Far above rubies (Vol. 3 of 3)

by Mrs. J. H. Riddell

Now he recollected Mr. Stewart’s prophetic words, and cursed that gentleman’s clear-sightedness as he did so. Now he recalled those sentences—“I am prepared to lose, and you are not;” “I can afford to wait; you, perhaps, are differently situated;” and they seemed to make his difficulty clear in a moment. “He was not prepared to lose—he was not able to wait.” He had stretched his arm out farther than he could draw it back; to lose, with him meant ruin; to wait, meant anxiety and distress unutterable.

What should he do? Looking back over the events of the previous twelve months, Squire Dudley lamented his own credulity and anathematized Mr. Black. He did not regret joining the Protector, or accepting the secretaryship, or leaving Berrie Down, but he bit his nails and drummed upon the table, and then, rising, kicked his chair over, and walked up and down the room, while he called himself all the names imaginable for having accepted bills and spent money, and bought the house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

He had been eager to buy that house the moment Mr. Black said it was in the market. He would scarcely take time to look over the premises before closing with the owner, so fearful was he of another purchaser forestalling him; but he forgot all this now, and worked himself up into the belief that the promoter had given him no rest till the deposit was paid and the deeds were signed.

He had thought himself so clever, and, behold, another hand stretched out beyond his, secured the prize. He had got nothing but a thousand a year and his shares, and he had to work for his thousand a year, do a vast amount more than “read the Times, and talk to people.” He had to write letters, at least dictate them, or else put down the heads which were to be written, and then see that his clerk filled them in properly, which the clerk never did sufficiently well to satisfy Arthur, who, on the whole, declared he found it easier to take the correspondence himself, than “to try to hammer the sense of what he wanted conveyed into any other person’s stupid head.”

He had to be at the office for a certain number of hours every day, and to see and discourse with hundreds of “perfect idiots”—shareholders—who, it is only fair to add, went away with the impression that Mr. Dudley was far too fine a gentleman to understand anything of the affairs of the Company to which he was secretary.

Further, the directors expected him to know every circumstance connected directly or indirectly with the Protector, whether that circumstance were in his department or not. Especially, there sat on the board a General Sinclair, C.B., who was the very plague and torment of Arthur Dudley’s life; who was always asking for information; eternally wanting the secretary to “refer back,” continually reverting to something which had occurred at the very creation of the Company, and of which the present secretary had no cognizance whatever.

A change this from Berrie Down Hollow; from doing what he liked, as he liked, without question asked by any one; a change this from coming and going as he pleased; from refraining from work; from wandering idly and purposelessly round the farm.

He detested the work, but he liked the thousand a year; he could not bear what he called the drudgery of London life, but he delighted in London gaiety, and in that gaiety he had expected to participate without ever having to labour before he enjoyed.

This life which he was leading; this life—and one a hundred times more agreeable, Mr. Black had told him, should be his—for the mere price of Nellie advanced into the Protector, Limited; and now it was no thanks to Mr. Black he was even in London at all; Mr. Stewart had procured him this trashy appointment, which he would have spurned excepting as a stepping-stone to something much better. Everybody had made, and was making, a fortune out of the Company excepting himself, and it was his money which had floated it; his money which had enabled Mr. Black to buy that place at Ealing, and furnish it without a second thought as to the cost!

But in this conclusion, Arthur Dudley—like all people who, reasoning in a passion, reason illogically—chanced to be wrong. His few thousands would have made but a very poor figure when placed to the credit of Mr. Black’s recent purchases; they would have been a drop in the ocean, a blade of grass on the prairie, a single crow amongst the occupants of a rookery. Those poor thousands were many for a poor man to lose; but even had he pocketed every sixpence of the money for which Arthur was responsible, the whole amount would not have tided Mr. Black over three months’ expenditure.