I told him, with more heat than the moment probably warranted, that a man in my trade could not afford scruples of that refinement, that information was my whole stock and I sold what the market wanted, and that if I declined to print every hard fact that came my way out of tenderness for the people attached to it, I would starve inside a twelvemonth.
He did not argue with me. He simply said, "I know," and left. I did not print the story of the child, not that year and not ever, though I could give you no better reason for my silence than that his disappointment had lodged somewhere under my ribs and stayed there. That is not the kind of thing a hard man likes to admit governs him. But there it is.
I want the record straight on one point, since I suspect the young man taking this down will be tempted, out of simple narrative tidiness, to make me sound a nobler creature than I was. I did not reform. I went on selling secrets for the whole of my working life, some of them a good deal uglier than the one I declined to sell that year, and I slept perfectly well doing it, on the whole. What Holmes gave me was not a conscience. I had one of those already, buried under thirty years of habit the way most men's are. What he gave me, now and again, was a reason to listen to it that felt less like weakness and more like precision, and a man in my trade values precision above almost everything, even when it costs him.
There was the business of the Cardinal's emerald, in the autumn of 1891. Watson has never heard of it, because it concerned a churchman whose reputation Holmes was anxious to protect, the man having done nothing wrong himself beyond trusting a nephew who had done a great deal wrong indeed. The stone had vanished from a collection kept, foolishly in my opinion, in the Cardinal's own study rather than any bank, and the household suspected a servant, as households generally do first and generally do wrong. I was able to tell Holmes, within an hour of his asking, that the nephew in question had run up gambling debts at three separate clubs that season, information his own family had no idea of and would have been horrified to learn. Holmes had the emerald back in its case within four days, the nephew shipped off to a cousin's sheep station in New South Wales with a speed that suggested the Cardinal, whatever else could be said of him, understood the value of a quiet solution as well as I did.
There was the Highgate business the following spring, which very nearly did reach print before Holmes stopped me. A widow was suspected by her own family of having hastened her husband's death by some means the doctors could not identify, and here my contribution was not gossip about the present but gossip about the past, a scandal twenty years buried concerning the husband's first fortune and the questionable means by which it had been made. Once Holmes had traced the thread properly, that old scandal gave the widow an entirely different and considerably less murderous motive for wanting certain old papers destroyed before her husband's death rather than his death itself.
I could go on, and I mean to, since young Anstey has assured me his editor wants length, and length is one thing I have never in my life been short of.
I should set down, too, since I am telling this honestly or not at all, the one occasion I got the whole business badly wrong, since I have noticed a man on his deathbed is tempted to remember himself more kindly than he deserves, and I have no wish to leave that particular vanity uncorrected.
There was a matter, in the winter of 1894, concerning a will, an elderly baronet named Sir Roger Ashby who had died leaving his considerable fortune to a nephew nobody in the family had ever much cared for, cutting out a daughter who had nursed him faithfully through a long final illness. The family came to Holmes suspecting forgery, and Holmes came to me suspecting nothing in particular, simply wanting to know what London said of the nephew, a young man named Cresswell who had spent most of his adult life on the Continent and about whom I had, or believed I had, a great deal of useful information.
I told Holmes that Cresswell was a gambler, a wastrel, and very probably a forger besides, having heard exactly that description from no fewer than three separate sources over the preceding two years, sources I trusted well enough that I never troubled to ask myself whether they had all, in fact, heard the very same rumour from the very same original mouth, rather than arriving at it independently. Holmes went off, I have no doubt, half persuaded by my own confidence, and spent the better part of a week chasing a forgery that did not exist, before discovering, through methods considerably more painstaking than mine, that the will was entirely genuine, that Cresswell had reformed himself thoroughly during his years abroad, and that the old rumours I had passed along so readily had been set in motion, years before, by a rival for the same young lady's hand who had never forgiven Cresswell for winning her, and who had gone on quietly seeding the story at every dinner table in London that would listen.