"Has that auld, nosey pig been round yet?" he demanded; "because if he has, I don't give a tinker's curse about it."
"Mr. Blair?" replied one of the pair. "No! he hasn't been round yet!"
"Humph!" cried Brodie, fiercely annoyed at the sudden feeling of relief which had swept involuntarily over him. "I suppose ye think I'm lucky. Well! Let me tell ye both that I don't give a damn whether he knows I've been late or not. Tell him if ye like! It's all one to me," and, flinging his hat upon a peg and his stick into a corner, he sat heavily down upon his stool. The other clerks exchanged a glance and after a slight pause, the spokesman of the two remarked diffidently;
"We wouldn't say a word, Mr. Brodie. You surely know that, but look here, you're wringing wet will you not take your jacket off and dry it?"
"No! I'll not take it off!" he replied roughly, opening his ledger, lifting his pen and beginning to work; but after a moment he raised his head and said in a different tone, "But thank ye all the same You're good lads both and I know you've lent me a hand in the past. The truth is, I've had some news that upset me, so I'm just not quite my usual this mornin'."
They knew something of his affdirs from certain bouts of rambling dissertations during the past months and the one who had not yet spoken remarked:
"Not Nessie, I hope, Mr. Brodie?"
"No!" he answered. "Not my Nessie! She's as right as the mail, thank God, workin' like a trooper and headin' straight for the Latta! She's never given me a moment's trouble. It was just something else, but I know what to do. I can win through it like I've done with all the rest."
They forbore to question him further and the three resumed work in a silence broken only by the scratching of pens on paper, the rustle of a turning page, the restless scrape of a stool and the mutter from Brodie's lips as he strove to concentrate his fogged brain in the effort to contend with the figures before him.
The forenoon had advanced well upon its course when a precise step sounded in the corridor outside and the door of the room opened to admit the correct figure of Mr. Blair. With a sheaf of papers in his hand he stood for a moment, adjusting his gold-rimmed pince-nez upon his elevated nose, and scrutinising at some length the three clerks now working under his severe eyes. His gaze eventually settled upon the sprawling form of Brodie from whose damp clothing the steam now rose in a warm, vaporous mist, and as he looked his glance became more disapproving; he cleared his throat warningly and strode forward, fluttering the papers in his grasp like feathers of his ruffled plumage. "Brodie," he began sharply, "a moment of your attention, please!"
Without changing his posture Brodie lifted his head from the desk and regarded the other mordantly.
"Well," he replied, "what is it this time?"
"You might get up when you address me," expostulated Blair. "Every other clerk does so but you. It's most irregular and unusual."
"I'm a kind o' unusual man, ye see; that's maybe the reason o' it," retorted Brodie slowly. "I'm just as well where I am! What is't you're wantin'?"
"These accounts," shot out the other angrily. "Do you recognize them? If you don't, I may inform you that they represent your work or so-called work! Every one of them is in error. Your figures are wrong the whole way through and your total is outrageously incorrect. I'm sick of your blundering incompetence, Brodie! Unless you can explain this I shall have to report the whole matter to my superior."
Brodie glowered from the papers to the other's starched and offended face, and, filled by a sense of the insupportable indignity of his position he replied sullenly, in a low voice:
"I did the best I could. I can do no more."
"Your best is not good enough, then," retorted Blair in a high, almost a shrill tone. "Lately your work has become atrociously bad and your behaviour is, if anything, worse. Your very appearance is lowering to the dignity of this office. I'm sure if Sir John knew he would never permit it. Why," he stuttered, choked by indignation, "already your breath is reeking with the smell of drink. It's abominable!"
Brodie sat quite still, his eyes lowered, his mind blurred, wondering if it were he, James Brodie, who remained passive under the insults of this primly insignificant creature. He saw himself leap up, seize the other by the throat, shake him within an inch of his life then hurl him, as he had hurled a man twice his size, ignominiously out of the door. But no, he was still sitting motionless upon his stool, muttering in a dull voice:
"My time is my own outside this place. I can use it how I like."
"You must come to this office in a fit condition to work," insisted Blair coldly. "You're a bad example to these young men here the look of you is a slur on the whole place!"
"Leave my appearance alone, damn you," ground out Brodie with a sudden fierceness. "I'd rather be as I am than have your smug face on me."
"None of your impertinence, please," cried Blair, a flush rising to his pale countenance. "Ill report you for insolence."
"Well, leave me alone," cried Brodie, looking up from his crouched position on the desk like a wild animal, broken by captivity, but still ferocious. "Don't push me too far or it'll be the worse for ye."
A sense of the latent danger to himself in the other's wild eye restrained Blair from further disparaging comment but, thrusting the file of papers disdainfully upon Brodie's desk, he remarked icily:
"Let me have these corrected at once faultless, if you please or I'll know the reason of it!" Then, turning, he stepped formally out of the office.
With the closing of the door no outburst occurred, but the stillness of the room became more oppressive than any storm. Brodie sat like an effigy in stone, turning over within his mind the insults he had just endured; feeling, in his humiliation, that the combined glances of the other two were fixed upon him derisively. Out of the corner of his eye he observed a hand appear over the edge of his desk and silently remove the offending accounts and, although he knew that he was again being aided through the good nature of his colleagues, the hard-hewn moroseness of his features did not relax. He sat thus for an interminable time without lifting his pen, observed, without speaking, the corrected documents slide back again in front of him, maintained his attitude of rigid indifference until the dinner whistle blew at one o'clock; then he rose immediately from his stool, seized his hat and walked quickly from the room. Some insults might be washed out in blood, but he now sought urgently, in a different manner, to eradicate the memory of his indignity.
When he returned, punctual to the hour, at two o'clock he was altered, as though some mysterious, benign influence had been at work upon him, potently dispersing his melancholy, smoothing the harsh outlines of his face, injecting into his veins a fluid gaiety which now coursed through him joyously and emanated radiantly from his being.
"I'm here first, lads, ye see," he cried with a heavy facctiousness, as the two other clerks appeared together shortly after he had arrived, "and on the stroke of the clock too! But what do you mean by comin' in late? It's abominable. If you don't improve your blunderin' irregularity I’ll report you to your superior that pasty pie-face that was in here this morninY' He laughed boisterously and
continued, "Can you not take your example from me that's held up to you as such a paragon o virtue?"
"You're in fettle now, Mr. Brodie," doubtfully replied one of the youngsters.
"And what for no'," he exclaimed. "I wouldna let a thing like what happened this forenoon put me down. Not on your life, my mannie. It was just the thought of other considerations that forbade me to wring the puir creature's stiff neck for him. You know," he continued confidentially, "he's aye been jealous o' the way I got into this office under his very nose, but I had the influence and he couldna