“This is cursed luck!” hissed Swinton through his teeth, as he descended the hotel steps and stood upon the flags below. “Cursed luck!” he repeated, as with despondent look and slow, irresolute tread he turned up the street of “our best shopkeepers.”
“Lucas with them to a certainty, and that other squirt! I might have known it, from their leaving New York without telling me where they were going. They must have followed by the very next steamer; and, hang me, if I don’t begin to think that that visit to the gambling-house was a trap—a preconceived plan to deprive me of the chance of getting over after her. By the living G— it has succeeded! Here I am, after months spent in struggling to make up the paltry passage money! And here they are not; and God knows where they are! Curse upon the crooked luck!”
Mr Swinton’s reflections will explain why he had not sooner reported himself at the Bond Street hotel, and show the mistake Mrs Girdwood had made, in supposing he had “cut” them.
The thousand dollars deposited in the New York faro bank was all the money he had in the world; and after taking stock of what might be raised upon his wife’s jewellery, most of which was already under the collateral mortgage of the three golden globes, it was found it would only pay ocean passage for one.
As Fan was determined not to be left behind—Broadway having proved less congenial than Regent Street—the two had to stay in America, till the price of two cabin tickets could be obtained.
With all Mr Swinton’s talent in the “manipulation of pasteboard,” it cost him months to obtain them.
His friend Lucas gone away, he found no more pigeons in America—only hawks!
The land of liberty was not the land for him. Its bird of freedom, type of the falcon tribe, seemed too truly emblematic of its people—certainly of those with whom he had come in contact—and as soon as he could get together enough to pay for a pair of Cunard tickets—second-class at that—he took departure for a clime more congenial, both to himself and his beloved.
They had arrived in London with little more than the clothes they stood in; and taken lodgings in that cheap, semi-genteel neighbourhood where almost every street, square, park, place, and terrace, has got Westbourne for its name.
Toward this quarter Mr Swinton turned his face, after reaching the head of Bond Street; and taking a twopenny “bus,” he was soon after set down at the Royal Oak, at no great distance from his suburban domicile.