Nothing at all businesslike, either, about him—nothing in the least like those gentlemen who consider that to go in to the "office" every morning is the sum total of life. A most unbusinesslike young fellow.
A clay pipe in his mouth, a jar of tobacco on another chair beside him, a glass of whiskey for a paper-weight on his telegrams. An idle, lounging, "bad lot;" late hours, tobacco, whiskey, and ballet-dancers writ very large indeed on his broad face. In short, a young "gent" of the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Not the slightest sign of "blue blood" anywhere; not even in the cut of his coat, no Brummel-like elegance; hardly a Bond Street coat at all—rough, large, coarse cloth. If he had stood at the door of a shop he would have done very well indeed for a shopkeeper, the sort that drives about in a cart for orders.
Of his character nothing could be learned from his features. His face was broad, rather flat, with a short but prominent nose; in spite of indulgence, he kept a good, healthy, country colour. His neck was thick, his figure stout, his hands big—a jovial, good-tempered looking man.
His neck was very thick, tree-like; a drover's neck, no refinement or special intelligence indicated there; great power to eat, drink, and sleep—belly energy.
But let no one, therefore, suppose that the members of the upper ten thousand are any thicker in the neck, or more abdominal in their proclivities, or beneath the culture of the day. Take five hundred "blue bloods," and you will find among them a certain proportion of thick-necked people; take five hundred very common commoners, and you may count exactly the same number interspersed.
The Pamments were simply Englishmen, and liable to be born big, with broad faces, thick necks, and ultimate livers. It was no disgrace to Raleigh, that jolly neck of his.
Unless you are given to æsthetic crockery, or Francesco de Rimini, I think you would rather have liked him; a sort of fellow who would lend you his dogs, or his gun, or his horse, or his ballet-dancer, or his credit—humph!—at a moment's notice. But he was a very "bad lot;" they whispered it even in dutiful Woolhorton.
He got rid of money in a most surprising way, and naturally had nothing to show for it. The wonderful manner in which coin will disappear in London, like water into deep sand, surpasses the mysteries of the skies. It slips, it slides, it glides, it sinks, it flies, it runs out of the pocket. The nimble squirrel is nothing to the way in which a sovereign will leap forth in town.
Raleigh had a good allowance, often supplemented by soft aunts, yet he frequently walked for lack of a cab fare. I can't blame him; I should be just as bad, if fortune favoured me. How delicious now to walk down Regent Street, along Piccadilly, up Bond Street, and so on, in a widening circle, with a thousand pounds in one's pocket, just to spend, all your own, and no need to worry when it was gone. To look in at all the shops and pick up something here and something yonder, to say, "I'll have that picture I admired ten years ago; I'll have a bit of real old oak furniture; I'll go to Paris—" but Paris is not a patch on London. To take a lady—the lady—to St. Peter Robinson's, and spread the silks of the earth before her feet, and see the awakening delight in her eyes and the glow on her cheek; to buy a pony for the "kids" and a diamond brooch for the kind, middle-aged matron who befriended you years since in time of financial need; to get a new gun, and inquire about the price of a deer-stalk in Scotland; whetting the road now and then with a sip of Moet—but only one sip, for your liver's sake—just to brighten up the imagination. And so onwards in a widening circle, as sun-lit fancy led: could Xerxes, could great Pompey, could Cæsar with all his legions, could Lucullus with all his oysters, ever have enjoyed such pleasure as this—just to spend money freely, with a jolly chuckle, in the streets of London? What is Mahomet's Paradise to that?