Markworth, however, did not mind this. He had been hard pushed before; and having always managed to wriggle himself out of pecuniary difficulties, he saw no reason why he should not raise himself again, even though his fortunes were at such a very low ebb. Indeed, he did not doubt his ability so to do for a moment.
His first care was to get a little money to go on with, and he had no fear but that Joseph Begg, his former confidant, would readily assist him, as he could soon pay him back in his own time; for a habitation, of which he had also to be careful, he determined to go back to his old lodgings at Mrs Martin’s in Bloomsbury.
Begg’s billiard rooms in Oxford Street accordingly formed his first destination. As it was getting late, and “pool” the natural thing at the time, he was certain of finding Joseph Begg in; but he was doomed to be disappointed.
On inquiring for his old friend of an Irish marker, who alone was in the room, he heard to his astonishment that Joseph Begg was dead!
“Yis, yer ’anner,” said this man, with a strong Dublin brogue; “he’s did an’ bur’d mor’n foor month. He wint to dhrink a pint of rhum agin some City swell or other for a bet of a fife-pun-nut, and be Jabers! it kilt poor Begg enthirely! Shure, yer ’anner, he jist dhropped down did on the flure, he did, yer ’anner. Good luck till him! Faith he wor one of the raal sort, too, and he desarved to win, but the rhum was too much for him—bad cess to it!”
It seemed another link in the chain of ill-luck which had enwrapped him ever since his marriage with Susan Hartshorne; and Markworth turned away with a heavy heart to seek his quarters at Mrs Martin’s, while the Irish lad was crooning out some ditty about a “gintlemun” who—
“Turned up his nose,
And the tips of his toes,
To the roots of the daisies, oh!”
But he readily found an asylum in Bloomsbury, as he had thought; still even there his fate still pursued him, and he was arrested next day, as already told.
The first visitor who came to see him in the sponging-house was she who had last held him on the heights of Ingouville, and called him murderer. He was proportionately glad to see her: a mutual pleasure, without doubt!
But his troubles had much shaken him, and Markworth was not the Markworth of before—the cool collected man of the world with a strong spice of the devil-may-care element; he was cowed and beaten.