A week passed. In the interval he wrote briefly to his wife. “I’m all right, and the shop goes on as usual.” He also forwarded one or two letters which came for Mrs. Ronald. No more news reached him from Ramsgate. “I suppose they’re enjoying themselves,” he reflected. “The house looks queer without them; I’ll go to the club.”
He stayed later than usual, and drank more than usual, that night. It was nearly one in the morning when he let himself in with his latch-key, and went upstairs to bed.
Approaching the toilette-table, he found a letter lying on it, addressed to “Mr. Ronald—private.” It was not in his wife’s handwriting; not in any handwriting known to him. The characters sloped the wrong way, and the envelope bore no postmark. He eyed it over and over suspiciously. At last he opened it, and read these lines:
“You are advised by a true friend to lose no time in looking after your wife. There are strange doings at the seaside. If you don’t believe me, ask Mrs. Turner, Number 1, Slains Row, Ramsgate.”
No address, no date, no signature—an anonymous letter, the first he had ever received in the long course of his life.
His hard brain was in no way affected by the liquor that he had drunk. He sat down on his bed, mechanically folding and refolding the letter. The reference to “Mrs. Turner” produced no impression on him of any sort: no person of that name, common as it was, happened to be numbered on the list of his friends or his customers. But for one circumstance, he would have thrown the letter aside, in contempt. His memory reverted to his wife’s incomprehensible behaviour at parting. Addressing him through that remembrance, the anonymous warning assumed a certain importance to his mind. He went down to his desk, in the back office, and took his wife’s letter out of the drawer, and read it through slowly. “Ha!” he said, pausing as he came across the sentence which requested him to write beforehand, in the unlikely event of his deciding to go to Ramsgate. He thought again of the strangely persistent way in which his wife had dwelt on his trusting her; he recalled her nervous anxious looks, her deepening colour, her agitation at one moment, and then her sudden silence and sudden retreat to the cab. Fed by these irritating influences, the inbred suspicion in his nature began to take fire slowly. She might be innocent enough in asking him to give her notice before he joined her at the seaside—she might naturally be anxious to omit no needful preparation for his comfort. Still, he didn’t like it; no, he didn’t like it. An appearance as of a slow collapse passed little by little over his rugged wrinkled face. He looked many years older than his age, as he sat at the desk, with the flaring candlelight close in front of him, thinking. The anonymous letter lay before him, side by side with his wife’s letter. On a sudden, he lifted his gray head, and clenched his fist, and struck the venomous written warning as if it had been a living thing that could feel. “Whoever you are,” he said, “I’ll take your advice.”
He never even made the attempt to go to bed that night. His pipe helped him through the comfortless and dreary hours. Once or twice he thought of his daughter. Why had her mother been so anxious about her? Why had her mother taken her to Ramsgate? Perhaps, as a blind—ah, yes, perhaps as a blind! More for the sake of something to do than for any other reason, he packed a handbag with a few necessaries. As soon as the servant was stirring, he ordered her to make him a cup of strong coffee. After that, it was time to show himself as usual, on the opening of the shop. To his astonishment, he found his clerk taking down the shutters, in place of the porter.
“What does this mean?” he asked. “Where is Farnaby?”
The clerk looked at his master, and paused aghast with a shutter in his hands.
“Good Lord! what has come to you?” he cried. “Are you ill?”
Old Ronald angrily repeated his question: “Where is Farnaby?”
“I don’t know,” was the answer.
“You don’t know? Have you been up to his bedroom?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“Well, he isn’t in his bedroom. And, what’s more, his bed hasn’t been slept in last night. Farnaby’s off, sir—nobody knows where.”
Old Ronald dropped heavily into the nearest chair. This second mystery, following on the mystery of the anonymous letter, staggered him. But his business instincts were still in good working order. He held out his keys to the clerk. “Get the petty cash-book,” he said, “and see if the money is all right.”
The clerk received the keys under protest. “That’s not the right reading of the riddle,” he remarked.
“Do as I tell you!”
The clerk opened the money-drawer under the counter; counted the pounds, shillings and pence paid by chance customers up to the closing of the shop on the previous evening; compared the result with the petty cash-book, and answered, “Right to a halfpenny.”
Satisfied so far, old Ronald condescended to approach the speculative side of the subject, with the assistance of his subordinate. “If what you said just now means anything,” he resumed, “it means that you suspect the reason why Farnaby has left my service. Let’s hear it.”
“You know that I never liked John Farnaby,” the clerk began. “An active young fellow and a clever young fellow, I grant you. But a bad servant for all that. False, Mr. Ronald—false to the marrow of his bones.”
Mr. Ronald’s patience began to give way. “Come to the facts,” he growled. “Why has Farnaby gone off without a word to anybody? Do you know that?”
“I know no more than you do,” the clerk answered coolly. “Don’t fly into a passion. I have got some facts for you, if you will only give me time. Turn them over in your own mind, and see what they come to. Three days ago I was short of postage-stamps, and I went to the office. Farnaby was there, waiting at the desk where they pay the post-office orders. There must have been ten or a dozen people with letters, orders, and what not, between him and me. I got behind him quietly, and looked over his shoulder. I saw the clerk give him the money for his post-office order. Five pounds in gold, which I reckoned as they lay on the counter, and a bank-note besides, which he crumpled up in his hand. I can’t tell you how much it was for; I only know it was a bank-note. Just ask yourself how a porter on twenty shillings a week (with a mother who takes in washing, and a father who takes in drink) comes to have a correspondent who sends him an order for five sovereigns—and a bank-note, value unknown. Say he’s turned betting-man in secret. Very good. There’s the post-office order, in that case, to show that he’s got a run of luck. If he has got a run of luck, tell me this—why does he leave his place like a thief in the night? He’s not a slave; he’s not even an apprentice. When he thinks he can better himself, he has no earthly need to keep it a secret that he means to leave your service. He may have met with an accident, to be sure. But that’s not my belief. I say he’s up to some mischief And now comes the question: What are we to do?”
Mr. Ronald, listening with his head down, and without interposing a word on his own part, made an extraordinary answer. “Leave it,” he said. “Leave it till tomorrow.”
“Why?” the clerk answered, without ceremony.
Mr. Ronald made another extraordinary answer. “Because I am obliged to go out of town for the day. Look after the business. The ironmonger’s man over the way will help you to put up the shutters at night. If anybody inquires for me, say I shall be back