Checkmate Part 38

"No, Shir, my partner'sh with me. He'll be out in a minute; he'sh only puttin' a chap on to make out an inventory."

"Well, I don't want him. Would you mind walking down the road here, a couple of hundred steps or so? I have a word for you. Your partner can overtake you in the cab."

"Shertainly, Mr. Longclooshe, shertainly, Shir."

And he halloed to the cabman to tell the "zhentleman" who was coming out to overtake him in the cab on the road to town.

This settled, Mr. Longcluse, walking his horse along the road, and his City acquaintance by his side, slowly made their way towards the City, casting long shadows over the low fence into the field at their left; and Mr. Goldshed's stumpy legs were projected across the road in such slender proportions that he felt for a moment rather slight and elegant, and was unusually disgusted, when he glanced down upon the substance of those shadows, at the unnecessarily clumsy style in which Messrs. Shears and Goslin had cut out his brown trousers.

Mr. Longcluse had a good deal to say when they got on a little. Being earnest, he stopped his horse; and Mr. Goldshed, forgetting his reverence in his absorption, placed his broad hand on the horse's shoulder, as he looked up into Mr. Longcluse's face, and now and then nodded, or grunted a "Surely." It was not until the shadows had grown perceptibly longer, until Mr. Longcluse's hat had stolen away to the gilded stem of the old ash-tree that was in perspective to their left, and until Mr. Goldshed's legs had grown so taper and elegant as to amount to the spindle, that the talk ended, and Mr. Longcluse, who was a little shy of being seen in such company, bid him good evening, and rode away townward at a brisk trot.

That morning Richard Arden looked as if he had got up after a month's fever. His dinner had been a pretence, and his breakfast was a sham. His luck, as he termed it, had got him at last pretty well into a corner.

The placing of the horses was a dreadful record of moral impossibilities accomplished against him. Five minutes before the start he could have sold his book for three thousand pounds; five minutes after it no one would have accepted fifteen thousand to take it off his hands. The shock, at first a confusion, had grown in the night into ghastly order.

It was all, in the terms of the good old simile, "as plain as a pike-staff." He simply could not pay. He might sell everything he possessed, and pay about ten shillings in the pound, and then work his pa.s.sage to another country, and become an Australian drayman, or a New Orleans billiard-marker.

But not pay his bets! And how could he? Ten shillings in the pound? Not five. He forgot how far he was already involved. What _was_ to become of him. Breakfast he could eat none. He drank a cup of tea, but his tremors grew worse. He tried claret, but that, too, was chilly comfort. He was driven to an experiment he had never ventured before. He had a "nip,"

and another, and with this Dutch courage rallied a little, and was able to talk to his friend and admirer, Vandeleur, who had made a miniature book after the pattern of d.i.c.k Arden's and had lost some hundreds, which he did not know how to pay; and who was, in his degree, as miserable as his chief; for is it not established that--

"The poor beetle, that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great As when a giant dies"?

Young Vandeleur, with light silken hair, and innocent blue eyes, found his paragon the picture of "grim-visaged, comfortless despair," drumming a tattoo on the window, in slippers and dressing-gown, without a collar to his shirt.

"You lost, of course," said Richard savagely; "you followed my lead. Any fellow that does is sure to lose."

"Yes," answered Vandeleur, "I did, heavily; and, I give you my honour, I believe I'm ruined."

"How much?"

"Two hundred and forty pounds!"

"_Ruined!_ What nonsense! Who are you? or what the devil are you making such a row about? Two hundred and forty! How can you be such an a.s.s?

Don't you know it's nothing?"

"Nothing! By Jove! I wish I could see it," said poor Van; "everything's something to any one, when there's nothing to pay it with. I'm not like you, you know; I'm awfully poor. I have just a hundred and twenty pounds from my office, and forty my aunt gives me, and ninety I get from home, and, upon my honour, that's all; and I owed just a hundred pounds to some fellows that were growing impertinent. My tailor is sixty-four, and the rest are trifling, but they were the most impertinent, and I was so sure of this unfortunate thing that I told them I--really did--to call next week; and now I suppose it's all up with me, I may as well make a bolt of it. Instead of having any money to pay them, I'm two hundred and forty pounds worse than ever. I don't know what on earth to do. Upon my honour, I haven't an idea."

"I wish we could exchange our accounts," said Richard grimly: "I wish you owed my sixteen thousand. I think you'd sink through the earth. I think you'd call for a pistol, and blow"--(he was going to say, "your brains out," but he would not pay him that compliment)--"blow your head off."

So it was the old case--"_Enter Tilburina, mad, in white satin; enter her maid, mad, in white linen._"

And Richard Arden continued--

"What's your aunt good for? You _know_ she will pay that; don't let me hear a word more about it."

"And your uncle will pay yours, won't he?" said Van, with an innocent gaze of his azure eyes.

"My uncle has paid some trifles before, but this is too big a thing.

He's tired of me and my cursed misfortunes, and he's not likely to apply any of his overgrown wealth in relieving a poor tortured beggar like me.

I'm simply ruined."

CHAPTER x.x.xIX.

BETWEEN FRIENDS.

Van was looking ruefully out of the window, down upon the deserted pavement opposite. At length he said,--

"And why don't you give your luck a chance?"

"Whenever I give it a chance it hits me so devilish hard," replied Richard Arden.

"But I mean at play to retrieve," said Van.

"So do I. So I did, last night, and lost another thousand. It is utterly monstrous."

"By Jove! that is really very extraordinary," exclaimed little Van. "I tried it, too, last night. Tom Franklyn had some fellows to sup with him, and I went in, and they were playing loo; and I lost thirty-seven pounds more!"

"Thirty-seven confounded flea-bites! Why, don't you see how you torture me with your nonsense? If you can't talk like a man of sense, for Heaven's sake, shut up, and don't distract me in my misery."

He emphasised the word with a Lilliputian thump with the side of his fist--that which presents the edge of the doubled-up little finger and palm--a sort of buffer, which I suppose he thought he might safely apply to the pane of gla.s.s on which he had been drumming. But he hit a little too hard, or there was a flaw in the gla.s.s, for the pane flew out, touching the window-sill, and alighted in the area with a musical jingle.

"There! see what you made me do. My luck! Now we can't talk without those brutes at that open window, over the way, hearing every word we say. By Jove, it is later than I thought! I did not sleep last night."

"Nor I, a moment," said Van.

"It seems like a week since that accursed race, and I don't know whether it is morning or evening, or day or night. It is past four, and I must dress and go to my uncle--he said five. Don't leave me, Van, old fellow!

I think I should cut my throat if I were alone."

"Oh, no, I'll stay with pleasure, although I don't see what comfort there is in me, for I am about the most miserable dog in London."

"Now don't make a fool of yourself any more," said Richard Arden. "You have only to tell your aunt, and say that you are a prodigal son, and that sort of thing, and it will be paid in a week. I look as if I was going to be hanged--or is it the colour of that gla.s.s? I hate it. I'll leave these cursed lodgings. Did you ever see such a ghost?"

"Well, you do look a trifle seedy: you'll look better when you're dressed. It's an awful world to live in," said poor Van.

"I'll not be five minutes; you must walk with me a bit of the way. I wish I had some fellow at my other side who had lost a hundred thousand.

I daresay he'd think me a fool. They say Chiffington lost a hundred and forty thousand. Perhaps he'd think me as great an a.s.s as I think you--who knows? I may be making too much of it--and my uncle is so very rich, and neither wife nor child; and, I give you my honour, I am sick of the whole thing. I'd never take a card or a dice-box in my hand, or back a horse, while I live, if I was once fairly out of it. He _might_ try me, don't you think? I'm the only near relation he has on earth--I don't count my father, for he's--it's a different thing, you know--I and my sister, just. And, really, it would be nothing to him. And I think he suspected something about it last night; perhaps he heard a little of it. And he's rather hot, but he's a good-natured fellow, and he has commercial ideas about a man's going into the insolvent court; and, by Jove, you know, I'm ruined, and I don't think he'd like to see our name disgraced--eh, do you?"

"No, I'm quite sure," said Van. "I thought so all along."

"Peers and peeresses are very fine in their way, and people, whenever the peers do anything foolish, and throw out a bill, exclaim 'Thank Heaven we have still a House of Lords!' but you and I, Van, may thank Heaven for a better estate, the order of aunts and uncles. Do you remember the man you and I saw in the vaudeville, who exclaims every now and then, '_Vive mon oncle! Vive ma tante!_'?"

So, in better spirits, Arden prepared to visit his uncle.

"Let us get into a cab; people are staring at you," said Richard Arden, when they had walked a little way towards his uncle's house. "You look so utterly ruined, one would think you had swallowed poison, and were dying by inches, and expected to be in the other world before you reached your doctor's door. Here's a cab."

They got in, and sitting side by side, said Vandeleur to him, after a minute's silence,--