“Then he is poor,” said the old man, sarcastically.
“I know little of his circumstances, but I believe they are ample.”
“Take my word for it, boy, they are not,” said the other, with a bitter smile. “Fortune is a thrifty goddess, and where she bestows a generous nature she takes care it shall have nothing to give away.”
“I trust your precept will not apply to this case, at all events. I have been his pensioner for nigh a year back: I am so still. I had hoped, indeed, by this project of lecturing—”
“Nay, nay, boy, no success could come of that. Had you been a great name in your own country, and come here heralded by honors won already, they would have given you a fair hearing and a generous recompense, but they will not take as money the unstamped metal; they will not stoop to accept what the old country sends forth without acknowledgment, as good enough for them. Believe me, this race is prouder than our own, and it is not by unworthy sneers at them that we shall make them less vainglorious.”
“I scarcely know them, but for the sake of that one man I owe them a deep affection,” said Alfred, warmly.
“I have a scheme for you,” said the old man, after a pause; “but we will talk of it later on. For the present, I want you to aid me in a plan of my own. Ever since I have been in this country I have endeavored to find out a person whose name alone was known to me, and with whom I gave a solemn promise to communicate,—a death-bed promise it was, and given under no common circumstances. The facts were these:—
“I was once upon a time, when practising as a physician at Jersey, sent for to attend a patient taken suddenly and dangerously ill. The case was a most embarrassing one. There were symptoms so incongruous as to reject the notion of any ordinary disease, and such as might well suggest the suspicion of poisoning, and yet so skilfully and even patiently had the scheme been matured, the detection of the poison during life was very difficult. My eagerness in the inquiry was mistaken by the patient for a feeling of personal kindness towards himself,—an error very familiar to all medical men in practice. He saw in my unremitting attention and hourly watching by his bedside the devotion of one like an old friend, and not the scientific ardor of a student.
“It is just possible that his gratitude was the greater, that the man was one little likely to conciliate good feeling or draw any sympathy towards him. He was a hard, cold, selfish fellow, whose life had been passed amongst the worst classes of play-men, and who rejected utterly all thought of truth or confidence in his old associates. I mention this to show how, in a very few days, the accident of my situation established between us a freedom and a frankness that savored of long acquaintance.
“In his conversations with me he confessed that his wife had been divorced from a former husband, and, from circumstances known to him, he believed she desired his death. He told me of the men to whom in particular his suspicions attached, and the reasons of the suspicions; that these men would be irretrievably ruined if his speculations on the turf were to succeed, and that there was not one of them would not peril his life to get sight of his book on the coming Derby. I was curious to ascertain why he should have surrounded himself with men so obviously his enemies, and he owned it was an act prompted by a sort of dogged courage, to show them that he did not fear them. Nor was this the only motive, as he let out by an inadvertence; he cherished the hope of detecting an intrigue between one of his guests and his wife, as the means of liberating himself from a tie long distasteful to him.