A check for two thousand pounds, enfolded in a sheet scrawled with a brief intimation in my Lord Walmerston’s stiff, characteristic handwriting, that no more of the stuff was to be had.
XLVII
“How like the man! The icy, phlegmatic islander! Two thousand pounds! A nothing! A bagatelle!”
The little gentleman removed his polished boots from the chased silver-gilt fender. He was strongly tempted to throw the check into the fire. But money is money, and he restrained himself. He folded the oblong slip of pink paper stamped with the magic name of Coutts and slipped it into his pocket note-case, gnawing, as was his wont, at the ends of his heavy brown mustache and breathing through his nose. He got up and looked upon his merry men with an ugly, livid smile, and said, still smiling:
“So be it! We take my Lord’s charity and we repay it. Without doubt—it shall be repaid by-and-by—with other debts owed by me to England. Her grudging shelter, her insulting tolerance, her heavy, insolent, insular contempt.”
Something in the speaker’s short thick throat rattled oddly. His eyes, that were usually like the faded negatives of eyes, glittered with a dull, retrospective hate. The white hand shook as it stroked the brown chin-tuft, and a grayish shiny sweat stood upon his face.
“I am to be upheld and supported by Great Britain if I accomplish miracles—but I am to accomplish them unaided. Two thousand pounds! We are infinitely indebted to my Lord Walmerston’s generosity!”
St. Arnaud, who had got off the sofa, remarked with a full-flavored oath:
“It is rating the Army cheap, by——!”
De Morny said, shrugging one shoulder and toying with his watch-chain: