“It would be better, perhaps, that I had some of that happy disposition of my son,” said she, with a cutting tone, “and could submit to whatever suited me.”
He started as if he had seen something, and turning on her a look of passionate anger, began: “Is it from you that this should come?” Then suddenly recollecting himself, he subdued his tone, and said: “We 'll not do better by losing our tempers. Can you put me in the way to raise a little money? I shall have the payment for my commission in about a fortnight; but I want a couple of hundred pounds at once.”
“It's not two months since you raised five hundred.”
“I know it, and there 's the last of it. I left Lucy ten sovereigns when I came away, and this twenty pounds is all that I now have in the world.”
“And all these fine dinners and grand entertainments that I have been told of,—what was the meaning of them?”
“They were what the railway people call 'preliminary expenses,' mother. Before one can get fellows to come to a house where there is play, there must be a sort of easy style of good living established that all men like: excellent dinners and good wine are the tame elephants, and without them you 'll not get the wild ones into your 'compounds.'”
“And to tell me that this could pay!”
“Ay, and pay splendidly. If I had three thousand pounds in the world to carry on with, I 'd see the old Judge and his rotten place at Jericho before I 'd accept it. One needs a little capital, that's all. It's just like blockade-running,—you must be able to lose three for one you succeed with.”
“I see nothing but ruin—disreputable ruin—in such a course.”
“Come down and look at it, mother, and you 'll change your mind. You 'll own you never saw a better ordered society in your life,—the beau idéal of a nice country-house on a small scale. I admit our chef is not a Frenchman, and I have only one fellow out of livery; but the thing is well done, I promise you. As for any serious play, you 'll never hear of it—never suspect it—no more than a man turning over Leech's sketches in a dentist's drawing-room suspects there's a fellow getting his eye-tooth extracted in the next room.”