Mr. Theodore Shelf had reached the end of his tether, and, like a shrewd business man, he knew it. There is a certain mad excitement in standing on a high ledge of an iceberg when the steps which you have clambered up by have splintered away, and the hundred-foot cliffs above are threatening every instant to descend in crashing avalanche. You know you have to jump into the cold green waters below, or be crushed out of existence; and lingering to the very last second is not without its fierce pleasures. The dive is chilly; the waters beneath unknown; final escape most hazardous. But it is not these things which make you loiter; it is the nearness of the crash behind; and that is fascinating beyond all words.
Mr. Shelf was in a similar position. He knew that his commercial ledge was growing more and more dangerous every minute, by reason of the Law of the Land which loomed above, and yet for the life of him he could not tear himself away. He had waiting for him that snug estançia on the banks of the Rio Paraguay which he had time-before made ready against a possible cataclysm; but it was left to wait. The excitement of lingering on in London was meat and drink to him. His daring would be spoken about afterwards; and though, it is true, he might not be blessed, still he would not be forgotten.
That last was, perhaps, the chief reason which made him stay on. The vanity of the man was colossal. He had been tickled by the improving young men, he had been tickled in his tabernacle, he had been tickled by a parliamentary constituency; but these did not glut him. He wanted more, far more; and if he could not distinguish himself in the way his wife had hoped, he would at last be famous in his fall. If only he could have stayed on three days more and seen his baronetcy gazetted in the birthday list, he could then have made the most sensational exit on record. But even debarred of this—for he could not avert the crash by even those three short days—he did not intend to depart without his special ruffle of Society drums.
He had a scheme, too, in his waiting, of taking a vengeance on this same wife who had made it necessary for him to fall at all. Without her wild extravagance he would have been able to weather the commercial depression which had weighed him down; but she had scoffed at warnings, and increased the muster-roll of her guests, and fed them on bank-notes. What this scheme was he confided to no one but George, and George did not split. George hated Mrs. Shelf to the extent of showing ivory whenever she was near him.
“George,” said Mr. Shelf, at the conclusion of one of these grim confidences, “I shall be a lonely man. You must come out there with me.”
And George poked a cold black nose into Mr. Shelf’s hand, and said that he should be vastly disappointed if he was left behind.
Now Mr. Theodore Shelf intended to have his vengeance on the night of a ball which his wife was going to give, and which for sheer gorgeousness and distinguished assembly was to rival by far all her previous efforts; and he was quite satisfied in his own mind that the action would be entirely justifiable. Still he was a man not without natural affections. He was extremely fond of his ward, Amy Rivers, even though, through the hard commercial shrewdness of Hamilton Fairfax, he had been obliged to refund her fortune which he had laid hands upon, and so bring nearer the day of his own ruin. Many men would have visited their natural annoyance on the girl, but Shelf did not. Indeed, he was only known to be disagreeable to her once, and that once was the last time he and she had speech together; and what he said then was entirely to her interest and without any profit to himself. It was on the morning of the great ball, and he called her to him in his room, and asked if Fairfax would be there that evening.
“Of course,” she said. “Why?”
“After what has passed between us?”
“You mean in the City?”