There must have been a black night at some period or other in his life; but no man in the City, at all events, could fix a date and locality when and where that event happened which caused Mr. Asherill to conceive a dread of, and dislike for, gentlemen and ladies, which was the one weak spot in an otherwise almost perfect Christian character.
Mr. Asherill's account of his own early life was that he worked in a cotton mill at Manchester; that through the kindness of a poor scholar who lodged in the house of his, Asherill's, sole surviving relative, his grandmother, he learned to read, write and cipher; that, being steady and hardworking, he attracted the attention and secured the interest of a Christian blessed with worldly means and influence, who took him first into his own warehouse, and subsequently procured for him an appointment in India, where he remained for a long time, and might have remained till the end of his life, had not the delicate health of his wife compelled him, ten years after his marriage, to choose the alternative of parting from her or leaving India.
"Guided by Providence," said Mr. Asherill, "I decided on returning to England."
Which was all likely enough and plausible enough, only it happened to be untrue in one particular at least.
An unregenerate wag who met Mr. Asherill at the Crystal Palace in the days when the mysteries of cotton spinning were expounded in the machinery department for the benefit of the masses, who were then supposed to be hungering and thirsting after solid information, persuaded that gentleman to inspect the process, and under pretence of ignorance beguiled the former factory lad into making various statements which proved conclusively he never could have been in a mill, save as a mere visitor, in his life.
One swallow, however, does not make a summer; and even though a man be convicted of having uttered one untruth, it does not follow that all his other statements are necessarily false.
That Mr. Asherill had been in India there could be no question. He had been there long enough to place a very effectual gulf between his present and his past, and to render all attempts to fathom whatever mystery may have attached to his early life utterly futile.
It might be the case, as some people declared, that he had not risen from the ranks—that his real name was not Asherill—that he and his father, a respectable tradesman, having had some difference concerning the contents of the till, he was shipped out of the country and requested to stay out of it—all this might be so, but who was to prove it? and supposing it all capable of proof, who would be interested in the matter?
All the king's horses and all the king's men could not undo the fact, that for twenty-five years Mr. Asherill had held up his head in the City—that he was a man of weight whom aldermen and common-councilmen delighted to honour—who had been connected with every form of speculation which the fashion of the day and the opportunities of each commercial year brought into repute. He had made money by railways and lost it, and come up again fresh and smiling as the director of various banks and insurance companies, the very names of which are now almost forgotten, so rapidly is the memory of one swindle wiped out by the collapse of another more recent. He had something to do, directly or indirectly, with nearly every "big thing" which was floated in the City. To a nicety he knew the price of a lord, and was once clever enough to bait a hook which enabled him to land a bishop. He was acquainted with baronets and knights, whose names looked remarkably well on the list of directors, whilst he had an army of generals, colonels, and majors ready at any moment to take the financial field.
A ready man and an able—a man, a Yankee speculator, a canny Scot, a German adventurer, or a religious philanthropist might have sat up all night to catch napping, and eventually found the intended victim wider awake than themselves.