The Moon Rock eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 404 pages of information about The Moon Rock.

The Moon Rock eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 404 pages of information about The Moon Rock.

His regard for Robert Turold was deep and sincere.  His dead client had been his ideal of a strong man.  Strong and unyielding—­like a rock.  That was the impression Robert Turold had conveyed at their first interview many years before, and his patience and tenacity in pursuit of his purpose had deepened the feeling since.  The object of his search had the lawyer’s sympathy.  Mr. Brimsdown had a reverence for titles—­inherited titles, not mere knighthoods, or Orders of the British Empire.  For those he felt nothing but contempt.  He drew the sharpest distinction between, such titled vulgarians and those who were born into the world with the blood running blue in their veins.  He regarded Robert Turold as belonging to this latter class.  It was nothing to him that he was a commoner in the eyes of the world, with no more claim to distinction than a golf-playing city merchant.  He had believed in his story from the first, and had helped him in that belief.  Turrald of Missenden!  It was a great old name.  Mr. Brimsdown rolled it round his tongue as though it were a vintage port—­pronounced it lingeringly, rolling the “rr’s” sonorously, and hissing the “ss’s” with a caressing sibilant sound.

Turrald of Missenden!  Robert Turold was the lineal descendant of the name, and worthy of the title.  Mr. Brimsdown had always felt that, from the very first.  There was something noble and dominating in his presence.  Blood told; there could be no doubt of that.

What stronger proof of it could be found than the dogged strength with which the dead man had persisted for thirty years in his effort to claim as his rightful due a baronial title which had been in abeyance for four hundred years?

And he would have succeeded—­was on the verge of success—­but for this unlucky stroke of Death’s.

With a sigh for the frailty of human hopes, Mr. Brimsdown put an end to his reflections and went downstairs for the post.

By the dim light of the lowered hall gas he saw an envelope lying on the floor—­a thick grey envelope addressed to himself in a thin irregular hand.  The sight of that superscription startled him like a glimpse of the unseen.  For it was the handwriting of the subject of his thoughts—­Robert Turold.

With the stiff movement of an ageing man he picked up the letter and went upstairs again.  In some subtle way the room seemed changed.  He had a sudden inexplicable sensation of nervousness and depression.  Shaking it off with an effort, he opened the envelope in his hand with an odd reluctance—­the feeling that he was prying into something which was no concern of his.  He drew out the single grey sheet and unfolded it.  The letter was dated from Flint House on the previous day.  There was but a few lines, but the lawyer was pulled up at the beginning by the unusual familiarity of the address.  “My dear Brimsdown” was unusual in one so formal as Robert Turold.  But the handwriting was his—­undoubtedly.  Mr. Brimsdown had seen it too often to be mistaken.  With the growing idea that the whole thing was confounding to sober sense and reason, he read on—­

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The Moon Rock from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.