Chapter XXII: Mr. Shelf’s Little Surprise

Mr. Theodore Shelf had reached the end of his tether, and, like a shrewd business man, he knew it. There is a certain mad excitement in standing on a high ledge of an iceberg when the steps which you have clambered up by have splintered away, and the hundred-foot cliffs above are threatening every instant to descend in crashing avalanche. You know you have to jump into the cold green waters below, or be crushed out of existence; and lingering to the very last second is not without its fierce pleasures. The dive is chilly; the waters beneath unknown; final escape most hazardous. But it is not these things which make you loiter; it is the nearness of the crash behind; and that is fascinating beyond all words.

Mr. Shelf was in a similar position. He knew that his commercial ledge was growing more and more dangerous every minute, by reason of the Law of the Land which loomed above, and yet for the life of him he could not tear himself away. He had waiting for him that snug _estançia_ on the banks of the Rio Paraguay which he had time-before made ready against a possible cataclysm; but it was left to wait. The excitement of lingering on in London was meat and drink to him. His daring would be spoken about afterwards; and though, it is true, he might not be blessed, still he would not be forgotten.

That last was, perhaps, the chief reason which made him stay on. The vanity of the man was colossal. He had been tickled by the improving young men, he had been tickled in his tabernacle, he had been tickled by a parliamentary constituency; but these did not glut him. He wanted more, far more; and if he could not distinguish himself in the way his wife had hoped, he would at last be famous in his fall. If only he could have stayed on three days more and seen his baronetcy gazetted in the birthday list, he could then have made the most sensational exit on record. But even debarred of this—for he could not avert the crash by even those three short days—he did not intend to depart without his special ruffle of Society drums.

He had a scheme, too, in his waiting, of taking a vengeance on this same wife who had made it necessary for him to fall at all. Without her wild extravagance he would have been able to weather the commercial depression which had weighed him down; but she had scoffed at warnings, and increased the muster-roll of her guests, and fed them on bank-notes. What this scheme was he confided to no one but George, and George did not split. George hated Mrs. Shelf to the extent of showing ivory whenever she was near him.

“George,” said Mr. Shelf, at the conclusion of one of these grim confidences, “I shall be a lonely man. You must come out there with me.”

And George poked a cold black nose into Mr. Shelf’s hand, and said that he should be vastly disappointed if he was left behind.

Now Mr. Theodore Shelf intended to have his vengeance on the night of a ball which his wife was going to give, and which for sheer gorgeousness and distinguished assembly was to rival by far all her previous efforts; and he was quite satisfied in his own mind that the action would be entirely justifiable. Still he was a man not without natural affections. He was extremely fond of his ward, Amy Rivers, even though, through the hard commercial shrewdness of Hamilton Fairfax, he had been obliged to refund her fortune which he had laid hands upon, and so bring nearer the day of his own ruin. Many men would have visited their natural annoyance on the girl, but Shelf did not. Indeed, he was only known to be disagreeable to her once, and that once was the last time he and she had speech together; and what he said then was entirely to her interest and without any profit to himself. It was on the morning of the great ball, and he called her to him in his room, and asked if Fairfax would be there that evening.

“Of course,” she said. “Why?”

“After what has passed between us?”

“You mean in the City?”

“I do, my dear. Mr. Fairfax has displeased me much. First of all, he resigned from the directorate of my new company, the ‘Brothers Steamship Association,’ on which I had placed him, a very flattering position for so young a man; and then he caused me deep sorrow in doubting the pureness of my motives in floating the company at all. I am long-suffering, Amy, and because it is my duty to bear with the hasty, I do so as much as possible. But Mr. Fairfax over-stepped the mark. Such a spirit as his would cause dissension amongst our simple-minded workers, and I felt it due to them that he should no longer be at their side.”

“So you gave him the—well, the sack. Of course, I know.”

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Shelf, with a smile of pain, “he will be able to obtain employment elsewhere, or, being a young man of means, he may choose to set up in business for himself; but I fear, my dear, that he will miss many of the Christian influences which so elevate and purify the dependents of Marmaduke Rivers and Shelf.”

Miss Rivers shrugged her shoulders. “Isn’t this,” she said, “to do with the City and not Park Lane? As Mrs. Shelf says, we’re ordinary society heathens when we’re here, and as she sent Hamilton his card, I don’t see that it matters. It’s Mrs. Shelf’s ‘At Home.’”

“And not mine, Amy? You are right in the word, my dear, but not in the spirit. As a Christian, of course I have already forgiven the wrong Mr. Fairfax has done me in doubting the pureness of my motives. But this humble roof is mine, Amy, and it would grieve me to receive under it any one with whom I am not on terms of brotherly amity. But perhaps you can assure me, my dear, that Mr. Fairfax has already repented him of his hasty and unjust words.”

“No, that,” said Miss Rivers, “I’m sure he hasn’t.”

“Then,” replied Mr. Theodore Shelf, with a sorrowful firmness, “I cannot receive him. I couldn’t do it.”

“I suppose you know,” the girl retorted sharply, “that if Hamilton does not come here to-night, I shan’t either.”

“You are my ward.”

“I may be. But you’ve never tyrannized over me, and you are not going to begin now. I tell you flatly that if it’s no Hamilton, it’s going to be no me. I shall go to Hampstead to stay with my cousin.”

“I cannot give way in this, Amy. My conscience will not permit me.”

“Very well. May I have the carriage, or must I order a hansom?”

“My dear child, I can refuse you nothing in reason. The brougham is now, as it always has been, entirely at your disposal.”

Miss Rivers left the room, and Mr. Shelf scrubbed his dog’s ragged head. “She’s angry with me now, George,” he said, with a fat, satisfied smile, “but I think she’ll change her mind afterwards. She’s a clever girl, and she’ll see. So will that young beggar Fairfax, confound him!”

Then Mr. Shelf put George on a comfortable chair, and turned to his table. He had, as may be imagined, a good deal of writing to get through, and a considerable deal of burning; and the work took him till very late. Then he dressed, slipped out for dinner, and returned by eleven o’clock, to stand behind his wife, and watch her as she received her guests, and share with her the warm congratulations on their coming accession to title. He thought he had never seen the woman look so handsome or so queenly, and once or twice he half regretted the blow which he was going to bring down upon her. But then his eyes would fall on the walls of the room, and the silver lamps, and the flowers; and the items of that gorgeous display would go into his soul, and wither up any morsel of compassion which might have been there.

“A man’s impelling motive is not always under his own hat,” he overheard some one saying as they passed him, and he applied the words to himself; and when he remembered the ruthless extravagance which no words or entreaties of his own could stay, and which alone (so he believed) had forced him into knavery, he felt that social death was a poor requital to the woman who had worked his ruin. A knife was more her due. And yet, and yet, she was such a monstrous fine woman, and so thoroughly clever in the _rôle_ she had set herself to play.

It certainly was a gorgeous assembly. Not made up exclusively of the very best people perhaps, though many of them were there; but it looked wealth unspeakable. Men in evening dress cannot show this; if they fail to appear like waiters, that is the utmost they can expect. But the women! They carried it on their shoulders and backs, as they have done since the beginning of time. Their dresses were a dream of cost and loveliness, their jewelery a chain of rainbows.

“Oh, Lord,” said one young man with predatory instincts, who propped a wall, “why aren’t I a practising bushranger just now? There’s some of the finest diamonds in all the world here to-night, and two Johnnies with pistols could stick up the whole house. Why’s England such a beastly safe place? If there was a hard, wooden chair anywhere here to sit on and think, I believe I’d turn anarchist on the spot.”

“Don’t reduce the crowd to L. S. D.,” said a fellow prop. “It spoils the poetry of the thing. Now, I find them good enough to look at.”

“Never said they weren’t,” rejoined the other. “Only thing is they aren’t mine. Now, I could do very well with the lot of them.”

“This isn’t Turkey,” said his friend, reprovingly.

“Oh, not the women. I’ve got one wife, and she’s enough for me. But I’d like the dresses and the diamonds. I’d sell ’em second-hand to the Jews, and riot on the proceeds. Talking of sales, come and find some burgundy cup.”

They went away from the ballroom, passing down the broad, shallow stairway, and were going to cross the hall, when a man stopped them and told them the way was closed.

“What’s the matter? Has there been an accident?”

“Well, perhaps it might be an accident, sir. ’Tisn’t for me to say.”

“Who the devil are you, anyway?”

“A member of the metropolitan police force, sir; a plain-clothes man, at your service. Stand back, sir, I say. You can’t come down here. The police are searching the lower part of the house.”

“My aunt! Has there been a burglary?”

“They are looking for Mr. Shelf,” said the policeman, shortly. “There’s a warrant out against him for embezzlement. But that needn’t affect you gentlemen and ladies up-stairs. You can go on with your dancing.”

The two guests looked at one another, and broke into a strained laugh. Then they calmed their faces again, and went back up the stair.

“And I was envying that man a minute ago,” said one of them. “Well, ‘all flesh is but grass,’ as the poor beggar would say himself. Shows how little you can gauge a man’s finances from seeing what he spends. I say, bet you a fiver my wife goes to the trial. She knows a judge.”

The music stopped at the end of a polka, and the gabble of talk burst promptly out with a clatter, and was carried about all over the house. But by degrees it hushed, and in its place grew the rustle of whispers. The scandal microbe travels quicker than his cousin of cholera. Curious glances were cast over the banisters by men and women, who half hoped, half feared to see their host led away in custody.

Some were sorry; some were shocked; a few were grimly glad. The band broke out into “El Dorado;” and, being the best band in London, it played it so that the very chairs tried to jig about and dance of their own accord. But no leather sole kissed the glistening parquet of the ballroom. The only things that moved there were the music-players, and a tatter of tulle which whirled about to the gale of the cornet. The guests in that house were running from it as though the black plague had broken out. The police had withdrawn their cordon from the bottom of the staircase, and were leaving the spot, as the careful Mr. Shelf had done some short time earlier.

Mrs. Theodore Shelf stood like a woman mazed. She could not change color, for happily that was fixed, according to the canons of the day; but she posed herself erectly behind a chair in the drawing-room, and gripped with her gloved hands upon the back, till muscles arose in her plump white arms which had never shown there before. Through the doorless doorway she saw an unbroken stream of her guests, cloaked and shawled, making their way to the head of the stair. Most kept their looks studiously before them; and of the few who cast her a glance, half-scared, half-curious, few added the smallest ghost of a bow.

Of all that wondrous crowd, no women at all, and two men only, came up to her before they went. One said, “Good night, Mrs. Shelf.” The other said, “Good night, Laura; I’m very sorry.”

Then these followed the rest; and, when all had gone, a white-faced servant came up and told her what had happened. The police had been quick with their search, but the man they wanted had been quicker. He had left the house ten minutes before they arrived.

“Is that all?”

“That is all, madame.”

“Very well,” said Mrs. Shelf. “I shall not want you any more to-night. Lock up, and then you may all go to bed.”

Then, picking up her fan, she walked leisurely out of the drawing-room, and went to her own boudoir.

That Mr. Theodore Shelf had made his own exit and brought about his wife’s social downfall most dramatically, even the worst-hit of his victims could not but admit. The police, with exquisite trouble, had traced him to Paddington Station, and found that he had taken a first-class ticket to Liverpool; and, after using the wires, they returned to bed with the firm conviction that their seaport associates would meet the gentleman at Lime Street. Of course they could not possibly guess that he and a wire-haired fox-terrier dog had changed their route to Monmouthshire, and had arrived in Newport in ample time to go on board one of the Oceanic Steam Transport Company’s boats, which had just finished coaling there.

The police and the victims said a good many things when they learnt the simple means by which Mr. Shelf had escaped, and they confidently expected never to see him again in this world, and hoped to miss him in the next.

Of all creation, the newspaper proprietors alone blessed the man, in that he had sent up their circulation with a bounce and a bound. But even they did not show due gratitude. They dissected his doings with all the cruelty that ink is capable of, and made derisive comments on his Christian name. They found no excuse for him; no tittle of good in all his prodigious enterprises. They painted him black all over, inside and out, and Great Britain set back its shoulders and howled with upright wrath over the picture. They published chartered accountants’ certificates of their sales, and sold their journals to companies on the strength of the figures, and thanked Heaven in print that they had never gone so low as to receive benefit from Theodore Shelf. It was only in private that they rubbed their hands complacently, and spoke of him as a journalist’s gold-mine. Perhaps this may not strike one as entirely fair; but it was eminently business-like; and, as a commercial man himself, Mr. Shelf should have been the last to condemn it. He did though, for all that. Indeed, circumstances combined to modify his views on many matters after his exit from polite society.