O ON the paths of self-interest the grass is seldom allowed to grow under the feet. Colonel Tempest hurried. It would be tedious to follow the various steps feverishly taken which led to his finally unearthing the home address of Mr. Swayne. He procured it at last, not without expense, from an impoverished client of that gentleman who had lately been in correspondence with him. Mr. Swayne had always shown a decided reticence with regard to the locality of his domestic roof. Colonel Tempest was of course in possession of several addresses where letters would find him, but his experience of such addresses had been that, unless strictly connected with pecuniary advantage to Mr. Swayne, the letters did not seem to reach their destination. But now, even when Colonel Tempest wrote to say he would pay up, no answer came. Swayne did not rise even to that bait. Colonel Tempest, who was aware that Mr. Swayne's faith in human nature had in the course of his career sustained several severe shocks, came to the conclusion that Mr. Swayne did not attach importance to his statement—that indeed he regarded it only as a "blind" in order to obtain another interview.

It was on a burning day in June that Colonel Tempest set forth to search out his tempter at Rosemont Villa, Iron Ferry, in the manufacturing town of Bilgewater. The dirty smudged address was in his pocket-book, as was also the notice of his banker that ten thousand pounds had been placed to his credit a few days before.

The London train took him to Worcester, and from thence the local line, after meandering through a desert of grime and chimneys, and after innumerable stoppages at one hideous nigger station after another, finally deposited him on the platform of Bilgewater Junction. Colonel Tempest got out and looked about him. It was not a rural scene. Heaps of refuse and slag lay upon the blistered land thick as the good resolutions that pave a certain road. Low cottages crowded each other in knots near the high smoking factories. Black wheels turned slowly against the grey of the sky, which whitened upwards towards the ghost of the midsummer sun high in heaven. We are told that the sun shines equally on the just and on the unjust; but that was said before the first factory was built. At Bilgewater it is no longer so.

Colonel Tempest inquired his way to Iron Ferry, and, vaguely surprised at Mr. Swayne's choice of locality for his country residence, set out along the baked wrinkles of the black high-road, winding between wastes of cottages, some inhabited and showing dreary signs of life, some empty and decrepit, some fallen down dead. The heat was intense. The steam and the smoke rose together into the air like some evil sacrifice. The pulses of the factories throbbed feverishly as he passed. The steam curled upwards from the surface of the livid pools and canals at their base. The very water seemed to sweat.

Colonel Tempest reached Iron Ferry, being guided thither by the spire of the little tin church, which pointed unheeded towards the low steel sky, shut down over the battered convulsed country like a coffin lid over one who has died in torment.

At Iron Ferry, which had a bridge and a wharf and a canal, and was everything except a ferry, he inquired again concerning Rosemont Villa, and was presently picking his way across a little patch of common towards a string of what had once been red brick houses, but which had long since embraced the universal colour of their surroundings. They were rather better looking houses if a sort of shabby gentility can be called anything except the worst. They were semi-detached. From out of one of them the strains were issuing faintly and continuously of the inevitable accordion, which for some occult reason is always found to consort with poverty and oyster-shells.

At the open door of another a girl was standing tearing pieces with her teeth out of a chunk of something she held in her hand. She was surrounded by a meagre family of poultry who fought and pecked and trod each other down with almost human eagerness for the occasional morsels she threw to them. Something in her appearance and in the way she seemed to enjoy the greed and mutual revilings of her little dependents reminded Colonel Tempest—he hardly knew why—of Mr. Swayne.

Another glance made the supposition a certainty. There were the small boot-buttons of eyes, the heavy mottled expressionless face, which Colonel Tempest had until now considered to be the exclusive property of Mr. Swayne. This slouching, tawdry down-at-heel arrow was no doubt one of that gentleman's quiverful.

Mr. Swayne had always worn such very unmarried waistcoats and button holes that it was a shock to Colonel Tempest to regard him as a domestic character.

"Is Mr. Swayne at home?" he asked, amid the cackling and flouncing of the poultry.

The "arrow," her cheek "bulged with the unchewed piece," looked at him doubtfully for a moment, and then called over her shoulder—

"Mother!"

The voice as of a female who had never been held in subjection answered shrilly from within—"Well?"

"Here's a gent as wants to see father."

There was a sound of some heavy vessel being set down, and a woman, large and swarthy, came to the door. She might have been good-looking once. She might perhaps have been "a fine figure of a woman" in the days when Swayne wooed and won her, and no doubt her savings, for his own. But possibly the society of Mr. Swayne may not in the long run have exerted an ennobling or even a soothing influence upon her. Her complexion was a fiery red, and her whole appearance bespoke a temperament to which the artificial stimulus of alcohol, though evidently unnecessary, was evidently not denied.

"Swayne's sick," she said, eyeing Colonel Tempest with distrust. "He can't see no one, and if he could, there's not a shilling in the house if you was to scrape the walls with a knife—so that's all about it. It's no manner of use coming pestering here for money."

"I don't want money," said Colonel Tempest. "I want to pay, not to be paid."

The woman shook her head incredulously, and put out her under lip, uttering the mystic word, "Walker!" It did not seem to bear upon the subject, but somebody, probably the accordion next door, laughed.

"I must see him!" said Colonel Tempest, vehemently. "I've had dealings with him which I want to settle and have done with. It's my own interest to pay up. He would see me directly if he knew I was here."

The woman hesitated.

"Swayne is uncommon sick," she said, slowly. "If it's business I doubt he could scarce fettle at it now."

"Do you mean he is not sober?"

"He's sober enough, poor fellow," said Mrs. Swayne, with momentary sympathy; "but he's mortal bad. He hasn't done nobbut but dithered with a bit of toast since Tuesday, and taking it out of hisself all the time with flouncing and swearing like a brute beast."

"Is he—do you mean to say he is dying?" demanded Colonel Tempest in sudden panic.

"Doctor says he won't hang on above a day or two," said the girl nonchalantly. "Doctor says his works is clean wore out."

"Let me go to him at once," said Colonel Tempest. "It is of great importance; I must see him at once."

The women stared at each other undecidedly, and the girl nudged her mother.

"Lor, mother, what does it signify? If the gentleman 'ull make it worth while, show him up."

Colonel Tempest hastily produced a sovereign, and in a few minutes was stumbling up the rickety stairs behind Mrs. Swayne. She pushed open a half-closed door, and noisily pulled back a bit of curtain which shaded the light—what poor dim light there was—from the bed, knocking over as she did so a tallow candle in the window-sill bent double by the heat.

Colonel Tempest had followed her into the room and into an atmosphere resembling that of the monkey-house at the Zoo, stiffened with brandy.

"Oh, good gracious!" he ejaculated, as Mrs. Swayne drew back the curtain. "Oh dear, Mrs. Swayne! I ought to have been prepared. I had no idea—— What's the matter with him? What is he writing on the wall?"

For Mr. Swayne was changed. He was within a measurable distance of being unrecognizable. That evidently would be the next alteration not for the better in him. Already he was slow to recognize others. He was sitting up in bed, swearing and scratching tearfully at the wall-paper. He looked stouter than ever, but as if he might collapse altogether at a pin prick, and shrivel down to a wrinkled nothing among the creases of his tumbled bedding.

Mrs. Swayne regarded her prostrate lord with arms akimbo. Possibly she considered that her part of the agreement, to love and to cherish Mr. Swayne, and honour and obey Mr. Swayne, was now at an end, as death was so plainly about to part them. At any rate, she appeared indisposed to add any finishing touches to her part of the contract. Mr. Swayne had, in all probability, put in his finishing touches with such vigour, that possibly a remembrance of them accounted for a certain absence of solicitude on the part of his helpmeet.

"Who's this? Who's this? Who's this?" said Mr. Swayne in a rapid whisper, perceiving his visitor, and peering out of the gloom with a bloodshot furtive eye. "Dear, dear, dear! ... Mary ... I'm busy ... I'm pressed for time. Take him away. Quite away; quite away."

Mr. Swayne had been a man of few and evil words when in health. His recording angel would now need a knowledge of shorthand. This sudden flow of language fairly staggered Colonel Tempest.

"I must have out those bonds," he went on, forgetting his visitor again instantly. "I can't lay my hand on 'em, but I've got 'em somewhere. Top left-hand drawer of the walnut escritoire. I know I have 'em. I'll make him bleed. Top left-hand. No, no, no. Where was it, then? Lock's stiff;—— the lock. Break it. I say I will have 'em."

As he spoke he tore from under the pillow a little footstool, having the remnant of a frayed dog, in blue beads, worked upon it, a conjugal attention no doubt on the part of Mrs. Swayne, to raise the sick man's head.

And Mr. Swayne, after endeavouring to unlock the dog's tail, smote savagely upon it, and sank back with chattering teeth.

"That's the way he goes on," said Mrs. Swayne. "Mornin', noon, and night. Never a bit of peace, except when he gets into his prayin' fits. I expect he'll go off in one of them tantrums."

It did not appear unlikely that he would "go off" then and there, but after a few moments a sort of ghastly life seemed to return. Even death did not appear to take to him. He opened his eyes, and looked round bewildered. Then his head fell forward.

"Now's yer time," said the woman. "Before he gets up steam for another of them rages. Parson comes and twitters a bit when he's in this way; and he'll pray very heavy while he recollects hisself, until he goes off again. He'll be better now for a spell," and she left the room, and creaked ponderously downstairs again. Colonel Tempest advanced a step nearer the lair on which poor Swayne was taking his last rest but one, and said faintly:

"Swayne. I say, Swayne. Rouse up."

The only things that roused up were Swayne's eyelids. These certainly trembled a little.

In the next house the accordion was beginning a new tune, was designating Jerusalem as its ha-appy home.

Apprehensive terror for himself as usual overcame other feelings. It overcame in this instance the unspeakable repugnance Colonel Tempest felt to approaching any nearer. He touched the prostrate man on the shoulder with the slender white hand which had served him so exclusively from boyhood upwards, which had never wavered in its fidelity to him to do a hand's turn for others, which shrinkingly did his bidding now.

"Wake up, Swayne," repeated Colonel Tempest, actually stooping over him. "Wake up, for——," he was going to add "heaven's sake;" but the thought of heaven in connection with Swayne seemed inappropriate; and he altered it to "for mercy's sake," which sounded just as well.

"Is it the parson?" asked Swayne feebly, in a more natural voice.

"No, no," said Colonel Tempest reassuringly. "It's only me, a friend. It's Colonel Tempest."

"I wish it was the parson," repeated Swayne, seeming to emerge somewhat from his torpor. "He might have come and let off a few more prayers for me. He says it's all right if I repent, and I suppose he knows; but it don't seem likely. Don't seem as if God could be greened quite as easy as parson makes out. I should have liked to throw off a few more prayers so as to be on the safe side," and he began to mutter incoherently.

As a man lives so, it is said, he generally dies. Swayne seemed to remain true to his own interests, only his aspect of those interests had altered. He felt the awkwardness of going into court absolutely unprepared. Prayer was cheap if it could do what he wanted, and he had had professional advice as to its efficacy. A man who all his life can grovel before his fellow-creatures, may as well do a little grovelling before his Creator at the last, if anything is to be got by it.

It is to the credit of human nature that, as a rule, men even of the lowest type feel the uselessness, the degradation, of trying to annul their past on their deathbeds. But to Swayne, who had never shone as a credit to human nature, a chance remained a chance. He was a gambler and a swindler, a man who had risked long odds, and had been made rich and poor by the drugging of a horse, or the forcing of a card. If, in his strict attention to never losing a chance, he had inadvertently mislaid his soul, he was not likely to be aware of it. But a chance was a thing he had never so far failed to take advantage of. He was taking his last now.

Colonel Tempest looked at him in horror. The interests of the two men clashed, and at a vital moment.

"For God's sake don't pray now, Swayne," said Colonel Tempest, appealingly, as Swayne began to mutter something more. "I've come to set wrong right, and that will be a great deal better than any prayers; do you more good in the end."

Swayne did not seem to understand. He looked in a perplexed manner at Colonel Tempest.

"I don't appear to fetch it out right," he said. "But it's in the Prayer-book on the mantelpiece. That's what our parson reads out of. You get it, colonel; just get it quick, and pray 'em off one after another. It don't matter much which. They're all good."

"Swayne," said Colonel Tempest, in utter desperation, "I'll do anything; I'll—pray as much as you like afterwards, if you will only give me up those papers you have against me—those bets."

"What?" said Swayne, a gleam of the old professional interest flickering into his face. "You han't got the money?"

"Yes. Here, here!" and Colonel Tempest tore the banker's note out of his pocket-book, and held it before Swayne's eyes.

"I was to have had twenty-five per cent. commission," said Swayne, rallying perceptibly at the thought. "Twenty-five per cent. on each. I wouldn't let 'em go at less. Two thousand five hundred I should have made. But"—with a sudden restless relapse—"it's no use thinking of that now. Get down the book, colonel."

But for once Colonel Tempest was firm.

Perhaps his indignation against Swayne's egotism enabled him to be so. He made Swayne understand that business must in this instance come first, and prayers afterwards. It was a compact; not the first between the two.

"The papers," he repeated over and over again, frantic at the speed with which the last links of Swayne's memory seemed falling from him. "Where are they? You have them with you, of course? Tell me where they are?" and he grasped the dying man by the shoulder.

Swayne was frightened back to some semblance of effort.

"I haven't got 'em," he gasped. "The—the—the chaps engaged in the business have 'em."

"But you know who have got them?"

"Yes, of course. It's all written down somewhere."

"Where?"

But Swayne "did not rightly know." He had the addresses in cipher somewhere, but he could not put his hand upon them. Half wild with fear, Colonel Tempest searched the pockets of the clothes that lay about the room, holding up their contents for Swayne to look at. It was like some hideous game of hide-and-seek. But the latter only shook his head.

"I have 'em somewhere," he repeated, "and there was a change not so long ago. When was it? May. There's one of 'em written down in cipher in my pocket-book in May, I know that."

"Here. This one?" said Colonel Tempest, holding out a greasy pocket-book.

"That's it," said Swayne. "Some time in May."

Colonel Tempest turned to the month, and actually found a page with a faint pencil scrawl in cipher across it.

"That's him," said Swayne. "James Larkin," and he read out a complicated address without difficulty.

"Will that find him?" asked Colonel Tempest, his hand shaking so much that he could hardly write down Swayne's words.

"If it's to his advantage it will."

"For certain?"

"Certain."

"And the others?"

"There's one dead," said Swayne, his voice waxing feebler and feebler as the momentary galvanism of Colonel Tempest's terror lost its effect. "And there's two I had back the papers from; they were sick of it, and they said he had a charmed life. And one of 'em went to America, and married, and set up respectable. I have his paper too. And one of 'em's in quod, but he'll be out soon, I reckon, and he's good for another try. He precious near brought it off last time. There's a few left that's still biding their time! There! And now I won't hear nothin' more about it. Get to the prayers, Colonel, and be quick. Parson might have come again, damn him."

"Stop a minute. Can I get at the others through Larkin?"

Swayne had sunk back spent and livid. He looked at Colonel Tempest with fixed and glassy eyes.

"Yes," he said, with the ghost of an oath; "get to the prayers."

Colonel Tempest was still trembling with the relief from that horrible nightmare of suspense as he opened the shiny new Prayer-book which the clergyman had left. He held the first link. He had now only to draw the whole chain through his hand, and break it to atoms; the chain that was dragging him down to hell. He hastily began to read.

God has heard many prayers, but, perhaps, not many like those which ascended from that hideous tumbled death-bed, where kneeling self-interest halted through the supplication, and prostrate self-interest gasped out Amen.

Oh! did He who first taught us how to pray, did He, raised high upon the cross of an apparent failure, look down the ages that were yet to come, and see how we should abuse that gift of prayer? Was that bitter cry which has echoed through eighteen hundred years wrung from Him even for our sakes also as well as those who stood around Him—"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do"?

Colonel Tempest was still on his knees when the door was softly opened, and a young, a very young, clergyman came in and knelt down beside him, clasping his thin hands over the collapsed felt soufflÉe which did duty for a hat. After stumbling to the end of the prayer he was reading, Colonel Tempest put the book into his hand and escaped.

He stole down the stairs and past the little sitting-room unobserved. He was out again in the open air, the live free air, which seemed freshness itself after the atmosphere of that sick-room. He held the clue. He had it, he held it, he was safe. God was on his side now, and was helping him to make restitution. At one despairing moment when he had been tearing even the linings out of the pockets of Swayne's check trousers he had feared that Providence had deserted him. Now that he had the pocket-book he regretted his want of faith. I do not think his mind reverted once to Swayne, for Swayne was no longer of any interest to him now that he was out of Swayne's power. Colonel Tempest did not exactly forget people, but his mind was so constituted that everything with which it came in contact was wiped out the moment it had ceased to affect or group itself round himself. His imagination did not follow his colleague's last faltering steps upon that steep brink where each must one day stand. His mind turned instinctively to the most frivolous subjects, was back in London wondering what he would have had for dinner if he had dined with Archie as he had intended; was anxious to know how many cigarettes of that new brand he had put into his case before he left London that morning. Colonel Tempest stopped, and got out his cigarette-case and counted them.

Those who had known Colonel Tempest best, those few who had misunderstood and loved him, had often pondered with grave anxiety, or with the wistful perplexity of wounded affection, as to what it was in him that being so impressionable was yet incapable of any real impression. His wife may or may not have mastered that expensive secret. At any rate, she had had opportunities of studying it. When first, a few weeks after her marriage, she had fallen ill, she, poor fool, had suffered agonies from the fear that because he hardly came into her sick-room after the first day, he had ceased to care for her. But when after a few days more she was feeling better and was pretty and interesting again in a pink wrapper on the sofa, she had found that he was as devoted to her as ever, and had confided her foolish dread to him with happy tears. Possibly she discovered at last that the secret lay not so much in the selfishness and self-indulgence of a character moth-eaten by idleness, as in the instant and invariable recoil of the mind from any subject that threatened to prove disagreeable, the determination to avoid everything irksome, wearisome, or reproachful. For a moment, while it was quite new, a sentiment might be indulged in. But as soon as a certain novelty and pleasure in emotion ceased the feeling itself was shirked, at whatever expense to others. Those who shirk are ill to live with, and lay up for themselves an increasing loneliness as life goes on.

Colonel Tempest found it unpleasant to think about Swayne, so he thought of something else. He could always do that unless he himself was concerned. Then, indeed, as we have seen, it was a different thing. He was annoyed when, after slowly picking his way back to the station, he found the last passenger train had just gone; that even if he drove fifteen miles in to Worcester he should be too late to catch the last express to London; in fact, that there was nothing for it but a bed at the station inn. He found, however, that by making a very early start from Bilgewater the following morning he could reach London by noon, and so resigned himself to his lot with composure. He had hardly expected he should be able to go and return in one day.

It was indeed early when he walked across to the station next morning, so early that there was a suspicion of freshness in the air, of colour in the eastern sky.

On a heap of slag a motionless figure was sitting, black against the sky line, looking towards the east. It was the curate, who when he perceived Colonel Tempest, came crunching and flapping in his long coat tails down to the road below, raised his hat from a meagre clerical brow, and held out his hand. His face was thin and poor, suggestive of a starved mind and cold mutton and Pearson on the Creed, but the smile redeemed it.

"It is all over," he said; "half an hour ago. Quite quietly at the last. I stayed with him through the night. I never left him. We prayed together without ceasing."

Colonel Tempest did not know what to say.

"It was too late to go to bed," continued the young man impulsively, his face working. "So I came here. I often come and sit on that ash heap to see the sun rise. I'm so glad just to have seen you again. I longed to thank you for those prayers by poor Mr. Crosbie's bed. You know the Scripture: 'Where two or three are gathered together.' I felt it was so true. I have lost heart so of late. No one seems to care or think about these things down here. But your coming and praying like that has been such a help, such a reproach to me for my want of faith when I think that the seed falls on the rock. I shall take courage again now. Ah! You are going by this train? Good-bye, God bless you! Thank you again."