Mr. Mandeville laughed. "One might think you had a million," he observed. "Or are you proposing to tip me a fiver?" The thought of his own thousands filled his tone with scorn; he did not do his speculating with Aunt Maria's money.
"If you're too proud, I can take my business somewhere else—and the name of the concern too," said Quisanté, lighting a cigar. Cousin Mandeville's stare had not escaped his notice.
Mandeville hesitated; he was very much annoyed; he liked his money, if not himself, to be respected. But business is business, to say nothing of blood being thicker than water.
"Oh, well, I'll do it for you," he agreed with lofty benevolence. Quisanté laughed. He would have covered his own retreat with much the same device.
The riches then were on the way; Quisanté had a far-seeing eye, and Aunt Maria's five hundred was to imagination already prolific of thousands. A hansom carried him up to Harley Street; he had been there three months before and had been told to come again in three weeks. The punishment for his neglect was a severe verdict. "No liquor, no tobacco, and three months' immediate and complete rest." Quisanté laughed—very much as he had at his kinsman in the City. Both doctor and stock-jobber showed such a curious ignorance of the conditions under which his life had to be lived and of his reasons for caring to live it.
"What's the matter then?" he asked.
The doctor became very technical, though not quite unreserved; the heart and the stomach were in some unholy conspiracy; this was as much as Quisanté really understood.
"And if I don't do as you say?" he asked. The doctor smiled and shrugged his shoulders. "I shan't outlive Methuselah anyhow, I suppose?"
"The present conditions of your life are very wearing," said the doctor.
Quisanté looked at him thoughtfully.