“Yes, and I am exceedingly grateful to you. What I seek to-day is your promise to further my request by varying your attitude from passive approval to active support.”
He was artful, that Schwartz. The Old Man wriggled a bit, but he hardly knew what to say. He was a thoroughbred, you see, and he hated the idea of bartering one of his girls for five thousand pounds. Yet Schwartz was what ladies who come to tea call “a good catch,” and it was quite true that he was after Dorothy months before anybody at Holly Lodge so much as heard the word “Kwantu.” And the Guv’nor was a proud man, too. It was Schwartz himself who had led him to believe that it would be an easy thing to make money by selling shares in this mine, yet Minkie told me afterwards that he seemed to be quite surprised when her father informed him that he had taken the “tip” and sold heavily. That was in November, when the mine was floated, and Schwartz had been absent in Paris until the third week in December. Now, as the German was a millionaire, and had landed a friend in a hole by his advice, it was reasonable enough to expect him to lend a helping hand, yet there could be no doubt he meant to take advantage of the difficulty and compel Dorothy to marry him to save her father.
I saw the bearings of the game far more clearly than the Guv’nor. My own opinion was that Schwartz was a regular scamp, and my experience of scamps is fairly wide, as I hail from South America. You would hardly credit the ups and downs of my life—no wonder I can take a man’s measure with fair accuracy. I began my education in an Indian village, after discovering that a baited trap is not exactly what it looks like. Then I went by train to Montevideo, and the things I learnt there would make you weep if I told you even the half which the Spanish language permits. A nigger fireman knifed my owner, a saloon-keeper, and was one of a crowd which cleared out the bar before the patrol came. He brought me to New York, and pawned me to an East-side crimp. I was stolen from there, and hung outside a sixth-floor tenement until I was sold to a bird-fancier in Eighth Avenue. He was a Dago, so I need say no more about him. If Mam understood the least little bit of Italian she wouldn’t keep me in the house five minutes, but you bet I take a rise out of those organ-grinders when they come touting for coppers. Giovanni traded me for five dollars to a patriotic American named O’Reilly, and he gave me a university course which ended suddenly by his going to Sing-Sing, while I was seized, with the remainder of the furniture, by another American citizen named Rosenbaum. During the annual fire at his place I was rescued by a ship’s steward, who liked the way I talked. On the way to England he died from want of proper liquid nourishment, and the crew would have kept me in the forecastle if some old girl had not complained to the captain of the dreadful language used by one of the men whenever she leaned over the forward rail. How was I to know she could speak the tongues of the Sunny South?
Believe me, even after I arrived at Liverpool, my adventures would fill a book, but I have said enough to show that I was ready to appreciate a good home when the Guv’nor found me in Leadenhall Market, and took me to Dale End as a present to Minkie. More than that, you never really appreciate a good home until you have had a few bad ones, and it is in the latter that you obtain any genuine schooling in the darker side of human nature.
So it is obvious that I watched Schwartz with my eyes skinned. I sized up the situation this way. Schwartz meant to press the Old Man just a little short of breaking point, and was far more anxious to bring about an agreement than he permitted to be seen. I was aching to give the Guv’nor a pointer, but I couldn’t, as my acquaintance with English is peculiar, and he is not able to catch on my meaning like Minkie. If only he had raised Schwartz before the draw, as they say in poker, his adversary would not have been so sure of his cards. As it was, he tried to evade the final struggle.
“After all,” he said, with a brave attempt at a smile, “this is a poor way to spend Christmas night. Suppose we adjourn to the drawing-room now, and try to forget for a while that mines may be bottomless pits.”
Schwartz was well content to leave it at that.
“May I have my letter?” he said.
The Guv’nor handed it to him, but it was not yet refolded when Minkie burst into the room.
“Please come, dad!” she cried. “And you, too, Mr. Schwartz! Jim says that the house is simply surrounded by black men.”