CHAPTER XXXIII.
CONSOLATION.
On the next day, at two o’clock punctually, Mark Robarts was at the “Dragon of Wantly,” walking up and down the very room in which the party had breakfasted after Harold Smith’s lecture, and waiting for the arrival of Mr. Sowerby. He had been very well able to divine what was the business on which his friend wished to see him, and he had been rather glad than otherwise to receive the summons. Judging of his friend’s character by what he had hitherto seen, he thought that Mr. Sowerby would have kept out of the way, unless he had it in his power to make some provision for these terrible bills. So he walked up and down the dingy room, impatient for the expected arrival, and thought himself wickedly ill-used in that Mr. Sowerby was not there when the clock struck a quarter to three. But when the clock struck three, Mr. Sowerby was there, and Mark Robarts’s hopes were nearly at an end.
“Do you mean that they will demand nine hundred pounds?” said Robarts, standing up and glaring angrily at the member of Parliament.
“I fear that they will,” said Sowerby. “I think it is best to tell you the worst, in order that we may see what can be done.”
“I can do nothing, and will do nothing,” said Robarts. “They may do what they choose—what the law allows them.”
And then he thought of Fanny and his nursery, and Lucy refusing in her pride Lord Lufton’s offer, and he turned away his face that the hard man of the world before him might not see the tear gathering in his eye.
“But, Mark, my dear fellow—” said Sowerby, trying to have recourse to the power of his cajoling voice.
Robarts, however, would not listen.
“Mr. Sowerby,” said he, with an attempt at calmness which betrayed itself at every syllable, “it seems to me that you have robbed me. That I have been a fool, and worse than a fool, I know well; but—but—but I thought that your position in the world would guarantee me from such treatment as this.”