“Well, luck! I believe in it, don’t you?”
Le Mert did believe a good deal more in what gamblers call luck than he would have confessed. Enderby’s luck, however, seemed likely to upset his last chance of getting out of his difficulties, and he felt savage enough, though he answered carelessly—
“I expect your luck will mean your getting to the bottom of that money in a week or two, and in a year that diamond will be sold, and you will be dead broke, and wishing yourself back again at Kimberley searching niggers.”
After dinner Jack announced his intention of going home, and asked the other to come with him and smoke a pipe and drink a glass of grog. He did not feel easy with the diamond on him, he said, while he did not like leaving it at home, though no one except Le Mert knew that he had in his possession a stone worth fifty thousand pounds.
Le Mert said nothing, his thoughts were busy with his own affairs. Things had begun to look as if he must make a bolt for it. What a convenient piece of portable property that diamond would be to take with him, he thought.
Enderby in his own rooms, with a glass or two of grog on board, did not become much more companionable; on the contrary, he began to indulge in some not very civil pleasantry on the subject of the diamond.
“You would like to fool me out of that stone and get your claws on it, wouldn’t you? If you were a better plucked one than you are I shouldn’t feel so comfortable smoking my pipe and watching you glare at me, though you are the respectable Mr Le Mert, the director of a dozen flourishing companies, and the big diamond merchant; but you’d—soon follow that Union Company’s boy if you tried that game on.”
Le Mert growled out something about the diamond not being worth quite as much as Jack fancied, but the other paid very little attention to him, and taking another gulp of brandy-and-water, began to follow out a train of thought which something he said had suggested to him with sublime indifference to his guest’s feelings.
“Le Mert the millionnaire! Hah, hah! you weren’t a millionnaire in the old days down at Dutoitspan, were you? I can see you now. What a hatched-faced thief you used to look, grinning at one across that patent spring-fitted roulette-table—that was a profitable bit of furniture for you, that was.”
“Yes, it was, or I would not have been able to pay you as good a commission as I did for introducing custom to it,” answered Le Mert, getting up as if he were going away.