The piteous unreason of the born gamester, who clings so madly to the belief that luck must come to him, and sets on that belief as though a bank were his to lose his gold from, was never more utterly spoken in all its folly, in all its pitiable optimism, than now in the boy's confession.
Bertie started from his chair, his sleepy languor dissipated; on his face the look that had come there when Lord Royallieu had dishonored his mother's name. In his code there was one shameless piece of utter and unmentionable degradation—it was to borrow of a friend.
“You will bring some disgrace on us before you die, Berkeley,” he said, with a keener inflection of pain and contempt than had ever been in his voice. “Have you no common knowledge of honor?”
The lad flushed under the lash of the words, but it was a flush of anger rather than of shame; he did not lift his eyes, but gazed sullenly down on the yellow paper of a Paris romance he was irritably dog-earing.
“You are severe enough,” he said gloomily, and yet insolently. “Are you such a mirror of honor yourself? I suppose my debts, at the worst, are about one-fifth of yours.”
For a moment even the sweetness of Cecil's temper almost gave way. Be his debts what they would, there was not one among them to his friends, or one for which the law could not seize him. He was silent; he did not wish to have a scene of discussion with one who was but a child to him; moreover, it was his nature to abhor scenes of any sort, and to avert even a dispute, at any cost.
He came back and sat down without any change of expression, putting his cheroot in his mouth.
“Tres cher, you are not courteous,” he said wearily; “but it may be that you are right. I am not a good one for you to copy from in anything except the fit of my coats; I don't think I ever told you I was. I am not altogether so satisfied with myself as to suggest myself as a model for anything, unless it were to stand in a tailor's window in Bond Street to show the muffs how to dress. That isn't the point, though; you say you want near 300 pounds by to-morrow—to-day rather. I can suggest nothing except to take the morning mail to the Shires, and ask Royal straight out; he never refuses you.”
Berkeley looked at him with a bewildered terror that banished at a stroke his sullen defiance; he was irresolute as a girl, and keenly moved by fear.
“I would rather cut my throat,” he said, with a wild exaggeration that was but the literal reflection of the trepidation on him; “as I live I would! I have had so much from him lately—you don't know how much—and now of all times, when they threaten to foreclose the mortgage on Royallieu—”