“Not you!” said Thompson Jowell, beaming on him fondly. “And when your old Governor’s willing to do the dirty work, why should you soil your hands?” His thick voice shook, and the tears stood in his goggle-eyes. “I’d lie down in the gutter so that those polished Wellingtons I spoke of just now should walk upon me dryshod—by Gosh, I would!” said Thompson Jowell—“if only I might get up again with golden mud upon me, to be scraped off and put away for you! Look here! You told your swell friend, Lord ’Dolph, your Governor was a generous bleeder. Well, so I am! I’ll fill your pail to-day.”
He whipped out his check-book, large and bulky like himself, and—Morty having condescendingly removed himself from the blotter—drew what that scion of his race was moved to term “a whacker” of a check. And sent him away gorged with that golden mud to which he had referred, and correspondingly happy; so that he passed through the larger, outer office, where seven pallid clerks were hard at work under the direction of a gray-faced elderly man who inhabited a little ground-glass-paneled sentry-box opening out of their place of bondage, with “Manager” in blistered letters of black paint upon the door,—like a boisterous wind tinged with stables, cigars, and mixed perfumery, and shed some drops of his shining store on them in passing.
“Look here, you chaps! See what the Old Man’s stood me!” Morty flourished the pink oblong, bearing the magic name of Coutts’. Six of the seven pairs of eyes ravished from ledgers and correspondence, flared with desperate longing and sickened with impotent desire. Standish still kept his sea-green face downbent. And the gray Manager, peeping out of his glass case, congratulated as in duty bound.
“You’re in luck again, Mr. Mortimer!... May I hope we see you well, sir?”
“First rate, Chobley! Topping condition!” Morty stuffed the check with lordly carelessness into a pocket in the gold-sprigged velvet vest, withdrawing a little ball of crackly white paper, which he jovially displayed between a finger and thumb attired in lemon kid.
“Twig this, hey? Well, it shall mean a dinner at the Albion in Drury Lane for the lot of you ... and an evenin’ at the Play—if you ain’t too proud for the Pit? Leave your wives at home!” the young reprobate advised, with a wink; “you’re all too much married by a lot, hey, Chobley? And half-a-bottle of fizz apiece it ought to stand you in.... And see that beggar Standish drinks his share!... Catch!... Gaw!—what a butter-fingered beggar you are, Standish!”.... The paper insult, flipped at ghastly Standish’s lowered nose, smartly hit that feature, and rebounded into a letter-basket as Morty blustered out. The clerks looked at each other as the swing-doors banged and gibbered behind the young autocrat. They heard him hail Lord ’Dolph, heard the trampling and slipping of the tandem-horses’ hoofs upon the uneven pavement; heard Morty cheerfully curse the groom,—heard, too, the final “Gaw!” with which the heir of the house of Jowell clinched the news of his good luck with his Governor; the hiss and smack of the tandem-whip, and the departing clatter of the tilbury westwards, to those regions where golden-haired sirens smile upon young men with monkeys in their pockets; and white-bosomed waiters dance attendance on their pleasure in halls of dazzling light.
Then said the gray-faced Manager, breaking the silence:
“I suppose, gentlemen, we had better do as Mr. Mortimer so kindly suggested? I presume that no one here is averse to theatrical exhibitions, or objects to a good dinner, washed down with the half-bottle of champagne the young gentleman liberally mentioned?”
“I prefer port!” said the hitherto silent Standish, in so strange a voice it seemed as though another man had spoken.
“Do you, egad?” said a fellow-clerk sniggeringly. “Perhaps you’ll tell us why?”