Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 6).djvu/42

" OU have an uncommonly cosy den here, Armstrong," said my friend Macpherson, as he turned his chair to the fire. "And this is a capital weed. Just one thing more, and our Elysium would be complete."

"And what may that be?" I inquired.

"A bottle of that wonderful old Madeira your Pater used to bring out on high days and holidays. But I suppose that's all gone long since."

"Not quite, I fancy. I brought the remainder of the governor's wine with me when I came here, and I'm pretty sure there was a dozen or so of the old Madeira. I can't say whereabouts in the cellar it lies, but if you'll come down and hold a candle for me, I'll see if I can lay my hand upon a bottle."

"Agreed, nem. con. I'd hold a candle to a much blacker personage than yourself, upon such an inducement."

The time was about eight o'clock on a December evening. The place, my private sitting-room on the first floor of the Whittlebury Bank, of which I had been appointed manager some two years previously. Dick Macpherson, my visitor, was an old school-fellow, who had just completed a three years' term of service as surgeon on H.M.S. Orion, and pending his appointment to another ship, had come down to spend a week or two with me at Whittlebury. Dick was a character in his way. He was accustomed to describe himself as a thoroughbred mongrel: half Scotch, half Irish; half sailor, half surgeon. Though still young, being barely thirty, he was not only exceptionally skilful in his own profession, but had a useful amateur knowledge of several others. He was a clever mechanic, and his knowledge of chemistry, like Sam Weller's of London, was "extensive and peculiar." His special hobby, however, was electricity, which he maintained to be not only the light and the power but the medicine of the future, and he was never so happy as when devising new uses for it. He had been greatly disgusted, on his arrival, to find that the bank was unprovided with electric bells, and gave me no peace until I consented to let him supply the deficiency. In vain I represented to him that electricity was an unknown force in Whittlebury. He retorted that in such case the bank, as representing finance, thrift, and other commercial virtues, was the more bound to set an example in the right direction; and already, in one corner of my sitting-room, lay a collection of bells, batteries, wires and pushes, to be used in the execution of the work.

The building, I may here state, had not been originally erected for a bank, but was an old-fashioned private house, which had been adapted to that purpose. The basement consisted of four roomy vaults, originally intended as cellars. Three of them, indeed, were still used for that purpose: one for coals, one for my private store of wine, and one as a receptacle for lumber; while the fourth had been converted into a "strong room." The walls and floor of the "strong room" were lined with concrete; the arch of the vault cased with boiler plates, and the wooden door replaced by a double door of wrought iron, secured by combination locks. Within stood a couple of strong safes—one large, one small—of the most approved construction. The only daylight admitted to the vault found its way through four circular pieces of thick glass, each six inches in diameter, let into the flooring of the room above (my private office), and the only access to the basement, including the strong room, was by spiral iron stairs leading from the same room.

The ground floor consisted of two rooms only, the larger being the public office of the bank, the other my private office, above mentioned. The latter was a small room at the rear of the building, and had originally been a kitchen. When, however, the house was adapted to its present purpose, the kitchen had been transferred to the topmost floor, where also were the apartments of the caretaker—a sturdy Irishman, named O'Grady—and his wife. There were three rooms on the intermediate floor; two being bedrooms,