The fellow professionals cited cases. There was Rosenthal, a noted receiver in his day, to whom a dishonest clerk had sold five thousand pounds for five hundred. Rosenthal had held the notes for six years, and had then put them cautiously on the Continental market. He was an old hand, was Rosenthal, and very clever and leary, but they had bowled him out. The clerk was wanted on another charge, and turned Queen’s evidence against the receiver. Almost all the stories had this kind of termination, because the legal gentlemen whom young Mr. Barter consulted remembered mainly cases in which they or their friends had been engaged, or cases which had resulted in criminal proceedings. Others there certainly were, but they were vague and necessarily without those guiding particulars which he desired.
It has been already hinted that the young man was a gambler, and it is likely that most of the reasons which made the money seem so welcome to him had their sources at the gaming table. He belonged to one of those clubs which deserve to be numbered among the blessings of modern society—where men do not meet for social intercourse and good-fellowship, or for dining purposes, or for any of the common and amiable reasons which draw men into club-life, but simply and purely to the end that they may win one another’s money. It was a joint-stock swindling company to which young Mr. Barter belonged, and within its limits every man proposed to himself to get the better of every other man by such means as lay in his power. A pigeon got in amongst them every now and then, of course—came in well-feathered and went out plucked, but for the main part the rooks pecked hungrily at one another, and made but little of their time and pains. The one solitary advantage of these corporations is that they gather the depredatory birds together, and lead them to prey upon themselves instead of wandering abroad for the defeathering of the innocent and artless who abound even in these days. The well-constituted mind can hardly fail to take pleasure in the contemplation of these resorts, where Greek meets Greek (in the modern French sense as well as the old heroic)—where scoundrel encounters scoundrel, and learns that the pleasure of being cheated is by no means so great as that of cheating.
There were people of widely ranging social position in this curious contingent. One or two men of title, and one or two of the highest social or commercial respectability, lent their names for some inconceivable reason to grace the front page of the neatly-bound little volume of rules which govern, or sometimes fail to govern, the conduct of the corporation. Mr. Barter rubbed shoulders with young men—very young men they were—who would one day have handles to their names, and enjoy the control of considerable estates. He sat at the same table with men whose birth and antecedents, like those of the immortal Jeames, were shrouded in a mystery. He met men of his own position, who like himself were desperately glad of being numbered in the same club society with men eminent on the turf, or familiar in the gilded saloons of the great. He liked to think of those gilded saloons; it might be interesting to know what he thought they resembled—most probably a somewhat old-fashioned earthly paradise of ormolu. He bragged indefatigably of his club and the people whom he met there. He dated all his private correspondence from it, and spent hundreds of daylight hours above the ivories and the pasteboard.
At the time of that foolish and weak-willed Bommaney’s disaster there were two or three I.O.U.‘s for sums much more considerable than he could afford to part with in the hands of his fellow-members. Law is a necessity to human society. Even a band of brigands can’t hang together without it. Debt, outside the club, was by no means a thing to be harshly spoken of, but debt to a fellow-member was a literal millstone round a man’s neck, and would sink him out of sight in no time.
The elder Barter had gone over to the majority, despatched by that street accident, and if the old man had known nothing of the young man’s courses, he had had it in his power to make him well-to-do. But he had paid his debts once at least, and had more than once had occasion to grieve over the boy’s handling of the firm’s money, and so had made his will entirely in his wife’s favour, leaving his son dependent upon her good graces. The mother was disposed to be a little sterner than the father had been. Perhaps if young Barter had dreaded her less poor Bommaney’s fallen notes might have been returned to him.
But, to get on with the story, the young man’s chief creditor at the club was one Steinberg, a gentleman whose time appeared to be absolutely at his own disposal, though he was known by some of his fellow-members to have an address in Hatton Garden, and to be more or less of a diamond merchant there. He often carried about with him, in a pocket-book, or in neat little packages of grocer’s gay paper, borne in the waistcoat-pocket, a collection of gems of considerable value, and would show them to his intimates with the insouciance of a man who was accustomed to handling things of price. He never was without money, made little journeys at times, which rarely took him away from town for more than a day or two, and was, almost always, wholly unoccupied except for the cards.
Now young Barter had a prodigious idea of this gentleman’s astuteness. He had no particular belief in his honesty, and he believed him, not altogether unreasonably as the sequel proved, to be initiated into most of the mysteries of modern rascality. This was merely a general notion, based upon statements made by Steinberg himself, and supported by the opinion of his intimates. Nobody spoke ill of Steinberg; it was only understood that there was no move upon the board with which he was not familiar. Young Barter, meeting him one evening at the club, whilst Bommaney’s disappearance was still a fresh topic of town conversation, spoke to him about it, with an assurance clearly begotten of practice.
‘Now, look here, Steinberg,’ he said, in his open and engaging way. ‘Suppose you’d nobbled those notes, what should you do with ‘em?’
Perhaps Mr. Steinberg resented the form of this inquiry. But be that as it may, he responded with some tartness,
‘Suppose you’d nobbled them?’