As a matter of course, James Wilton was involved; led on by Garstang, he had mortgaged his property deeply, and the money was now called in, and ruin stared him in the face just at a time when he was prostrate with illness.
“It’s jolly hard on the old man,” said Claud one day when he had come up to town and called on Leigh, “for the guv’nor has lorded it down at Northwood all these years, and could have been doing it fine now if it hadn’t been for old Garstang. He gammoned the guv’nor into speculating, and then gammoned him when he lost to go on with the double or quits game, and a nice thing Johnny must have made out of it. If it had been sheep or turnips, of course the old man would have been all there; but it was a fat turkey playing cards with a fox, and I suppose everything comes to the hammer.”
“Very bad for your mother,” said Leigh.
“Oh, I don’t know. I say, may I light my pipe?”
“Oh, yes; smoke away while you have any brains left.”
“Better smoke one’s brains away than catch some infection in your doctor’s shop. How do I know that some one with the epidemics hasn’t been sitting in this chair?—ah! that’s better. I say, it’s a pity you don’t smoke, Leigh.”
“Is it? Very well, then, I’ll have a cigar with you to help keep off the infection. I did have a rheumatic patient in that chair this morning.”
“Eh? Did you? Oh, well, I’ll risk that. Ah, now you look more sociable, and as if you hadn’t got your back up because I called.”
“I couldn’t have had, because I was very glad to see you.”
“Were you? Well, you didn’t look it. You were saying about being bad for the mater. I don’t believe she’ll mind, if the guv’nor don’t worry. She’s about the most contented old girl that ever lived, if things will only go smooth. The crash comes hardest on poor me. It’s Othello’s occupation, gone, and no mistake, with yours truly. I say, don’t you think I could turn surgeon? I have lots of friends in the Mid-West Pack, and if they knew I was in the profession I could get all the accidents.”