“I was sorry to hear of your friend’s illness, and trust he will now do very well. Bring him down with you at Christmas, if you can. I hear, by the way, there is a Miss Russell in the case—a very fascinating young lady, whom you never mention at all—a fact which your mother, who is up to all those things, says is very suspicious. All I can say is, if she is as good a girl as her mother was before her—I knew her well once—you may bring her down with you too, if you like.”
How very unlucky it is that the home authorities seldom approve of any little affairs of the kind except those of which one is perfectly innocent! Now, if I had been in love with Mary Russell, the governor would, in the nature of things, have felt it his duty to be disagreeable.
I put off the little business my father alluded to day after day, to make way for more pleasant engagements, until my stay in town was drawing to a close. Letters from Russell informed me of his having left Oxford for Southampton, where he was reading hard, and getting quite stout; but he spoke of his sister’s health in a tone that alarmed me, though he evidently was trying to persuade himself that a few weeks’ sea-air would quite restore it. At last I devoted a morning to call on Mr Rushton, whom I found at home, though professing, as all lawyers do, to be full of business. He made my acquaintance as politely as if I had been the heir-expectant of an earldom, instead of the very moderate amount of acres which had escaped sale and subdivision in the Hawthorne family. In fact, he seemed a very good sort of fellow, and we ran over the parchments together very amicably—I almost suspected he was cheating me, he seemed so very friendly, but therein I did him wrong.
“And now, my dear sir,” continued he, as we shut up the last of them, “will you dine with me to-day? Let me see; I fear I can’t say before seven, for I have a great deal of work to get through. Some bankruptcy business, about which I have taken some trouble,” he continued, rubbing his hands, “and which we shall manage pretty well in the end, I fancy. By the way, it concerns some friends of yours, too: is not Mr Ormiston of your college? Ay, I thought he was; he is two thousand pounds richer than he fancied himself yesterday.”
“Really?” said I, somewhat interested; “how, may I ask?”
“Why, you see, when Russell’s bank broke—bad business that—we all thought the first dividend—tenpence-halfpenny in the pound, I believe it was—would be the final one: however, there are some foreign securities which, when they first came into the hands of the assignees, were considered of no value at all, but have gone up wonderfully in the market just of late, so that we have delayed finally closing accounts till we could sell them to such advantage as will leave some tolerable pickings for the creditors after all.”
“Had Ormiston money in Mr Russell’s bank, then, at the time?”
“Oh, yes: something like eight thousand pounds: not all his own, though: five thousand he had in trust for some nieces of his, which he had unluckily just sold out of the funds, and placed with Russell, while he was engaged in making arrangements for a more profitable investment; the rest was his own.”
“He lost it all, then?”
“All but somewhere about three hundred pounds, as it appeared at the time. What an excellent fellow he is! You know him well, I dare say. They tell me that he pays the interest regularly to his nieces for their money out of his own income still.”