“I am rather,” said I, “and worried too, Jack.”
“What about?” he asked.
Then I told him all about my debts; and we spent the rest of the evening in a sort of committee of ways and means.
Taken separately my debts were none of them very large, but added all together their total was something appalling. Ten pounds would scarcely cover them, and that did not include what I owed the doctor.
It was a serious business, without doubt.
Wallop’s threat to insist on immediate payment, or else “show me up” before the partners and my other creditors, may have been mere bounce; but it may equally well have been in earnest, in which case I was ruined.
Jack’s one solicitude that evening was to keep me from fretting too much. But it is all very well to say, “Don’t fret,” and another thing to remove the cause of fretting. And that we could neither of us do.
Jack had no money. What little he had saved he had spent on books or sent home to Mrs Shield. As for Mr Smith, senior, even if I had cared to ask him to help me, I knew he had barely enough to keep body and soul together. The idea of borrowing from Doubleday occurred to me, but Smith promptly discouraged it. Besides, I had once asked him for a loan, and he had refused it, on the ground he never lent money to anybody.
“The only thing,” said Jack, “is to write home to your uncle.”
I could scarcely help smiling at the idea. I knew my uncle better than Jack Smith did, and I might as well hope to get blood out of a stone as expect him to pay for my extravagances in London.