The dinner-party was at the great Physician's. Bar was there, and in
full force. Ferdinand Barnacle was there, and in his most engaging
state.
Few ways of life were hidden from Physician, and he was oftener
in its darkest places than even Bishop. There were brilliant ladies
about London who perfectly doted on him, my dear, as the most charming
creature and the most delightful person, who would have been shocked to
find themselves so close to him if they could have known on what sights
those thoughtful eyes of his had rested within an hour or two, and near
to whose beds, and under what roofs, his composed figure had stood.
But Physician was a composed man, who performed neither on his own trumpet,
nor on the trumpets of other people. Many wonderful things did he see
and hear, and much irreconcilable moral contradiction did he pass his
life among; yet his equality of compassion was no more disturbed than
the Divine Master's of all healing was. He went, like the rain,
among the just and unjust, doing all the good he could, and neither
proclaiming it in the synagogues nor at the corner of streets.
As no man of large experience of humanity, however quietly carried
it may be, can fail to be invested with an interest peculiar to the
possession of such knowledge, Physician was an attractive man. Even the
daintier gentlemen and ladies who had no idea of his secret, and
who would have been startled out of more wits than they had, by the
monstrous impropriety of his proposing to them 'Come and see what I
see!' confessed his attraction. Where he was, something real was. And
half a grain of reality, like the smallest portion of some other scarce
natural productions, will flavour an enormous quantity of diluent.
It came to pass, therefore, that Physician's little dinners always
presented people in their least conventional lights. The guests said to
themselves, whether they were conscious of it or no, 'Here is a man who
really has an acquaintance with us as we are, who is admitted to some
of us every day with our wigs and paint off, who hears the wanderings of
our minds, and sees the undisguised expression of our faces, when both
are past our control; we may as well make an approach to reality with
him, for the man has got the better of us and is too strong for us.'
Therefore, Physician's guests came out so surprisingly at his round
table that they were almost natural.
Bar's knowledge of that agglomeration of jurymen which is called
humanity was as sharp as a razor; yet a razor is not a generally
convenient instrument, and Physician's plain bright scalpel, though far
less keen, was adaptable to far wider purposes. Bar knew all about the
gullibility and knavery of people; but Physician could have given him
a better insight into their tendernesses and affections, in one week of
his rounds, than Westminster Hall and all the circuits put together,
in threescore years and ten. Bar always had a suspicion of this, and
perhaps was glad to encourage it (for, if the world were really a great
Law Court, one would think that the last day of Term could not too soon
arrive); and so he liked and respected Physician quite as much as any
other kind of man did.
Mr Merdle's default left a Banquo's chair at the table; but, if he had
been there, he would have merely made the difference of Banquo in it,
and consequently he was no loss. Bar, who picked up all sorts of odds
and ends about Westminster Hall, much as a raven would have done if he
had passed as much of his time there, had been picking up a great many
straws lately and tossing them about, to try which way the Merdle wind
blew. He now had a little talk on the subject with Mrs Merdle herself;
sidling up to that lady, of course, with his double eye-glass and his
jury droop.
'A certain bird,' said Bar; and he looked as if it could have been no
other bird than a magpie; 'has been whispering among us lawyers lately,
that there is to be an addition to the titled personages of this realm.'
'Really?' said Mrs Merdle.
'Yes,' said Bar. 'Has not the bird been whispering in very different
ears from ours--in lovely ears?' He looked expressively at Mrs Merdle's
nearest ear-ring.
'Do you mean mine?' asked Mrs Merdle.
'When I say lovely,' said Bar, 'I always mean you.'
'You never mean anything, I think,' returned Mrs Merdle (not
displeased).
'Oh, cruelly unjust!' said Bar. 'But, the bird.'
'I am the last person in the world to hear news,' observed Mrs Merdle,
carelessly arranging her stronghold. 'Who is it?'
'What an admirable witness you would make!' said Bar. 'No jury (unless
we could empanel one of blind men) could resist you, if you were ever so
bad a one; but you would be such a good one!'
'Why, you ridiculous man?' asked Mrs Merdle, laughing.
Bar waved his double eye-glass three or four times between himself and
the Bosom, as a rallying answer, and inquired in his most insinuating
accents:
'What am I to call the most elegant, accomplished and charming of women,
a few weeks, or it may be a few days, hence?'
'Didn't your bird tell you what to call her?' answered Mrs Merdle. 'Do
ask it to-morrow, and tell me the next time you see me what it says.'
This led to further passages of similar pleasantry between the two; but
Bar, with all his sharpness, got nothing out of them. Physician, on the
other hand, taking Mrs Merdle down to her carriage and attending on her
as she put on her cloak, inquired into the symptoms with his usual calm
directness.
'May I ask,' he said, 'is this true about Merdle?'
'My dear doctor,' she returned, 'you ask me the very question that I was
half disposed to ask you.' 'To ask me! Why me?'
'Upon my honour, I think Mr Merdle reposes greater confidence in you
than in any one.'
'On the contrary, he tells me absolutely nothing, even professionally.
You have heard the talk, of course?'
'Of course I have. But you know what Mr Merdle is; you know how
taciturn and reserved he is. I assure you I have no idea what foundation
for it there may be. I should like it to be true; why should I deny that
to you? You would know better, if I did!'
'Just so,' said Physician.
'But whether it is all true, or partly true, or entirely false, I am
wholly unable to say. It is a most provoking situation, a most absurd
situation; but you know Mr Merdle, and are not surprised.'
Physician was not surprised, handed her into her carriage, and bade her
Good Night. He stood for a moment at his own hall door, looking sedately
at the elegant equipage as it rattled away. On his return up-stairs, the
rest of the guests soon dispersed, and he was left alone. Being a great
reader of all kinds of literature (and never at all apologetic for that
weakness), he sat down comfortably to read.
The clock upon his study table pointed to a few minutes short of twelve,
when his attention was called to it by a ringing at the door bell. A man
of plain habits, he had sent his servants to bed and must needs go down
to open the door. He went down, and there found a man without hat or
coat, whose shirt sleeves were rolled up tight to his shoulders. For a
moment, he thought the man had been fighting: the rather, as he was much
agitated and out of breath. A second look, however, showed him that
the man was particularly clean, and not otherwise discomposed as to his
dress than as it answered this description.
'I come from the warm-baths, sir, round in the neighbouring street.'
'And what is the matter at the warm-baths?'
'Would you please to come directly, sir. We found that, lying on the
table.'
He put into the physician's hand a scrap of paper. Physician looked at
it, and read his own name and address written in pencil; nothing more.
He looked closer at the writing, looked at the man, took his hat from
its peg, put the key of his door in his pocket, and they hurried away
together.
When they came to the warm-baths, all the other people belonging to that
establishment were looking out for them at the door, and running up and
down the passages. 'Request everybody else to keep back, if you please,'
said the physician aloud to the master; 'and do you take me straight to
the place, my friend,' to the messenger.
The messenger hurried before him, along a grove of little rooms,
and turning into one at the end of the grove, looked round the door.
Physician was close upon him, and looked round the door too.
There was a bath in that corner, from which the water had been hastily
drained off. Lying in it, as in a grave or sarcophagus, with a hurried
drapery of sheet and blanket thrown across it, was the body of a
heavily-made man, with an obtuse head, and coarse, mean, common
features. A sky-light had been opened to release the steam with which
the room had been filled; but it hung, condensed into water-drops,
heavily upon the walls, and heavily upon the face and figure in the
bath. The room was still hot, and the marble of the bath still warm; but
the face and figure were clammy to the touch. The white marble at the
bottom of the bath was veined with a dreadful red. On the ledge at
the side, were an empty laudanum-bottle and a tortoise-shell handled
penknife--soiled, but not with ink.
'Separation of jugular vein--death rapid--been dead at least half an
hour.' This echo of the physician's words ran through the passages
and little rooms, and through the house while he was yet straightening
himself from having bent down to reach to the bottom of the bath, and
while he was yet dabbling his hands in water; redly veining it as the
marble was veined, before it mingled into one tint.
He turned his eyes to the dress upon the sofa, and to the watch, money,
and pocket-book on the table. A folded note half buckled up in the
pocket-book, and half protruding from it, caught his observant glance.
He looked at it, touched it, pulled it a little further out from among
the leaves, said quietly, 'This is addressed to me,' and opened and read
it.
There were no directions for him to give. The people of the house knew
what to do; the proper authorities were soon brought; and they took an
equable business-like possession of the deceased, and of what had been
his property, with no greater disturbance of manner or countenance than
usually attends the winding-up of a clock. Physician was glad to walk
out into the night air--was even glad, in spite of his great experience,
to sit down upon a door-step for a little while: feeling sick and faint.
Bar was a near neighbour of his, and, when he came to the house, he saw
a light in the room where he knew his friend often sat late getting up
his work. As the light was never there when Bar was not, it gave him
assurance that Bar was not yet in bed. In fact, this busy bee had
a verdict to get to-morrow, against evidence, and was improving the
shining hours in setting snares for the gentlemen of the jury.
Physician's knock astonished Bar; but, as he immediately suspected that
somebody had come to tell him that somebody else was robbing him, or
otherwise trying to get the better of him, he came down promptly and
softly. He had been clearing his head with a lotion of cold water, as a
good preparative to providing hot water for the heads of the jury, and
had been reading with the neck of his shirt thrown wide open that he
might the more freely choke the opposite witnesses. In consequence, he
came down, looking rather wild. Seeing Physician, the least expected of
men, he looked wilder and said, 'What's the matter?'
'You asked me once what Merdle's complaint was.'
'Extraordinary answer! I know I did.'
'I told you I had not found out.'
'Yes. I know you did.'
'I have found it out.'
'My God!' said Bar, starting back, and clapping his hand upon the
other's breast. 'And so have I! I see it in your face.'
They went into the nearest room, where Physician gave him the letter to
read. He read it through half-a-dozen times. There was not much in it
as to quantity; but it made a great demand on his close and continuous
attention. He could not sufficiently give utterance to his regret that
he had not himself found a clue to this. The smallest clue, he said,
would have made him master of the case, and what a case it would have
been to have got to the bottom of!
Physician had engaged to break the intelligence in Harley Street. Bar
could not at once return to his inveiglements of the most enlightened
and remarkable jury he had ever seen in that box, with whom, he could
tell his learned friend, no shallow sophistry would go down, and no
unhappily abused professional tact and skill prevail (this was the way
he meant to begin with them); so he said he would go too, and would
loiter to and fro near the house while his friend was inside. They
walked there, the better to recover self-possession in the air; and the
wings of day were fluttering the night when Physician knocked at the
door.
A footman of rainbow hues, in the public eye, was sitting up for his
master--that is to say, was fast asleep in the kitchen over a couple
of candles and a newspaper, demonstrating the great accumulation of
mathematical odds against the probabilities of a house being set on fire
by accident When this serving man was roused, Physician had still to
await the rousing of the Chief Butler. At last that noble creature came
into the dining-room in a flannel gown and list shoes; but with his
cravat on, and a Chief Butler all over. It was morning now. Physician
had opened the shutters of one window while waiting, that he might see
the light. 'Mrs Merdle's maid must be called, and told to get Mrs Merdle
up, and prepare her as gently as she can to see me. I have dreadful news
to break to her.'
Thus Physician to the Chief Butler. The latter, who had a candle in his
hand, called his man to take it away. Then he approached the window with
dignity; looking on at Physician's news exactly as he had looked on at
the dinners in that very room.
'Mr Merdle is dead.'
'I should wish,' said the Chief Butler, 'to give a month's notice.'
'Mr Merdle has destroyed himself.'
'Sir,' said the Chief Butler, 'that is very unpleasant to the feelings
of one in my position, as calculated to awaken prejudice; and I should
wish to leave immediately.'
'If you are not shocked, are you not surprised, man?' demanded the
Physician, warmly.
The Chief Butler, erect and calm, replied in these memorable words.
'Sir, Mr Merdle never was the gentleman, and no ungentlemanly act on
Mr Merdle's part would surprise me. Is there anybody else I can send to
you, or any other directions I can give before I leave, respecting what
you would wish to be done?'
When Physician, after discharging himself of his trust up-stairs,
rejoined Bar in the street, he said no more of his interview with Mrs
Merdle than that he had not yet told her all, but that what he had told
her she had borne pretty well. Bar had devoted his leisure in the street
to the construction of a most ingenious man-trap for catching the whole
of his jury at a blow; having got that matter settled in his mind,
it was lucid on the late catastrophe, and they walked home slowly,
discussing it in every bearing. Before parting at the Physician's door,
they both looked up at the sunny morning sky, into which the smoke of a
few early fires and the breath and voices of a few early stirrers were
peacefully rising, and then looked round upon the immense city, and
said, if all those hundreds and thousands of beggared people who were
yet asleep could only know, as they two spoke, the ruin that impended
over them, what a fearful cry against one miserable soul would go up to
Heaven!
The report that the great man was dead, got about with astonishing
rapidity. At first, he was dead of all the diseases that ever were
known, and of several bran-new maladies invented with the speed of
Light to meet the demand of the occasion. He had concealed a dropsy from
infancy, he had inherited a large estate of water on the chest from his
grandfather, he had had an operation performed upon him every morning
of his life for eighteen years, he had been subject to the explosion of
important veins in his body after the manner of fireworks, he had had
something the matter with his lungs, he had had something the matter
with his heart, he had had something the matter with his brain. Five
hundred people who sat down to breakfast entirely uninformed on the
whole subject, believed before they had done breakfast, that they
privately and personally knew Physician to have said to Mr Merdle, 'You
must expect to go out, some day, like the snuff of a candle;' and that
they knew Mr Merdle to have said to Physician, 'A man can die but once.'
By about eleven o'clock in the forenoon, something the matter with the
brain, became the favourite theory against the field; and by twelve the
something had been distinctly ascertained to be 'Pressure.'
Pressure was so entirely satisfactory to the public mind, and seemed to
make everybody so comfortable, that it might have lasted all day but for
Bar's having taken the real state of the case into Court at half-past
nine. This led to its beginning to be currently whispered all over
London by about one, that Mr Merdle had killed himself. Pressure,
however, so far from being overthrown by the discovery, became a greater
favourite than ever. There was a general moralising upon Pressure, in
every street. All the people who had tried to make money and had not
been able to do it, said, There you were! You no sooner began to devote
yourself to the pursuit of wealth than you got Pressure. The idle people
improved the occasion in a similar manner. See, said they, what you
brought yourself to by work, work, work! You persisted in working, you
overdid it. Pressure came on, and you were done for! This consideration
was very potent in many quarters, but nowhere more so than among the
young clerks and partners who had never been in the slightest danger
of overdoing it. These, one and all, declared, quite piously, that they
hoped they would never forget the warning as long as they lived, and
that their conduct might be so regulated as to keep off Pressure, and
preserve them, a comfort to their friends, for many years.
But, at about the time of High 'Change, Pressure began to wane, and
appalling whispers to circulate, east, west, north, and south. At first
they were faint, and went no further than a doubt whether Mr Merdle's
wealth would be found to be as vast as had been supposed; whether there
might not be a temporary difficulty in 'realising' it; whether there
might not even be a temporary suspension (say a month or so), on the
part of the wonderful Bank. As the whispers became louder, which they
did from that time every minute, they became more threatening. He had
sprung from nothing, by no natural growth or process that any one could
account for; he had been, after all, a low, ignorant fellow; he had been
a down-looking man, and no one had ever been able to catch his eye;
he had been taken up by all sorts of people in quite an unaccountable
manner; he had never had any money of his own, his ventures had been
utterly reckless, and his expenditure had been most enormous. In steady
progression, as the day declined, the talk rose in sound and purpose.
He had left a letter at the Baths addressed to his physician, and his
physician had got the letter, and the letter would be produced at the
Inquest on the morrow, and it would fall like a thunderbolt upon the
multitude he had deluded. Numbers of men in every profession and trade
would be blighted by his insolvency; old people who had been in easy
circumstances all their lives would have no place of repentance for
their trust in him but the workhouse; legions of women and children
would have their whole future desolated by the hand of this mighty
scoundrel. Every partaker of his magnificent feasts would be seen to
have been a sharer in the plunder of innumerable homes; every servile
worshipper of riches who had helped to set him on his pedestal, would
have done better to worship the Devil point-blank. So, the talk, lashed
louder and higher by confirmation on confirmation, and by edition after
edition of the evening papers, swelled into such a roar when night came,
as might have brought one to believe that a solitary watcher on the
gallery above the Dome of St Paul's would have perceived the night air
to be laden with a heavy muttering of the name of Merdle, coupled with
every form of execration.
For by that time it was known that the late Mr Merdle's complaint
had been simply Forgery and Robbery. He, the uncouth object of such
wide-spread adulation, the sitter at great men's feasts, the roc's egg
of great ladies' assemblies, the subduer of exclusiveness, the leveller
of pride, the patron of patrons, the bargain-driver with a Minister
for Lordships of the Circumlocution Office, the recipient of more
acknowledgment within some ten or fifteen years, at most, than had been
bestowed in England upon all peaceful public benefactors, and upon
all the leaders of all the Arts and Sciences, with all their works to
testify for them, during two centuries at least--he, the shining wonder,
the new constellation to be followed by the wise men bringing gifts,
until it stopped over a certain carrion at the bottom of a bath and
disappeared--was simply the greatest Forger and the greatest Thief that
ever cheated the gallows.