“I'll not be five minutes; you must walk with me a bit of the way. I wish I had some fellow at my other side who had lost a hundred thousand. I daresay he'd think me a fool. They say Chiffington lost a hundred and forty thousand. Perhaps he'd think me as great an ass as I think you—who knows? I may be making too much of it—and my uncle is so very rich, and neither wife nor child; and, I give you my honour, I am sick of the whole thing. I'd never take a card or a dice-box in my hand, or back a horse, while I live, if I was once fairly out of it. He might try me, don't you think? I'm the only near relation he has on earth—I don't count my father, for he's—it's a different thing, you know—I and my sister, just. And, really, it would be nothing to him. And I think he suspected something about it last night; perhaps he heard a little of it. And he's rather hot, but he's a good-natured fellow, and he has commercial ideas about a man's going into the insolvent court; and, by Jove, you know, I'm ruined, and I don't think he'd like to see our name disgraced—eh, do you?”
“No, I'm quite sure,” said Van. “I thought so all along.”
“Peers and peeresses are very fine in their way, and people, whenever the peers do anything foolish, and throw out a bill, exclaim ‘Thank Heaven we have still a House of Lords!’ but you and I, Van, may thank Heaven for a better estate, the order of aunts and uncles. Do you remember the man you and I saw in the vaudeville, who exclaims every now and then, ‘Vive mon oncle! Vive ma tante!’?”
So, in better spirits, Arden prepared to visit his uncle.
“Let us get into a cab; people are staring at you,” said Richard Arden, when they had walked a little way towards his uncle's house. “You look so utterly ruined, one would think you had swallowed poison, and were dying by inches, and expected to be in the other world before you reached your doctor's door. Here's a cab.”
They got in, and sitting side by side, said Vandeleur to him, after a minute's silence,—
“I've been thinking of a thing—why did not you take Mr. Longcluse into council? He gave you a lift before, don't you remember? and he lost nothing by it, and made everything smooth. Why don't you look him up?”
“I've been an awful fool, Van.”
“How so?”
“I've had a sort of row with Longcluse, and there are reasons—I could not, at all events, have asked him. It would have been next to impossible, and now it is quite impossible.”