For two weeks I was kept in London "facing the music," as he would have
said, and making things easy for my aunt, and I still marvel at the
consideration with which the world treated me. For now it was open and
manifest that I and my uncle were no more than specimens of a modern
species of brigand, wasting the savings of the public out of the sheer
wantonness of enterprise. I think that in a way, his death produced
a reaction in my favour and my flight, of which some particulars now
appeared stuck in the popular imagination. It seemed a more daring and
difficult feat than it was, and I couldn't very well write to the papers
to sustain my private estimate. There can be little doubt that men
infinitely prefer the appearance of dash and enterprise to simple
honesty. No one believed I was not an arch plotter in his financing. Yet
they favoured me. I even got permission from the trustee to occupy
my chalet for a fortnight while I cleared up the mass of papers,
calculations, notes of work, drawings and the like, that I left in
disorder when I started on that impulsive raid upon the Mordet quap
heaps.
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