All Sorts and Conditions of Men: An Impossible Story

What was going to happen?

Recovering his presence of mind, he held out the dusty papers and shook the dust off them.

Then he began slowly to obey orders, and to examine them.

Suddenly he began to turn them over with fierce eagerness. His eyes flashed – he gasped.

"Come, Josephus," said his cousin, taking his arm, "gently – gently. What are they, these papers?"

The man laughed, a hysterical laugh.

"They are. Ha! ha! they are – ha! ha! ha!"

He did not finish because his voice failed him; but he dropped into a chair, with his head in his hands.

"They are country bank-notes and other papers," said Harry, taking them from his cousin's hands – he had interpreted the missing words rightly.

The chief looked round the room. "Young men," he said solemnly, "a wonderful thing has happened. After many years of undeserved suspicion and unmerited punishment, Mr. Coppin's character is cleared at last. We cannot restore to him the years he has lost, but we can rejoice that his innocence is established."

"Come, Josephus," said Harry, "bear your good fortune as you have borne the bad – rouse yourself."

The senior junior clerk lifted his head and looked around. His cheeks were white. His eyes were filled with tears; his lips were trembling.

"Take your cousin home," said the chief to Harry, "and then come back to my office."

Harry led Josephus unresisting home to the boarding-house.

"We have had a shock, Mrs. Bormalack. Nothing to be alarmed about – quite the contrary. The bank-notes have been found after all these years, and my cousin has earned his promotion and recovered his character. Give him some brandy and water, and make him lie down for a bit."

For the man was dazed – he could not understand as yet what had happened.

Harry placed him in the armchair, and left him to the care of the landlady. Then he went back to the brewery.

The chief brewer was with the chief accountant, and they were talking over what was best to be done; said very kind things about intelligence, without which good fortune and lucky finds are wasted. And they promised to represent Harry's conduct in a proper light to Miss Messenger, who would be immediately communicated with; and Josephus would at once receive a very substantial addition to his pay, a better position, and more responsible work.

"May I suggest, gentlemen," said Harry, "that a man who is fifty-five, and has all his life been doing the simple work of a junior, may not be found equal to more responsible work."

"That may be the case."

"My cousin, when the misfortune happened, left off taking any interest in things – I believe he has never opened a book or learned anything in all these years."

"Well, we shall see." A workman was not to be taken into counsel. "There is, however, something here which seems to concern yourself. Your mother was one Caroline Coppin, was she not?"

"Yes."

"Then these papers which were deposited by some persons unknown with Mr. Messenger – most likely for greater care – and placed in the safe by him, belong to you; and I hope will prove of value to you."

Harry took them without much interest, and came away.

In the evening Josephus held a reception. All his contemporaries in the brewery – the men who entered with himself – all those who had passed over his head, all those with whom he had been a junior in the brewery, called to congratulate him. At the moment he felt as if this universal sympathy fully made up for all his sufferings of the past. Nor was it until the morning that he partly perceived the truth – that no amount of sympathy would restore his vanished youth, and give him what he had lost.

But he will never quite understand this; and he looked upon himself as having begun again from the point where he stopped. When the reception was over and the last man gone, he began to talk about his future.

"I shall go on again with the evening course," he said, "just where I left off. I remember we were having Monday for book-keeping by single and double entry; Tuesday for French; Thursday for arithmetic – we were in mixed fractions; and Friday for Euclid. Then I shall take up my class at the Sunday-school again, and shall become a full church-member of the Wesleyan connection – for though my father was once churchwarden at Stepney church, I always favored the Wesleyans myself."

He talked as if he was a boy again, with all his life before him, and, indeed, at the moment he thought he was.

CHAPTER XLIII.

O MY PROPHETIC SOUL!

Harry thought nothing about the papers which were found among the notes that evening, because he was wholly engaged in the contemplation of a man who had suddenly gone back thirty-five years in his life. The gray hairs, thin at the top and gone at the temples, were not, it is true, replaced by the curly brown locks of youth, though one thinks that Josephus must always have been a straight-haired young man. But it was remarkable to hear that man of fifty-five talking as if the years had rolled backward, and he could take up the thread of life where he had dropped it so long ago. He spoke of his evening lectures and his Sunday-school with the enthusiasm of a boy. He would study – work of that sort always paid: he would prepare his lessons for the school beforehand, and stand well with the superintendent: it was good for men in business offices, he said, to have a good character with the superintendent. Above all, he would learn French and bookkeeping, with mensuration, gauging, and astronomy, at the Beaumont Institute. All these things would come in useful, some time or the other, at the brewery; besides, it helps a man to be considered studious in his habits. He became, in fact, in imagination a young man once more. And because in the old days, when he had a character to earn, he did not smoke tobacco, so now he forgot that former solace of the day, his evening pipe.

"The brewery," he said, "is a splendid thing to get into. You can rise: you may become – ah! even chief accountant: you may look forward to draw over a thousand a year at the brewery, if you are steady and well conducted, and get a good name. It is not every one, mind you, gets the chance of such a service. And once in, always in. That's the pride of the brewery. No turning out: there you stay, with your salary always rising, till you die."

In the morning, the exultation of spirits was exchanged for a corresponding depression. Josephus went to the brewery, knowing that he should sit on that old seat of his no longer.

He went to look at it: the wooden stool was worn black; the desk was worn black; he knew every cut and scratch in the lid at which he had written so many years. There were all the books at which he had worked so long: not hard work, nor work requiring thought, but simple entering and ticking off of names, which a man can do mechanically – on summer afternoons, with the window open and an occasional bee buzzing in from Hainault Forest, and the sweet smell of the vats and the drowsy rolling of the machinery – one can do the work half asleep and never make a mistake. Now he would have to undertake some different kind of work, more responsible work: he would have to order and direct; he would have a chair instead of a stool, and a table instead of a desk. So that he began to wish that he had in the old days gone further in his studies – but he was always slow at learning – before the accident happened; and to wonder if anything at all remained of the knowledge he had then painfully acquired after all these years.

As a matter of fact, nothing remained. Josephus had become perfectly, delightfully, inconceivably stupid. He had forgotten everything, and could now learn no new thing. Pending the decision of Miss Messenger, to whom the case was referred, they tried him with all sorts of simple work – correspondence, answering letters, any of the things which require a little intelligence. Josephus could do nothing. He sat like a helpless boy and looked at the documents. Then they let him alone, and for a while he came every day, sat all day long, half asleep, and did nothing, and was much less happy than when he had been kept at work from nine o'clock in the morning till six o'clock at night.

When Harry remembered the packet of papers placed in his hand, which was on the following morning, he read them. And the effect of his reading was that he did not go to work that morning at all.

He was not a lawyer, and the principal paper was a legal instrument, the meaning of which it took him some little time to make out.

"Hum – hum – um – why can't they write plain English. 'I give to my said trustees, John Skelton and Benjamin Bunker, the three freehold houses as follows: that called number twenty-nine on Stepney Green, forty-five in Beaumont Square, and twenty-three in Redman's Row, upon trust to apply the rents and income of the same as in their absolute discretion they may think fit for the maintenance, education, and benefit of the said Caroline, until she be twenty-one years old or until she marry, and to invest from time to time the accumulations of such rents and income as is hereintofore provided, and to apply the same when invested in all respects as I direct concerning the last above-mentioned premises. And when the said Caroline shall attain the age of twenty-one, or marry, I direct my said trustees to pay to her the said rents and income and the income of the accumulation of the same, if any during her life, by four equal quarterly payments for her sole and separate use, free from the debts and engagements of any husband or husbands she may marry; and I direct that on the death of the said Caroline my said trustees shall hold and stand possessed of all the said premises for such person or persons and in such manner in all respects as the said Caroline shall by deed or will appoint. And in default of such appointment and so far as the same shall not extend upon trust' – and so on – and so on."

Harry read this document with a sense, at first, of mystification. Then he read it a second time, and began to understand it.

"The houses," he said, "my mother's houses, are hers, free from any debts contracted by her husband: they are vested in trustees for her behalf; she could not sell or part with them. And the trustees were John Skelton and Benjamin Bunker. John Skelton – gone to Abraham's bosom, I suppose. Benjamin Bunker – where will he go to? The houses were tied up – settled – entailed."

He read the document right through for the third time.

"So," he said. "The house at number twenty-nine Stepney Green. That is the house which Bunker calls his own; the house of the Associated Dressmakers; and it's mine – mine." He clinched his fist and looked dangerous. "Then the house at twenty-three Redman's Row, and at forty-five Beaumont Square. Two more houses. Also mine. And Bunker, the perfidious Bunker, calls them all his own! What shall be done to Bunker?"

"Next," he went on, after reading the document again, "Bunker is a fraudulent trustee, and his brother trustee too, unless he has gone dead. Of that there can be no doubt whatever. That virtuous and benevolent Bunker was my mother's trustee – and mine. And he calmly appropriates the trust to his own uses – Uncle Bunker! Uncle Bunker!"

"I knew from the beginning that there was something wrong. First, I thought he had taken a sum of money from Lord Jocelyn. Then I found out that he had got possession of houses in a mysterious manner. And now I find that he was simply the trustee. Wicked Uncle Bunker!"

Armed with his precious document, he put on his hat and walked straight off, resolution on his front, toward his uncle's office. He arrived just when Mr. Bunker was about to start on a daily round among his houses. By this frequent visitation he kept up the hearts of his tenants, and taught them the meaning of necessity; so that they put by their money and religiously paid the rent. Else —

"Pray," said Harry, "be so good as to take off your hat, and sit down and have five minutes' talk with me."

"No, sir," said Bunker, "I will not. You can go away, do you hear? Be off; let me lock my office and go about my own business."

"Do take off your hat, my uncle."

"Go, sir, do you hear?"