“She took the carriage into town, and has not returned.”
“By Jove! I'd write a line to Sir Stafford; I 'd tell him that I was going for change of ah—, and all that sort of thing, to Como for a week or two, and that these people were so pestering and pressing, and all that; that, in fact, you were worried to death about it; and finding that your means were so very limited—”
“But he has been most liberal. His generosity has been without bounds.”
“So much the better; he'll come down all the readier now.”
“I feel shame at such a course,” said she, in a weak, faint voice.
“As I don't precisely know what that sensation is, I can't advise against it; but it must needs be a very powerful emotion, if it prevent you accepting money.”
“Can you think of nothing else, Norwood?”
“To be sure I can—there are twenty ways to do the thing. Close the shutters, and send for Buccellini; be ill dangerously ill and leave this to-morrow, at daybreak; or give a ball, like Dashwood, and start when the company are at supper. You lose the spoons and forks, to be sure; but that can't be helped. You might try and bully them, too though perhaps it 's late for that; and lastly and, I believe, best of all raise a few hundreds, and pay them each something.”
“But how or where raise the money?”
“Leave that to me, if it must be done. The great benefactor of mankind was the fellow that invented bills. The glorious philanthropist that first devised the bright expedient of living by paper, when bullion failed, was a grand and original genius. How many a poor fellow might have been rescued from the Serpentine by a few words scrawled over a five-shilling stamp! What a turn to a man's whole earthly career has been often given, as his pen glided over the imaginative phrase 'I promise to pay'!”