_ CHAPTER XI. HUMANITY IN HIGH PLACES
One day, however, Henry was to make the still more surprising discovery, that not only were the clerks human beings, but that one of the partners--only one of them--was also human. He made this discovery about the senior partner, whose old-world figure and quaint name, Septimus Searle Lingard, had, in spite of his severity, attracted him by a certain musty distinction.
A stranger figure than Septimus Searle Lingard has seldom walked the streets of any town. Though not actually much over sixty, you would have said he must be a thousand; his abnormally long, narrow, shaven face was so thin and gaunt and hollowed, and his tall, upright figure was so painfully fragile, that his black broadcloth seemed almost too heavy for the worn frame inside it. And nothing in the world else was ever so piercingly solemn as his keen weary old eyes. With his tall silk hat, his thin white hair, his long white face, long black frock-coat, and black trousers, he looked for all the world like a distinguished skeleton. Henry could never be quite sure whether he was to be classed as a "character," or as a genuine personality. One thing was certain, that, sometime or other, or many times, in his life he had done something, or many things, which had won for him a respect as deep as his solemnity of aspect; and certainly, if gravity of demeanour goes for anything, all the owls of all the ages in collaboration could not have produced an expression of time-honoured wisdom so convincing. Sometimes his old lantern-jaws would emit an uncanny cackle of a laugh, and a ghastly flicker of humour play across his parchment features; but these only deepened the general sense of solemnity, as the hoot of a night-bird deepens the loneliness of some desolate hollow among the hills.
It was this strange old ghost of a man that was to be the next to turn human, and it came about like this. Right away at the top of the building was a lonely room where the sun never shone, in which were stored away the old account-books, diaries, and various dead-and-done-with documents of the firm; and here too was deposited, from time to time, various wreckage of the same kind from other businesses whose last offices had been done by the firm, and whose records were still preserved, in the unlikely event of any chance resurrection of claim upon, or interest in, their long forgotten names.
Here crumbled the last relics of many an ambitious enterprise,--great ledgers, with their covers still fresh, lay like slabs, from which, if you wiped away the dust, the gilded names of foundered companies would flash as from gaudy tombstones; letter-books bursting with letters that no eye would read again so long as the world lasted; yellow title-deeds from which all the virtue had long since exhaled, and to which no dangling of enormous seals could any longer lend a convincing air of importance. Here everything was dead and dusty as an old shoe. The dry bones in the valley of Askelon were as children skipping in the morning sun compared with the dusty death that mouldered and mouldered in this lonely locked-up room,--this catacomb of dead businesses.
It was seldom necessary to visit this room; but occasionally Henry would find an excuse to loiter an hour there, for there was a certain dreary romance about the place, and the almost choking smell of old leather seemed to promise all sorts of buried secrets. It cannot be said that the place ever adequately gratified the sense of mystery it excited; but, after all, to excite the sense of mystery is perhaps better than to gratify it, and, considering its poor material, this room was quite a clever old mysteriarch.
One day, however, Henry came upon some writing that did greatly interest him, though it was almost contemporary. It was old Mr. Septimus Lingard's diary for the year preceding, which he had got hold of,--not his private diary, but the entirely public official diary in which he kept account of the division of his days among his various clients--for the most part an unexciting record. But at the end of the book, on one of the general memoranda pages, Henry noticed a square block of writing which, to his surprise, proved to be a long quotation from a book which the old man had been reading,--on the Immortality of the soul!
Had old Mr. Septimus Lingard a soul too, a soul that troubled him maybe, a soul that had its moving memories, and its immortal aspirations? Yes, somewhere hidden in that strange legal document of a body, there was evidently a soul. Mr. Lingard had a soul!
But wait a moment, here was an addition of the old man's own! The passage quoted had been of death and its possible significance, and it was just a sigh, a fear, the old man had breathed after it: _How high has the winding-sheet encompassed my own bosom_!
Solemn as were the words in themselves, they seemed doubly so in that lonely room; and Henry was glad to lock the door and return to the comparatively living world downstairs. But from that moment old Mr. Lingard was transfigured in his eyes. Beneath all the sternness of his exterior, the grimness of the business interests which seemed to absorb him, Henry had discovered the blessed human spring. And he came too to wear a certain pathos and sanctity in Henry's eyes, as he remembered how old a man he was, and that secretly all this time, while he seemed so busy with this public company and another, he was quietly preparing to die. From this moment tasks done for him came to have a certain joy in them. For his sake, as it were, he began to understand how you might take a pride in doing well something that, in your opinion, was not worth doing; and one day when the old man, well satisfied with some work he had done, patted him kindly on the back and said, "We'll make a business man of you after all!" the tears started to his eyes, and for a moment he almost hoped that they would. _