‘No doubt,’ Arthur answered, with a smile. ‘And the Bodahls? What about them?’
‘Oh! he kept that cheque for a few days uncashed—though I’m sure he wanted money at the time; but in the end, I’m happy to say, he cashed it.’
Arthur’s countenance fell ominously.
‘He did!’ he said gloomily. ‘He cashed it! That’s bad news indeed, then. I must go and see them to-morrow morning early. I’m afraid they must be at the last pitch of poverty before they’d consent to do that. And yet, Solomon says, men do not despise a thief if he steal to satisfy his soul when he is hungry. And Le Breton, after all, has a wife and child to think of.’
Lancaster stared at him blankly, and turned aside to glance at the telegrams, saying to himself meanwhile, that all these young fellows of the new school alike were really quite too incomprehensible for a sensible, practical man like himself to deal with comfortably.
CHAPTER XXXI. — DE PROFUNDIS.
After all Ernest didn’t get many more socials to write for the ‘Morning Intelligence,’ as it happened; for the war that came on shortly after crowded such trifles as socials fairly out of all the papers, and he had harder work than ever to pick up a precarious living somehow by the most casual possible contributions. Of course he tried many other channels; but he had few introductions, and then his views were really so absurdly ultra that no reasonable editor could ever be expected to put up with them. He got tired at last of seeing his well-meant papers return to him, morning after morning, with the unvarying legend, ‘Declined with thanks;’ and he might have gone to the wall utterly but for the kindly interest which Arthur Berkeley still took in his and Edie’s future. On the very day after his conversation with Lancaster at the club Arthur dropped round casually at Holloway, and brought with him a proposal which he said had just been made him by a colonial newsagent. It was a transparent little ruse enough; but Ernest and Edie were not learned in the ways of the world and did not suspect it so readily as older and wiser heads might probably have done. Would Ernest supply a fortnightly letter, to go by the Australian mail, to the Paramatta ‘Chronicle and News,’ containing London political and social gossip of a commonplace kind—just the petty chit-chat he could pick up easily out of ‘Truth’ and the ‘World’—for the small sum of thirty shillings a letter?
Yes, Ernest thought he could manage that.