The Glory of Clementina Wing. William John Locke

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СКАЧАТЬ whose name was Job. We know that he was perfect and upright, feared God, and eschewed evil; and we are told how, on a disastrous afternoon, messenger after messenger came to him to announce one calamity after the other, culminating in the annihilation of his entire family, and how the final scorbutic affliction came shortly afterwards, the anti-climax, it must be confessed, of his woes, which drove the patient man to open his mouth and curse his day. Between Job and Dr. Quixtus I doubt whether the like avalanche of disasters, Pelion on Ossa and Kinchinjunga on Pelion of misfortunes, ever came thundering down on the head of an upright and evil-eschewing human creature.

      The tale of these successive misfortunes can only be briefly narrated; for to examine in detail the train of circumstances which led up to them, and the intricate nexus of human motive in which they were complicated would be foreign to the purpose of this chronicle. Except passively or negatively, perhaps, Quixtus had no hand in their happening. As in the case of Job the thunderbolts fell from a cloudless sky. His moral character was blameless, his position as assured, his life as happy as the patriarch’s. He had done no man harm all his days, and he had no cause to fear evil from any quarter. A tithe or more of his goods he gave in generous charity; and not only did he not proclaim the fact aloud like the Pharisee, but never mentioned the matter to himself—for the simple reason that keeping no accounts of his expenditure he had not the remotest notion of the amount of his eleemosynary expenses. You would have far to go to meet a man more free from petty-mindedness or vanity than Ephraim Quixtus. He was mild, urbane, and for all his scholarly reading, palæolithic knowledge, and wide travel, singularly modest. If you contradicted him, instead of asserting himself, as most men do, with increased vigour, he forthwith put back to find, if possible, the flaw in his own argument. When complimented on his undoubted attainments, he always sought to depreciate them. The achievement of others, even in his own special department of learning, moved his generous admiration. Yet he had one extraordinary vanity—which made him fall short of the perfection of his prototype in the land of Uz—the doctorial title which he possessed by virtue of his PhD. degree from the University of Heidelberg. Through signing his articles in learned publications “Ephraim Quixtus, PhD.,” his brethren among the learned who rent him respectfully to pieces in other learned publications, invariably alluded to him as Dr. Quixtus. Through being thus styled by his brethren both in print and conversation, he began to give his name as Dr. Quixtus to the stentorian functionary at the doors of banquets and receptions of the learned, and derived infinite gratification from hearing it loudly proclaimed to all assembled. From that to announcing himself as “Dr. Quixtus” to the parlour-maid or butler in the homes of the worldly was but a step.

      Now it may be questioned whether on the rolls kept by the Incorporated Law Society there is a solicitor who would style himself Doctor. It would be as foreign to the ordinary solicitor’s notions of professional propriety as to interview his clients in a surplice. The title does not suggest a solicitor—any more than Quixtus himself did in person. He was a stranger, an anomaly, a changeling in the Corporation. He ought never to have been a solicitor. He was a very bad solicitor—and that was what the judge said, among other things of a devastating nature, when he was giving evidence at a certain memorable trial, which took place not long after he had re-entered the stormy horizon of Clementina Wing, and his portrait had been hung above the presidential chair of the Anthropological Society.

      It is but justice to say that Quixtus was a solicitor not by choice but by inheritance and filial affection. His father had an old-fashioned lucrative family practice, into which, as it was his father’s earnest desire, his kindly nature allowed him to drift. When his father died suddenly, almost as soon as his articles were completed and he was admitted into partnership, he stared in dismay at the prospect before him. He could no more draw up a conveyance of land, or administer a bankrupt estate, or prepare a brief for a barrister, than he could have steered an Atlantic liner into New York Harbour. And he had not the faintest desire to know how to draw up a conveyance or administer an estate. Beyond acquiring from text-books the bare information requisite for the passing of his examinations, he had never attempted to probe deeper into the machinery of the law. His mind attributed far greater importance to the sharp flint instruments wherewith primitive men settled their quarrels by whanging each other over the head than to the miserable instruments on parchment which adjusted the sordid wrangles of the present generation. By entering the profession he had merely gratified a paternal whim. There had been a “Quixtus and Son” in Lincoln’s Inn for a hundred years, and it was the dearest wish of the old man’s heart that “Quixtus and Son” should remain there in sæcula sæculorum. While his father was alive Ephraim had scarcely thought of this desirable continuity. But his father dead, it behoved him to see piously to its establishment.

      The irksome part of the matter was that he had no financial reason for proceeding with an abominated profession. As hunger drives the wolves abroad, according to François Villon, so might hunger have driven him from his palæolithic forest. But there was no chance of his being hungry. Not only did his father and his mother each leave him a comfortable fortune, but he was the declared heir of an uncle, his father’s elder brother, who possessed large estates in Devonshire, and had impressed Ephraim from his boyhood up as one in advanced and palsied old age.

      Yet “Quixtus and Son” had to be carried on. How? He consulted the confidential clerk, Marrable, who had been in the office since boyhood. Marrable at once suggested a solution of the difficulty which almost caused Ephraim to throw himself into his arms for joy. It was wonderful! It was immense! Quixtus welcomed it as Henry VIII. welcomed Cromwell’s suggestion for getting rid of Queen Katherine. The solution was nothing less than that Ephraim should take him into partnership on generous terms. The deed of partnership was drawn up and signed, and Quixtus entered upon a series of happy and prosperous years. He attended the office occasionally, signed letters and interviewed old family clients, whom he entertained with instructive though irrelevant gossip until they went away comforted. When they insisted on business advice instead of comfort, he rang the bell, and Marrable appeared like a djinn out of a bottle. Nothing could be simpler, nothing could work more satisfactorily. Not only did clients find their affairs thoroughly looked after, but they were flattered at having bestowed upon them the concentrated legal acumen and experience of the firm. You may say that, as a solicitor, Quixtus was a humbug; that he ought never to have accepted the position. But show me a man who has never done that which he ought not to have done, and you will show me either an irresponsible idiot or an angel masquerading in mortal vesture. I have my doubts whether Job himself before his trials was quite as perfect as he is made out to be. Quixtus was neither idiot nor angel. At the most he was a scholarly ineffectual gentleman of comfortable means, forced by filial tenderness into a distasteful and bewildering pursuit. He had neither the hard-heartedness to kill the one, nor the strength of will to devote himself to the mastery of the other. He compromised, you may say, with the devil. Well, the devil is notoriously insidious, and Quixtus was entirely unconscious of subscribing to a bargain. At any rate, the devil had a hand in his undoing and appointed a zealous agent of iniquity in the person of Mr. Samuel Marrable.

      When Quixtus went to Lincoln’s Inn Fields one morning and found, instead of his partner, a letter from him stating that he had gone abroad and would remain there without an address for an indefinite time, Quixtus was surprised. When he had summoned the managing clerk and together they had opened Marrable’s safe, both he and the clerk were bewildered; and after he had spent an hour or two with a chartered accountant, for whom he had hurriedly telephoned, he grew sick from horror and amazement. Later in the day he heard through the police that a warrant was out for Samuel Marrable’s arrest. In the course of time he learned that Samuel Marrable had done everything that a solicitor should not do. He had misappropriated trust-funds; he had made away with bearer-bonds; he had falsified accounts; he had forged transfers; he had speculated in wild-cat concerns; he had become the dupe of a gang of company promoters known throughout the City as “Gehenna Unlimited.” He had robbed the widow; he had robbed the orphan; he had robbed the firm; he had robbed with impunity for many years; but when, in desperation, he had tried to rob “Gehenna Unlimited,” they were too much for him. So Samuel Marrable had fled the country.

      Thus fell the first thunderbolt. Quixtus saw the fair repute of “Quixtus and СКАЧАТЬ