Never were two men more dumfoundered. They had eaten their cake and enjoyed it, and now the reckoning must be paid. They were no better off than they had been at Brussels; indeed, they were worse off to the extent of twenty pounds, and, now as then, their predicament was such that, of all people in the world, Sir Gilbert was the last whose ears it must be allowed to reach. It was indeed a sorry home-coming.
In the course of the following day Captain Verinder waited upon the executors, but the only concession he could obtain from them was a week’s grace beyond the date when the note would fall due.
“London swarms with money-lenders,” said Luigi; “surely, one or other of them would do as Henriques did, and advance us enough money on our joint signatures to pay off this confounded bill.”
“Very possibly that might be managed; but what then? We should merely be putting off the evil day for a little while, and the worst of it would be that the longer we succeeded in staving it off, the bigger would be the reckoning when it did come. At present all we have to find is a hundred and twenty pounds, but if we should succeed in negotiating another bill, at the end of two or three months we should have a hundred and fifty to meet, and supposing we were compelled to go on renewing, a little later we should have to face a liability of a couple of hundred pounds; and so it would go up by leaps and bounds in the way of compound interest till some day our good friends the usurers would put the screw on, and the inevitable crash would come. No; we must, if possible, find some better way out of our difficulty than that. I’ll sleep on it; perhaps an idea may come to me in the course of the night.”
Next morning the Captain seemed in a thoughtful mood, and as Luigi was in no humour for talking, breakfast passed almost in silence. When it had come to an end, and the equipage had been removed, the elder man said: “Draw up that easy chair to the window, and light a weed. I have something to say to you.”
As soon as his own meerschaum and Luigi’s cigar were well under way, he resumed: “You remember that day about which you spoke to me while we were abroad, when, Mr. Everard Lisle being away on business for your grandfather, the old gentleman called you into his study and got you to write one or two letters for him?”
Luigi nodded.
“Then, you will remember telling me that while you were there a clerk came down from London, bringing with him a parcel of American bonds, for which your grandfather, after having examined and counted them, gave the man a receipt, and that, as soon as the clerk had gone, he asked you to unlock the door of the strong room which opens out of his study, and deposit the bonds in question in a certain drawer marked B. You also said, if I mistake not, that that was the first time you had set foot inside the strong room.”
“And the last,” interposed Luigi.
“If I recollect rightly, the bonds in question were endorsed ‘Missouri and Eastern Union Preference.’”