"I don't blame you entirely; you are not used to this sort of thing, and you were cautious. But I'll be bound you never made forty pounds first and sixty pounds afterward so quickly. That's the beauty of the thing."
"Do you know," inquired Jeremiah, "what the Major's system is?"
"Catch the Major telling anybody!" said Captain Ablewhite. "No, sir; he keeps it to himself—as you would do if you had a sure thing, as I would do, as anybody would do. If he finds any one watching him he puts him off the scent, or drops betting. Know his system! I would give ten thousand pounds to know it. But what matters? There are more systems than one, and if there's a man in the country who can discover them, you are the man. A long head like yours—such a calculator as you! There's backing first favourites; there's backing second favourites; there's backing them both together; there's backing outsiders; there's backing short odds and long odds; there's backing jockeys. If one thing won't do alone, there are combinations. Why, there never was such a field and such opportunities for a head like yours! With what I can learn from the stables, and what you could discover, such an absolute certainty never presented itself. Everything hasn't been discovered yet. There are a thousand fortunes in figures and calculations which some fellows will make. Why not you, for one, and me, for another? I won't make a pretence of disguising from you that I want a little bit of it. That's natural enough, and you won't make a pretence of denying it. Fair play's a jewel. Then there's the people I can introduce you to—young men who come into great estates and get into messes. There's another field for you. Keep it all to yourself; but give me a commission. I don't ask for more than that. The puddings shall be yours; give me a little plum now and then. Then there's such games as you saw going on last night in my rooms. There are kites and pigeons, and we know it. Why, some of the fellows know about as much of baccarat and poker as a blue-bottle—and they will play when they get a chance! Always have done, and always will. But the great thing is racing. It's waiting for you and made for you every day for nine months in the year. Wants a little pluck now and then; but the result is a moral. Your slow, timid, cautious ones, what do they make? A hundred a year instead of a hundred thousand."
In this way Captain Ablewhite talked, and Jeremiah listened and took it all in. A golden field lay before him, a veritable Tom Tiddler's ground. What a fool he would be to turn his back upon it! Such a chance would never present itself again.
Behold him, then, a few weeks after this conversation, secretly hand and glove with Captain Ablewhite, going occasionally to the Captain's rooms and picking up a few sovereigns; going occasionally to a race-course and coming home a pound or two the richer, and night after night covering pages upon pages with figures and calculations from racing-books. He was very cautious in these gambling transactions, and he suffered tortures upon nearly every occasion when he sat down in Miser Farebrother's office, which he regarded as his own, and reckoned up what he might have won had he been able to screw his courage to the sticking-point. "Had I done this or that," he thought, "had I had pluck, I should have been so much in pocket. The Captain told me I should require pluck now and then, and that the result would be a certainty—and it would have been." At the end of some three months, during which he was feeling his way, he calculated that a little courage would have made him the richer at least by a couple of thousand pounds—for, as is the case with every person who calculates after the event—he had no doubt that he would have backed such or such a horse or such and such a jockey, or have adopted such or such a combination, the issue of which would have been to put him on the straight, or the crooked, road to fortune. At length he was convinced that he had discovered a certain system of winning. What that system was it would be imprudent to explain here, for the reason that it might lead misguided persons to ruin. Sufficient that Jeremiah was convinced that it was impossible of failure, and that he had very nearly nerved himself to plunge boldly into it.
Meanwhile the fever and the infatuation of betting and gambling had taken such complete possession of him that he thought of little else, except the safety which lay in his marriage with Phœbe. "For," as he argued with himself, "supposing that by some extraordinary combination of circumstances luck should go against me, I should still be all right if I were the master of Miser Farebrother's business, and if his money were mine." As for anything in shape of sentiment, that was entirely outside his domain; his nature was not capable of it. He thought only of himself, and worked and schemed only for himself.
Meanwhile, also, the course of events was—so far as Jeremiah Pamflett was mixed up in his affairs—fairly satisfactory to Captain Ablewhite. Instead of being dunned for the money he owed Jeremiah—which by Jeremiah's cunning methods of compound interest, was beginning to swell into an important amount—he borrowed more of him; small sums at a time, certainly, but, as Captain Ablewhite said to himself, "Little fish are sweet." As Jeremiah had him in his power, so also the smiling Captain had managed to obtain a hold upon the man from whom, in ordinary circumstances, he knew he would get no mercy. Of a different quality of cunning from Jeremiah's was the standard of Captain Ablewhite's intellect, but, properly handled, it was scarcely less powerful. All his life had Captain Ablewhite lived upon his wits, eating and drinking of the best, a member of good clubs, living in fashionable quarters, owing money right and left, and yet managing somehow to keep out of water too hot for him. He entertained a very thorough and sincere contempt for Jeremiah, laughed in his sleeve at his meanness, fooled him on and on, allowed him to win a little at his card-parties, introduced him to men as impecunious and unscrupulous as himself, who borrowed money of Jeremiah, and would have pulled his nose upon the smallest provocation. But Jeremiah was always humble, cringing, and subservient, biding his time for the grand coup which would make him as good as the best among them. And so the game went on, its minutest detail assisting to bring to a terrible climax the tragedy in which Phœbe's life was presently to be engulfed. This brings us to the day upon which our heroine, accompanied by Fred Cornwall and dear Aunt Leth, journeyed to Parksides to ask her father's consent to her engagement with the young lawyer.