“I have every faith in him,” said Carraways. “Perhaps, Mr. Jericho, you will break the matter to Basil’s mother? I need not intrude upon the lady’s better employment. We leave England in about a fortnight.”
“What! the young couple and all?” cried Jericho; “and where may you be bound for?”
“The antipodes,” answered Carraways, very blithely.
“A capital determination, Gilbert. As you’ve been turned topsy-turvy here, why going to the antipodes is, perhaps, the shortest way of putting you on your legs again.” Here the servant answered the bell, rang by the Man of Money. “Beg Mrs. Jericho to come to me,” said the husband.
“Good morning,” cried Carraways rising. “I would rather not see the lady. I’ll leave the explanation in your hands. ’Twill come better from you. Much better. Well,”—and Carraways paused before Jericho, and staringly read him up and down—“you are thin! Why, you must have no more blood than a cucumber, Solomon. To think that a man should be so rich—ha! what luck you’ve had in platina, to be sure—so rich and so meagre! Talk of the Wandering Jew, why if you live long enough, you’ll be known as the Wandering Bank-note. Dear me! Well, you’d be very curious under a microscope—very curious. Good morning, good morning.” And Carraways bustled from the presence of the Man of Money, who sat speechless and confounded by the easy insolence of the pauper. Never, perhaps, since the first piece of metal was stamped as the go-between of man and man, had the dignity of wealth been so impudently put upon. In the savageness of his injured majesty, Jericho could have brained the offender with a bag of money—dashed him in little pieces with a golden thunderbolt; an article with which Plutus often beats the iron of the bigger Jupiter.
“He is gone now—the pauper’s departed,” said Jericho scornfully to his wife, as she entered.
“Who is gone? And whom can you speak of? A pauper, and here!” Mrs. Jericho would as soon have thought to see a polecat basking on the hearth-rug. “Pauper!”
“That fellow Carraways,” said Jericho, and his lips widened at the name as at a filthy drug.
“Oh! I suppose the old story with such people. Came for money?” said his wife.
“Not he; an impudent, blustering scoundrel. Came here to shake his rags in my face, and show how very proud he was of them. Would you believe it? He had the brazen effrontery to come here—here—to renounce my offer of money, and that before it was made.”