“Well,” I said, “everything went off all right.”
“Everybody's gone off all right, so far,” he grunted. He was crouching over the fire, though the weather was still warm, one hand spread out towards the blaze. “Now I've got to go off, that's the only thing they're waiting for. Then everything will be in order.”
“I don't think they are wanting you to go off,” I answered, with a laugh.
“You mean,” he answered, “I'm the goose that lays the golden eggs. Ah, but you see, so many of the eggs break, and so many of them are bad.”
“Some of them hatch all right,” I replied. The simile was becoming somewhat confused: in conversation similes are apt to.
“If I were to die this week,” he said—he paused, completing mental calculations, “I should be worth, roughly speaking, a couple of million. This time next year I may be owing a million.”
I sat down opposite to him. “Why run risks?” I suggested. “Surely you have enough. Why not give it up—retire?”
He laughed. “Do you think I haven't said that to myself, lad—sworn I would a dozen times a year? I can't do it; I'm a gambler. It's the earliest thing I can recollect doing, gambling with brace buttons. There are men, Paul, now dying in the workhouse—men I once knew well; I think of them sometimes, and wish I didn't—who any time during half their life might have retired on twenty thousand a year. If I were to go to any one of them, and settle an annuity of a hundred a year upon him, the moment my back was turned he'd sell it out and totter up to Threadneedle Street with the proceeds. It's in our blood. I shall gamble on my death-bed, die with the tape in my hand.”
He kicked the fire into a blaze. A roaring flame made the room light again.
“But that won't be just yet awhile,” he laughed, “and before it does, I'll be the richest man in Europe. I keep my head cool—that's the great secret.” Leaning over towards me, he sunk his voice to a whisper, “Drink, Paul—so many of them drink. They get worried; fifty things dancing round and round at the same time in their heads. Fifty questions to be answered in five minutes. Tick, tick, tick, taps the little devil at their elbow. This going down, that going up. Rumor of this, report of that. A fortune to be lost here, a fortune to be snatched there. Everything in a whirl! Tick, tick, tick, like nails into a coffin. God! for five minutes' peace to think. Shut the door, turn the key. Out comes the bottle. That's the end. All right so long as you keep away from that. Cool, quick brain, clear judgment—that's the secret.”