‘Or else dispute the will,’ said the trenchant old sailor. ‘Obeying your parents is one thing, and sacrificing yourself to a piece of nonsense is another. Your poor father’s mind must have been touched—it must have been——’
‘My father had a right to dispose of what was his own,’ said Ben, haughtily; and then he broke down a little. ‘Forgive me, uncle. I am dreadfully tired to-night, and down on my luck. We could not touch my father’s will if even I would consent to try. I’ll talk it all over with you another day.’
The old captain gave the young man a compassionate look as he sat thus huddled up, hiding his face in his hands, and made that curious little sound with his tongue against the roof of his mouth which is one of the primitive signs of distress and perplexity. Then he hobbled off into a corner and pulled out a pocket-book from his pocket and examined its contents. ‘A little money can’t do him any harm,’ he said to himself. And as it happened, by a lucky chance for Ben, there were two notes, a ten-pound and a five, among the papers in that receptacle. The Captain made a bundle of them, folding them up with his gouty, lumpy fingers, which trembled a little, and came back and thrust it into his nephew’s hand. ‘You’re not too old yet for a tip, though you’re wiser than your elders,’ he said. ‘God bless you, my dear boy! Come and see me as soon as you can.’
And thus deliverance, utterly unlocked for, came to Ben Renton in his downfall. Such a tiny, little deliverance out of such a paltry ruin as Mrs. Barton’s bill might have brought him to! But if the bill had been thousands, and this treasure a million, it could not have been more emphatically a deliverance. He would have avoided the club altogether could he have supposed his uncle to be there; indeed, nothing but sheer weariness could have carried him into it at such a moment. And yet the chance had saved him. Saved him! Only a ten and a five-pound note; but at this moment to Ben it was salvation, neither less nor more. How curiously words differ in their meaning from one day to another in a man’s life!
He sat there a long time after in one of those lulls which follow great excitement, sipping his sherry, which, though he had eaten no dinner, gave a certain soothing to his outward man, and looking as if he were in very deep thought. But naturally, poor fellow! he was not thinking, nor capable of thinking. Heaps of things were flitting before him in a kind of fantastic procession. The home, which seemed so far away; the mother whom he had almost forgotten; the life,—had it ever been, or had he but dreamed it?—which he had lived a year ago. Was it he, Ben Renton, whom Captain Ormerod’s fifteen pounds had just saved from bankruptcy, who lived in the Albany once, and was the heir of Renton Manor, and one of the most popular men in society? or was it but a tale he had read somewhere in a book? His weariness lent another shade of confusion to the picture. And now and then these dim thoughts were traversed by one so sharp, so clear, so acute, that it chased all the mists away. She was going to-morrow. He had said his farewell to her. Her hand had been in those hands of his, on which he looked down with a sudden thrill. Her lips had consented, or at least assented, with that passive softness of the unimpassioned woman, which drove him wild, yet held him fast, to wait for him. Was it to wait for him? or was it only to let him come when his fortune was made to try his chance again? What did it matter which? One form of folly or the other would have been much the same to Millicent, in her strange, compassionate, worldly-minded conviction that he would never make his fortune, or, if he did, would change his mind;—and in the confidence of his love and passion would have been the same to Ben.
Thus when the witch had routed once more all the softening charm of old association, he sat till there was nobody but himself in the dining-room. He had so much the air of a man who had no mind to be interrupted, that several of his old friends had felt themselves suppressed by a nod, and had gone without speaking to him. And even that unpleasant suggestion which had occurred to the Captain about the habits of the impoverished man came into the heads of two or three who saw him sitting with that absorbed look over his sherry. Could he have taken in his downfall to the meanest of all consolations? The thought troubled some friendly souls; but perhaps it helped to keep him quite undisturbed in the solitude he wished. It was getting quite late when some one rushed in with his hands full of papers, disturbing the quiet of the place—some one who demanded coffee—and threw himself down in a chair at the other end of the room; and then got up and began to walk about, filling the languid air with a certain commotion, a sound of rustling papers, and vibration of busy thought. This intruder caught sight of Ben after he had been about ten minutes in the room, and catching up his documents, whatever they were, made a rush at his table. ‘The very man I wanted!’ he cried. ‘Ben Renton! I thought you were dead, or mad, or at the other end of the world.’
‘And I am neither, as you perceive,’ said Ben, not well pleased with the encounter. There was no man in the world he less cared to see at this particular time.
‘I have not seen you for ages,’ said Hillyard. ‘Mind, I don’t want to intrude myself if I’m a bore. You have only to say so. But unless you’ve had more luck than most men, I have something that may be of use to you here.’ And he put down his rustling burden on the table, and swallowed his coffee with a kind of impatient eagerness. ‘I’d rather have had something more cheering,’ he said, with a laugh; ‘but a man must have his wits clear when he has business in hand. You don’t answer my question, Ben.’
‘If I am in luck!’ said Ben. Already he had suppressed the inclination to impatience with which he had been disposed to answer his old acquaintance. Surely this was not a moment to repel any offer of aid. ‘I am just as you saw me six months ago, which does not come to much.’
‘Doing nothing?’ said Hillyard, eagerly.