“Not a poor one at all, as the world goes. I should like very much to be a millionaire.”
“To say that I am not richer to-day than I was the day I was twenty-one would not be true,” said Tom, with a demure smile. “I am years and years, half a lifetime at the very least, from being a millionaire—if; indeed, I ever live to be one. But I no longer live in two cheap rooms in the city, and dine at an eating-house for fifteen pence. I have very nice chambers just out of Piccadilly, where you must look me up when you are next in town. I belong to a club where I have an opportunity of meeting good people—by ‘good people’ I mean people who may some day be useful to me in my struggle through life. Finally, I ride my hack in the Park two or three afternoons a week during the season, and am on bowing terms with a duchess.”
“I can no longer doubt that you are a rising man,” said Lionel, with a laugh.
“My head is full of schemes of one kind or another,” said Tom, a little wearily. “Or rather it was full of them before I met with that confounded accident. In one or the other of those schemes the duchess will play her part like any other pawn that may be on my chess-board at the time. There is no keener speculator in the whole City of London than her Grace of Leamington.”
“What a martyrdom it must seem to you to be shut up here, in this dull old house, so far away from the exciting life you have learned to love so well!”
“A martyrdom, Dering? It is anything but that. Had I been well in health, I can’t tell what my feelings might have been. I should probably have considered it a waste of time to have spent a month, either here or anywhere else, in absolute idleness. But being ill, and having just been dragged back, by main force as it were, from Death’s very door, I cannot tell you how grateful, how soothing to me is the quietude of this old spot. If, now and then, when I feel better and stronger, there come moments when I long to glance over the money article of ‘The Times,’ or to write a long, impatient letter to my broker in London, there are days and nights when such things have no longer the faintest interest for me—times when bare life itself seems a burden almost too heavy for endurance, and all my ambitious schemes and speculations nothing more than a tissue of huge mistakes.”
“Your old interest in everyday matters will gradually come back to you as you grow better,” said Lionel, “and with it will come the desire to be up and doing.”
“I suppose you are right,” said Tom. “It would never do for a little illness to change the plans and settled aims of a lifetime.”
“No chance of your settling down here at Gatehouse Farm as Hermit Number Two?”
Tom shook his head and laughed. “Do you know, Dering,” he said, “that you are one of the greatest riddles, one of the most incomprehensible fellows, it was ever my fortune to meet with! But, pardon me,” he added hastily. “Of all men in the world, you are the one to whom I ought least to say such words.”