“No tempting you, eh?”
“Not in that way, certainly. Good-bye till five o'clock.”
CHAPTER XVI. A STARLIT NIGHT
Late at night of the same day on which the conversation of last chapter occurred, Sewell was returning to the Priory: he was on foot, having failed to find a carriage at that late hour, and was depressed and wretched in mind, for he had lost a large sum at the Club, which he had no means whatever to meet on the coming morning.
It was a rare event with him to take a retrospect of his life; and his theory was that he owed any success he had ever won to the fact that he brought to the present—to the actual casualty before him—an amount of concentration which men who look back or look forward never can command. Now, however, the past would force itself upon him, and his whole career, with all its faults and its failures, was before him.
It was a bitter memory, the very bitterest one can imagine, not in its self-accusation or reproach, but in the thought of all the grand opportunities he had thrown away, the reckless way in which he had treated Fortune, believing that she never would fail him. All his regrets were for the occasions he had suffered to slip by him unprofitably. He did not waste a thought on those he had ruined, many of them young fellows starting hopefully, joyously in life. His mind only dwelt on such as had escaped his snares. Ay, the very fellows to whom he had lost largely that night, had once been in his power! He remembered them when they “joined;” he had met them when they landed at Calcutta, in all their raw inexperience of life, pressing their petty wagers upon him, and eagerly, almost ignominiously courting acquaintance with the favored aide-de-camp of the Governor-General.
And there they were now, bronzed, hard-featured, shrewd men of the world, who had paid for their experience, and knew its worth.
Nothing to be done with them! Indeed, there was little now “to be done” anywhere. The whole machinery of life was changed. Formerly, when fellows started in life, they were trustful, uncalculating, and careless. Now, on the contrary, they were wary, cautious, and suspectful. Instead of attaching themselves to older men as safe guides and counsellors, they hung back from them as too skilful and too crafty to be dealt with. Except Trafford he had not seen one—not one, for many a day—who could be “chaffed” into a bet, or laughed into play against his inclination. And what had he made of Trafford? A few hundred pounds in hand, and those letters which now Fossbrooke had insisted on his giving up. How invariably it was that same man who came up at every crisis of his life to thwart and defeat him. And it was a hard, a cruelly hard, thing to remember that this very man who had been the dupe of hundreds, who had been rogued and swindled out of all he had, should still have brought all his faculties to the task of persecuting him!
“One might have thought,” said he, with a bitter laugh, “that he had troubles enough of his own not to have spare time to bestow upon me and my affairs. He was once, I own indeed, a rich man, with station and influence, and now he is a beggar. There was a time no society refused him entrée; now it is thought a very gracious thing to know him. Why will these things occupy him? And this stupid rebellion! I wonder how far he is compromised, or how far one could manage to have him compromised, by it? It is doubtless some personal consideration, some liking for this or that man, that has entangled him in it. If Pemberton were not so close, he could tell this; but these lawyers are so reserved, so crafty, they will not even tell what a few hours later the whole world will read in the public papers.