“But I haven’t three thousand pounds in the world to meet it with,” Guy exclaimed in despair. “I shall be ruined, of course. I don’t mind about that; but I never shall be able to make good my liabilities!”
Nevitt lighted a cigarette with a philosophical smile. The hotter Guy waxed, the faster did he cool down.
“Neither have I, my dear boy,” he said, in his most careless voice, puffing out rings of smoke in the interval between his clauses; “but I don’t, therefore, go mad. I don’t tear my hair over it; though, to be sure, I’m a deal worse off than you. My position’s at stake. If Drummonds were to hear of it—sack—sack instanter. As to making yourself responsible for what you don’t possess, that’s simply speculation. Everybody on the Stock Exchange always does it. If they didn’t there’d be no such thing as enterprise at all. You can’t make a fortune by risking a ha’penny.”
“But what am I to do?” Guy cried wildly. “However am I to raise three thousand pounds? I should be ashamed to let Cyril know I’d defaulted like this. If I can’t find the money I shall go mad or kill myself.”
Montague Nevitt played him gently, as an experienced angler plays a plunging trout, before proceeding to land him. At last, after offering Guy much sympathetic advice, and suggesting several intentionally feeble schemes, only to quash them instantly, he observed with a certain apologetic air of unobtrusive friendliness, “Well, if the worst comes to the worst, you’ve one thing to fall back upon: There’s that six-thousand, of course, coming in by-and-by from the unknown benefactor.”
Guy flung himself down in his easy-chair, with a look of utter despondency upon his handsome face. “But I promised Cyril,” he exclaimed, with a groan, “I’d never touch that. If I were to spend it I don’t know how I could ever face Cyril.”
“I was told yesterday,” Nevitt answered, with a bitter little smile, “and by a lady, too, many times over, that circumstances alter cases, till I began to believe it. When you promised Cyril you weren’t face to face with a financial crisis. If you were to use the money temporarily—mind, I say only temporarily; for to my certain knowledge Rio Negros will pull through all right in the end—if you were to use it temporarily in such an emergency as this, no blame of any sort could possibly attach to you. The unknown benefactor won’t mind whether your money’s at your banker’s, or employed for the time being in paying your debts. Your creditors will. If I were you, therefore, I’d use it up in paying them.”
“You would?” Guy inquired, glancing across at him, with a faint gleam of hope in his eye.
Nevitt fixed him at once with his strange cold stare, He had caught his man now. He could play upon him as readily as he could play his violin.
“Why, certainly I would,” he answered, with confidence, striking the new chord full. “Cyril himself would do the same in your place, I’ll bet you. And the proof that he would is simply this—you yourself will do it. Depend upon it, if you can do anything, under given circumstances, Cyril would do it too, in the same set of conditions. And if ever Cyril feels inclined to criticise what you’ve done, you can answer him back, ‘I know your heart as you know mine. In my place, I know you’d have acted as I did.’”