Then why did he not return them after the first week’s trial, when Jacob had requested either to have them back or to be paid for them? His lordship had then, as half a dozen of the boys on the Jew’s side were ready to testify, refused to return the watches, declaring they went very well, and that he would keep them as long as he pleased, and pay for them when he pleased, and no sooner.
This plain tale put down the Lord Mowbray. His wit and his party now availed him not; he was publicly reprimanded, and sentenced to pay Jacob for the watches in a week, or to be expelled from the school. Mowbray would have desired no better than to leave the school, but he knew that his mother would never consent to this.
His mother, the Countess de Brantefield, was a Countess in her own right, and had an estate in her own power;—his father, a simple commoner, was dead, his mother was his sole guardian.
“That mother of mine,” said he to us, “would not hear of her son’s being turned out—so I must set my head to work against the head of the head master, who is at this present moment inditing a letter to her ladyship, beginning, no doubt, with, ‘I am sorry to be obliged to take up my pen,’ or, ‘I am concerned to be under the necessity of sitting down to inform your ladyship.’ Now I must make haste and inform my lady mother of the truth with my own pen, which luckily is the pen of a ready writer. You will see,” continued he, “how cleverly I will get myself out of the scrape with her. I know how to touch her up. There’s a folio, at home, of old Manuscript Memoirs of the De Brantefield family, since the time of the flood, I believe: it’s the only book my dear mother ever looks into; and she has often made me read it to her, till—no offence to my long line of ancestry—I cursed it and them; but now I bless it and them for supplying my happy memory with a case in point, that will just hit my mother’s fancy, and, of course, obtain judgment in my favour. A case, in the reign of Richard the Second, between a Jew and my great, great, great, six times great grandfather, whom it is sufficient to name to have all the blood of all the De Brantefields up in arms for me against all the Jews that ever were born. So my little Jacob, I have you.”
Mowbray, accordingly, wrote to his mother what he called a chef-d’oeuvre of a letter, and next post came an answer from Lady de Brantefield with the money to pay her son’s debt, and, as desired and expected, a strong reproof to her son for his folly in ever dealing with a Jew. How could he possibly expect not to be cheated, as, by his own confession, it appeared he had been, grossly? It was the more extraordinary, since he so well recollected the ever to be lamented case of Sir Josseline de Brantefield, that her son could, with all his family experience, be, at this time of day, a dupe to one of a race branded by the public History of England, and private Memoirs of the De Brantefields, to all eternity!
Mowbray showed this letter in triumph to all his party. It answered the double purpose of justifying his own bad opinion of the tribe of Israel, and of tormenting Jacob.
The next Thursday evening after that on which judgment had been given against Mowbray, when Jacob appeared in the school-room, the anti-Jewish party gathered round him, according to the instructions of their leader, who promised to show them some good sport at the Jew’s expense.
“Only give me fair play,” said Mowbray, “and stick close, and don’t let him off, for your lives don’t let him break through you, till I’ve roasted him well.”
“There’s your money,” cried Mowbray, throwing down the money for the watches—“take it—ay, count it—every penny right—I’ve paid you by the day appointed; and, thank Heaven and my friends, the pound of flesh next my heart is safe from your knife, Shylock!”
Jacob made no reply, but he looked as if he felt much.