Among a very motley crowd, Richard Arden slowly sauntering through the room found Mr. Levi, whose appearance he already knew, having once or twice had occasion to consult him financially. His play was over for the night. The slim little Jew, with black curly head, large fierce black eyes, and sullen mouth, stood with his hands in his pockets, gaping luridly over the table where he had just, he observed to his friend Isaac Blumer, who did not care if he was hanged, “losht sheven pound sheventeen, ash I’m a shinner!”
Mr. Levi saw Richard Arden approaching, and smiled on him with his wide show of white fangs. Richard Arden approached Mr. Levi with a grave and haughty face. Here, to be sure, was nothing but what Horace Walpole used to call “the mob.” Not a human being whom he knew was in the room; still he would have preferred seeing Mr. Levi at his office; and the audacity of his presuming to grin in that familiar fashion! He would have liked to fling one of the billiard-balls in his teeth. In a freezing tone, and with his head high, he said, —
“I think you are Mr. Levi.”
“The shame,” responded Levi, still smiling; “and ‘ow ish Mr. Harden thish evening?”
“I had a note from you,” said Arden, passing by Mr. Levi’s polite inquiry, “and I should like to know if any of that money you spoke of may be made available tonight.”
“Every shtiver,” replied the Jew cheerfully.
“I can have it all? Well, this is rather a noisy place,” hesitated Richard Arden, looking around him.
“I can get into Mishter Dignum’s book-offish here, Mr. Harden, and it won’t take a moment. I haven’t notes, but I’ll give you our cheques, and there’sh no place in town they won’t go down as slick as gold. I’ll fetch you to where there’s pen and ink.”
“Do so,” said he.
In a very small room, where burned a single jet of gas, Mr. Arden signed a promissory note for, £1,012 10s., for which Mr. Levi handed him cheques of his firm for £1,000.
Having exchanged these securities, Richard Arden said —
“I wish to put one or two questions to you, Mr. Levi.” He glanced at a clerk who was making “tots” from a huge folio before him, on a slip of paper, and transferring them to a small book, with great industry.
Levi understood him and beckoned in silence, and when they both stood in the passage he said —
“If you want a word private with me, Mr. Harden, where there’sh no one can shee us, you’ll be as private as the deshert of Harabia if you walk round the corner of the shtreet.”
Arden nodded, and walked out into the Strand, accompanied by Mr. Levi. They turned to the left, and a few steps brought them to the corner of Cecil Street. The street widens a little after you pass its narrow entrance. It was still enough to justify Mr. Levi’s sublime comparison. The moon shone mistily on the river, which was dotted and streaked, at its further edge with occasional red lights from windows, relieved by the black reflected outline of the building which made their background. At the foot of the street, at that time, stood a clumsy rail, and Richard Arden leaned his arm on this, as he talked to the Jew, who had pulled his short cloak about him; and in the faint light he could not discern his features, near as he stood, except, now and then, his white eyeballs, faintly, as he turned, or his teeth when he smiled.
CHAPTER XLVII.
BY THE RIVER.
“You mentioned, Mr. Levi, in your note, that you were instructed, by some person who takes an interest in me, to open this business,” said Richard Arden, in a more conciliatory tone. “Will your instructions permit you to tell me who that person is?”
“No, no,” drawled Mr. Levi, with a slow shake of his head; “I declare to you sholemnly, Mr. Harden, I couldn’t. I’m employed by a third party, and though I may make a tolerable near guess who’s firsht fiddle in the bishness, I can’t shay nothin’.”
“Surely you can say this — it is hardly a question, I am so sure of it — is the friend who lends this money a gentleman?”
“I think the pershon as makesh the advanshe is a bit of a shwell. There, now, that’sh enough.”
“But I said a gentleman,” persisted Arden.
“You mean to ask, hashn’t a lady got nothing to do with it?”
“Well, suppose I do?”
Mr. Levi shook his head slowly, and all his white teeth showed dimly, as he answered with an unctuous significance that tempted Arden strongly to pitch him into the river.
“We puts the ladiesh first; ladiesh and shentlemen, that’s the way it goes at the theaytre; if a good-looking chap’s a bit in a fix, there’sh no one like a lady to pull him through.”
“I really want to know,” said Richard Arden, with difficulty restraining his fury. “I have some relations who are likely enough to give me a lift of this kind; some are ladies, and some gentlemen, and I have a right to know to whom I owe this money.”
“To our firm; who elshe? We have took your paper, and you have our cheques on Childs’.”
“Your firm lend money at five per cent.!” said Arden with contempt. “You forget, Mr. Levi, you mentioned in your note, distinctly, that you act for another person. Who is that principal for whom you act?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come, Mr. Levi! you are no simpleton; you may as well tell me — no one shall be a bit the wiser — for I will know.”
“Azh I’m a shinner — as I hope to be shaved — — “ began Mr. Levi.
“It won’t do — you may just as well tell me — out with it!”
“Well, here now; I don’t know, but if I did, upon my shoul, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“It is pleasant to meet with so much sensitive honour, Mr. Levi,” said Richard Arden very scornfully. “I have nothing particular to say, only that your firm were mistaken, a little time ago, when they thought that I was without resources; I’ve friends, you now perceive, who only need to learn that I want money, to volunteer assistance. Have you anything more to say?”
Richard Arden saw the little Jew’s fine fangs again displayed in the faint light, as he thus spoke; but it was only prudent to keep his temper with this lucky intervenient.
“I have nothing to shay, Mr. Harden, only there’sh more where that came from, and I may tell you sho, for that’sh no shecret. But don’t you go too fasht, young gentleman — not that you won’t get it — but don’t you go too fasht.”
“If I should ever ask your advice, it will be upon other things. I’m giving the lender as good security as I have given to any one else. I don’t see any great wonder in the matter. Goodnight,” he said haughtily, not taking the trouble to look over his shoulder as he walked away.
“Goodnight,” responded Mr. Levi, taking one of Dignum’s cigars from his waistcoat-pocket, and preparing to light it with a lazy grin, as he watched the retreating figure lessening in the perspective of the street, “and take care of yourshelf for my shake, do, and don’t you be lettin’ all them fine women be throwin’ their fortunes like that into your ‘at, and bringin’ themshelves to the workus, for love of your pretty fashe — poor, dear, love-sick little fools! There you go, right off to Mallet and Turner’s, I dareshay, and good luck attend you, for a reglar lady-killin’, ‘ansome, sweet-spoken, broken-down jackass!”
At this period of his valediction the vesuvian was applied to his cigar, and Richard Arden, turning the far corner of the street, escaped the remainder of his irony, as the Jew, with his hands in his pockets, sauntered up its quiet pavement, in the direction in which Richard Arden had just disappeared. It seemed to that young gentleman that his supplies, no less than thirteen hundred pounds, would all but command the luck of which, as his spirits rose, he began to feel confident. “Fellows,” he thought, “who have gone in with less than fifty, have come out, to my knowledge, with thousands; and if less than fifty could do that, what might not be expected from thirteen hundred?”
He picked up a cab. Never did lover fly more impatiently to the feet of his mistress than Richard Arden did, that night, to the shrine of the goddess whom
he worshipped.
The muttered scoffs, the dark fiery gaze, the glimmering teeth of this mocking, malicious little Jew, represented an influence that followed Richard Arden that night.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
SUDDEN NEWS.
What is luck? Is there such an influence? What type of mind rejects altogether, and consistently, this law or power? Call it by what name you will, fate or fortune, did not Napoleon, the man of death and of action, and did not Swedenborg, the man of quietude and visions, acknowledge it? Where is the successful gamester who does not “back his luck,” when once it has declared itself, and bow before the storms of fortune when they in turn have set in? I take Napoleon and Swedenborg — the man of this visible world, and the man of the invisible world — as the representatives of extreme types of mind. People who have looked into Swedenborg’s works will remember curious passages on the subject, and find more dogmatical, and less metaphysical admissions in Napoleon’s conversations everywhere.
In corroboration of this theory, that luck is an element, with its floods and ebbs, against which it is fatuity to contend, was the result of Richard Arden’s play.
Before halfpast two, he had lost every guinea of his treasure. He had been drinking champagne. He was flushed, dismal, profoundly angry. Hot and headachy, he was ready to choke with gall. There was a big, red-headed, vulgar fellow beside him, with a broad-brimmed white hat, who was stuffing his pockets and piling the table before him, as though he had found the secret of an “open sesame,” and was helping himself from the sacks of the Forty Thieves.
When Richard had lost his last pound, he would have liked to smash the gas-lamps and windows, and the white hat and the red head in it, and roar the blasphemy that rose to his lips. But men can’t afford to make themselves ridiculous, and as he turned about to make his unnoticed exit, he saw the little Jew, munching a sandwich, with a glass of champagne beside him.
“I say,” said Richard Arden, walking up to the little man, whose big mouth was full of sandwich, and whose fierce black eyes encountered his instantaneously, “you don’t happen to have a little more, on the same terms, about you?”
Mr. Levi waited to bolt his sandwich, and then swallow down his champagne.
“Shave me!” exclaimed he, when this was done. “The thoushand gone! every rag! and” (glancing at his watch) “only two twenty-five! Won’t it be rayther young, though, backin’ such a run o’ bad luck, and throwin’ good money after bad, Mr. Harden?”
“That’s my affair, I fancy; what I want to know is whether you have got a few hundreds more, on the same terms — I mean, from the same lender. Hang it, say yes or no — can’t you?”
“Well, Mr. Harden, there’s five hundred more — but ’twasn’t expected you’d a’ drew it so soon. How much do you say, Mr. Harden?”
“I’ll take it all,” said Richard Arden. “I wish I could have it without these blackguards seeing.”
“They don’t care, blesh ye! if you got it from the old boy himself. That is a rum un!” There were pen and ink on a small table beside the wall, at which Mr. Levi began rapidly to fill in the blanks of a bill of exchange. “Why, there’s not one o’ them, almost, but takes a hundred now and then from me, when they runs out a bit too fast. You’d better shay one month.”
“Say two, like the other, and don’t keep me waiting.”
“You’d better shay one — your friend will think you’re going a bit too quick to the devil. Remember, as your proverb shays, ‘taint the thing to kill the gooshe that laysh the golden eggs — shay one month.”
Levi’s large black eye was fixed on him, and he added, “If you want it pushed on a bit when it comes due, there won’t be no great trouble about it, I calculate.”
Richard Arden looked at the large fierce eyes that were silently fixed on him: one of those eyes winked solemnly and significantly.
“Well, what way you like, only be quick,” said Richard Arden.
His new sheaf of cheques were quickly turned into counters; and, after various fluctuations, these counters followed the rest, and in the grey morning he left that haunt jaded and savage, with just fifteen pounds in his pocket, the wreck of the large sum which he had borrowed to restore his fortunes.
It needs some little time to enable a man, who has sustained such a shock as Richard Arden had, to collect his thoughts and define the magnitude of his calamity. He let himself in by a latchkey: the grey light was streaming through the shutters, and turning the chintz pattern of his window-curtains here and there, in streaks, into transparencies. He went into his room and swallowed nearly a tumbler of brandy, then threw off his clothes, drank some more, and fell into a flushed stupor, rather than a sleep, and lay for hours as still as any dead man on the field of battle.
Some four hours of this lethargy, and he became conscious, at intervals, of a sound of footsteps in his room. The shutters were still closed. He thought he heard a voice say, “Master Richard!” but he was too drowsy, still, to rouse himself.
At length a hand was laid upon him, and a voice that was familiar to his ear repeated twice over, more urgently, “Master Richard! Master Richard!” He was now awake: very dimly, by his bedside, he saw a figure standing. Again he heard the same words, and wondered, for a few seconds, where he was.
“That’s Crozier talking,” said Richard.
“Yes, Sir,” said Crozier, in a low tone; “I’m here half-an-hour, Sir, waiting till you should wake.”
“Let in some light; I can’t see you.”
Crozier opened half the window-shutter, and drew the curtain.
“Are ye ailin’, Master Richard — are ye bad, Sir?”
“Ailing — yes, I’m bad enough, as you say — I’m miserable. I don’t know where to turn or what to do. Hold my coat while I count what’s in the pocket. If my father, the old scoundrel — — “
“Master Richard, don’t ye say the like o’ that no more; all’s over, this morning, wi’ the old master — Sir Reginald’s dead, Sir,” said the old follower, sternly.
“Good God!” cried Richard, starting up in his bed and staring at old Crozier with a frightened look.
“Ay, Sir,” said the old servant, in a low stern tone, “he’s gone at last: he was took just a quarter past five this mornin’, by the clock at Mortlake, about four minutes before St. Paul’s chimed the quarter. The wind being southerly, we heard the chimes. We thought he was all right, and I did not leave him until halfpast twelve o’clock, having given him his drops, and waited till he went asleep. It was about three he rang his bell, and in I goes that minute, and finds him sitting up in his bed, talking quite silly-like about old Wainbridge, the groom, that’s dead and buried, away in Skarkwynd Churchyard, these thirty year.”
Crozier paused here. He had been crying hours ago, and his eyes and nose still showed evidences of that unbecoming weakness. Perhaps he expected Richard, now Sir Richard Arden, to say something, but nothing came.
“’Tis a change, Sir, and I feel a bit queer; and as I was sayin’, when I went in, ’twas in his head he saw Tom Wainbridge leadin’ a horse saddled and all into the room, and standin’ by the side of his bed, with the bridle in his hand, and holdin’ the stirrup for him to mount. ‘And what the devil brings Wainbridge here, when he has his business to mind in Yorkshire? and where could he find a horse like that beast? He’s waiting for me; I can hear the roarin’ brute, and I see Tom’s parchment face at the door — there,’ he’d say, ‘and there — where are your eyes, Crozier, can’t you see, man? Don’t be afraid — can’t you look — and don’t you hear him? Wainbridge’s old nonsense.’ And he’d laugh a bit to himself every now and again, and then he’d whimper to me, looking a bit frightened, ‘Get him away, Crozier, will you? He’s annoying me, he’ll have me out,’ and this sort o’ talk he went on wi’ for full twenty minutes. I rang the bell to Mrs. Tansey’s room, and when she was come we agreed to send in the brougham for the doctor. I think he was a bit wrong i’ the garrets, and we were both afraid to let it be no
longer.”
Crozier paused for a moment, and shook his head.
“We thought he was goin’ asleep, but he wasn’t. His eyes was half shut, and his shoulders against the pillows, and Mrs. Tansey was drawin’ the eider-down coverlet over his feet, softly, when all on a sudden — I thought he was laughin’ — a noise like a little flyrin’ laugh, and then a long, frightful yellock, that would make your heart tremble, and awa’ wi’ him into one o’ them fits, and so from one into another, until when the doctor came he said he was in an apoplexy; and so, at just a quarter past five the auld master departed. And I came in to tell you, Sir; and have you any orders to give me, Master Richard? and I’m going on, I take it you’d wish me, to your uncle, Mr. David, and little Miss Alice, that han’t heard nout o’ the matter yet.”
“Yes, Crozier — go,” said Richard Arden, staring on him as if his soul was in his eyes; and, after a pause, with an effort, he added— “I’ll call there as I go on to Mortlake; tell them I’ll see them on my way.”
When Crozier was gone, Richard Arden got up, threw his dressing-gown about him, and sat on the side of his bed, feeling very faint. A sudden gush of tears relieved the strange paroxysm. Then come other emotions less unselfish. He dressed hastily. He was too much excited to make a breakfast. He drank a cup of coffee, and drove to Uncle David’s house.
CHAPTER XLIX.
VOWS FOR THE FUTURE.
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 545