They little thought that Mr. Richard Tallant was really in serious difficulties at this very time. Whilst others of his class had been content to make large fortunes and retire, Mr. Richard Tallant had gone on playing for higher stakes. Men who had no money to begin with, had succeeded in humbugging the public out of thousands; and others who commenced cautiously and equally unscrupulously with thousands, had retired upon magnificent fortunes. Richard Tallant might have been amongst the latter had he been less covetous; and now he stood in imminent peril of losing nearly all: nothing but timely aid could save him.
CHAPTER VIII.
PORTENDS A DEED OF VENGEANCE.
The difficulty of getting up the evidence to support a charge of conspiracy, in the absence of Mr. Williamson, and Lieutenant Somerton’s unwillingness to prosecute, saved Gibbs from one of the perils which threatened him; and the other case which Mr. Bales had against him also fell through. But the ex-swell was reminded by the Court that he had had a narrow escape, and that his escape was rather owing to a technicality in the law than to any doubt of his guilt.
Gibbs had been falling lower and lower, as our readers will have seen, since the night of his expulsion from the Ashford Club. Now and then Fortune’s lamp had blazed up for a moment, but only to flicker down again, and tempt him into lower depths of degradation. From bad to worse, from fashionable gambling to swindling, from cheating at cards to forgery, Gibbs had run the gauntlet of vice and immorality. From a Stock Exchange bear to a money-lender’s cad; from an advertising sharper to a begging-letter writer; from haunting clubs to frequenting hotels; from hotels to taverns; from taverns to gin-shops; from gin-shops to the lowest night-houses, Shuffleton Gibbs had become a mean, shabby, out-of-elbows, unshaven outcast of society, who had twice been within a gaol, and seemed likely to die in the gutter.
There is no exaggeration in this rapid downward career—it is a common occurrence. We are not romancing, we are not sermonising, we do not believe in the Maine Law, we have no sympathy with trumpet-and-drum teetotal demagogues; but we are none the less sure in our belief that the first step aside from the straight path, unless at once retraced, will lead to misery if not to ruin, and that the man or woman who descends to “neat gin” is beyond human redemption. There is hope in beer, in wine, even in brandy; but the gin-drinker swallows a devilish elixir that destroys him body and soul. There is something heroic in brandy, something noble, the smack of the grape is there, the origin of the liquor has a glory in it; in gin there is debasement; the juniper berry has no classic history; who does not shudder, too, at the compound which the habitual gin tippler consumes—the fumetacious spirit, imbued with turpentine? Ugh! Whilst brandy fires the soul of the hero, the gin of the London stew stimulates the morbid passions of the thief and the murderer!
Shuffleton Gibbs had come down to gin and fog, to gin and darkness, to gin and the reeking night air; he was the habitué of the lowest night-houses, a shivering miserable wretch, and all the more dangerous to the man whom he hated with the low grovelling murderous hate of raw gin and poverty.
We have told the reader how Gibbs had applied for assistance to his early friend, Richard Tallant, and how he had been discarded and disowned. He made another effort still, a last effort, the effort of a miserable hungry beggar, in whose heart every spark of pride and honour has been drowned in juniper juice and turpentine.
“I have done with you, sir,” said the managing director of the Meter Works, “you are an impostor; I never saw you before.”
“Not at Oxford,” said the shivering beggar, “not when somebody wrote an epigram on the name of Tallant?”
“Never! This will be my answer always.”