yours very faithfully,
When these letters had been disposed of and a few other business matters attended to, he took train for the south-east and arrived in London that night.
The journey fatigued him; and change of air, even when from a good into a worse atmosphere, being beneficial, he slept soundly that night, and awoke with less sense of distraction, less difficulty in collecting his thoughts.
In Grey's youth he had spent much time in London, and knew portions of the town, those west of Tottenham Court Road and Trafalgar Square, very well. But he had little acquaintance with the City, and none with the east. He had been frequently in the City on banking business, and knew the ten streets confluent round the Bank. But the bulk of the City was an unknown land to him.
Change was what he sought. Novelty without solitude. Therefore, instead of the quiet hotel in Jermyn Street, where he usually put up, he found himself this morning in a large City hotel not a bow-shot from the cathedral of St. Paul.
A while he lay awake listening to the tremulous mutter of the City traffic. What a contrast, these groans of wheels and clatters of hoofs with the morning silence about the Manor House. Here, the walls vibrated, the solid ground shook, the air fluttered against the window-panes with the sway of bodies moving ceaselessly hither and thither. There, no sound came in upon the desert realms of the morning silence but the faint twitter of a bird or the far-off crack of a carter's whip or a sportsman's gun.
Would it not be better for him to stop here always?
Here were no suggestions of the disastrous past. No one knew him here. Suppose he burnt down the Manor House, took twenty thousand pounds out of the Bank, changed his name, disguised himself, and came to live in the middle of roaring London? Ambition he would abandon. Blows had come so heavily and so quickly, the ambition had been beaten out of him. Security and peace were what he yearned for. Security and peace. Peace.
If he lived in this great whirlpool in the ocean of Man, the shoutings of his fellows would drown the memories of his ears. Who could hear the whisperings of a woman's dress in the tumult of this great city, with its turmoil of multitudinous wheels and clangour of innumerable bells? Here he could take his ease for the rest of his life, and drown the vague hideous whispers of the dead in the loud-toned wrangles of the living.
There was, however, no necessity for his now changing his name or adopting disguises. He had some days to rest and recruit. When these had passed it would be time enough for him to think of precautions.
He went out after breakfast, and strolled along streets he had never been in before.
He moved west through streets running in perplexing zigzags, a little to the north of Cheapside, Newgate Street, and Holborn. He strolled slowly, looking in at shop-windows, and taking interest in the disputes of ragged boys and the bargaining of slattern women at the doors of slopshops and marine store dealers. He was not used to such scenes, and they took his mind off his own affairs and condition better than the deserted parks or richer streets. It seemed to him as though he had already severed his connection with Daneford, and lived emancipated from the past.
At last he came to an open space, in the centre of which stood a large heavy-looking building he had never seen before. Passing along the southern side of this open space, he came to the entrance of that building.
He thought: "Often as I have been in London, I have never seen even the outside of this before. It will be a capital place to spend a few hours."
He entered the enclosure through the small gate, and walked slowly up to the deep portico. Under this portico he stood awhile, watching the pigeons, and the people going in and out. Then turning his back upon the daylight, he entered the British Museum, that storehouse for the unclaimed personal property of intestate centuries and forgotten kings.
Passing slowly through the hall of busts, he reached the Egyptian Room. He had no great love of the antique, no great curiosity in people who staggered through the dark approaches leading up to the still, unspiritualised, unexciting Greek art. He never took much interest in art. He had been many times to the Academy. He had enjoyed going; but it is doubtful if he were offered to be allowed to go through the rooms alone he would have accepted the privilege.
To-day Egypt had a new meaning and a new attraction for him. From Egypt that young man had come unexpectedly to thwart his plans. To Egypt that young man was going back again.
What preposterous and foolish figures those around were! What impossible creatures! Cat-headed men! Was this the kind of country that young man had come from? Alligators, too, and crocodiles! Tombs. The Egyptians gave more honour to their illustrious dead than we do to our living poor. With them a dead lion was much better than a living dog.
Egypt must have been a land of monsters, fools, and tombs.
Grey was now leaning on the rail which protected a sarcophagus of polished black stone. His eyes were fixed vacantly on the coffin.
"The Egyptians," he followed on thinking, "preserved their dead for ever; the Greeks destroyed them at once; and we put them underground, and let them shift for themselves.
"Put them underground – not all!"
He stopped thinking, and looked around cautiously. There were no protecting noises here. Infrequent footsteps, and occasionally a cough, were the only sounds invading the dull gloomy gallery. Coming up towards the sarcophagus by which he stood was a middle-aged portly man, leading two fair flaxen-haired children by the hand. The man was describing the various objects they passed.
"Sometimes we don't let the living shift for themselves, we shift for them; and sometimes without putting the dead in the ground we leave those whom we shifted out of life to shift for themselves unburied."
The man leading the little girls reached the sarcophagus. He stopped the children and, pointing to the coffin, said:
"This was King Pharoah's favourite coffin. When he was quite a young man he contracted the habit of being buried in this coffin, and as he grew older he gave way more and more to this degrading habit. Stop, let me look closer. Upon my word and honour I have made a mistake. I see by one of the mortuary cards issued at the death, and found when they dug up this coffin out of the Nile, the body was that of one Ibis Cheops, who flourished a long time ago. When he was done flourishing they put him in here. Flourishing long ago was greatly admired; we solicitors are dead against it now. Let me see any of my copying clerks flourishing, and he may take down his hat and overcoat and go and enjoy life."
"Is that in the catalogue, all about this stone hearse?" asked one of the children.
"No, child."
"Then how do you know, uncle? You told us you were never here before."
"My dear child, you forget I am a solicitor; and once a man has anything to do with the Court of Chancery he is up to every mean dodge of human nature. It isn't to say that the muddle-headed ancient Egyptians could deceive or over-reach him in any way, but he is more than a match at cheating for the modern Greeks; and that's about as stiff a competitive examination in roguery as anyone can pass. I beg your pardon, sir; Mr. Grey, I think, of Daneford? Am I right?"
CHAPTER IX
THE END OF THE HOLIDAY
Grey looked up with an uneasy start and a sudden pallor.
"You do not remember me. My name is Barraclough. I am London representative of Mr. Evans, your Daneford solicitor."
"Of course, of
