It was so settled. I then led him out into the street, impelled to tell the news, yet dreading the effect; not daring to make the revelation in my office for fear of a scene.
I began hesitatingly, “Mr. Fitz-Roy, I am happy to say that I find you are entitled to.... ten thousand pounds!”
“Ten thousand pounds!” he echoed. “Ten thousand pounds!” he shrieked. “Ten thousand pounds!” he yelled, seizing my arm violently.
“You are a brick,—— Here, cab! cab!” Several drove up—the shout might have been heard a mile off. He jumped in the first.
“Where to?” said the driver.
“To a tailor’s, you rascal!”
“Ten thousand pounds! ha, ha, ha!” he repeated hysterically, when in the cab; and every moment grasping my arm. Presently he subsided, looked me straight in the face, and muttered with agonizing fervor, “What a jolly brick you are!”
The tailor, the hosier, the bootmaker, the hairdresser, were in turn visited by this poor pagan of externals. As by degrees under their hands he emerged from the beggar to the gentleman, his spirits rose; his eyes brightened; he walked erect, but always nervously grasping my arm; fearing, apparently, to lose sight of me for a moment, lest his fortune should vanish with me. The impatient pride with which he gave his order to the astonished tradesman for the finest and best of everything, and the amazed air of the fashionable hairdresser when he presented his matted locks and stubble chin to be “cut and shaved,” may be acted—it cannot be described.
By the time the external transformation was complete, and I sat down in a café in the Haymarket opposite a haggard but handsome thoroughbred-looking man, whose air, with the exception of the wild eyes and deeply-browned face, did not differ from the stereotyped men about town sitting around us, Mr. Molinos Fitz-Roy had already almost forgotten the past; he bullied the waiter, and criticized the wine, as if he had done nothing else but dine and drink and scold there all the days of his life.
Once he wished to drink my health, and would have proclaimed his whole story to the coffee-room assembly in a raving style. When I left he almost wept in terror at the idea of losing sight of me. But, allowing for these ebullitions—the natural result of such a whirl of events—he was wonderfully calm and self-possessed.