THE USURER'S GIFT.
A FEW months ago in London an old man sat in a large paneled room in one of the streets near Soho-square. Every thing in the apartment was brown with age and neglect. Nothing more superlatively dingy could well be imagined. The leathern covers of the chairs were white and glossy at the edges; the carpet was almost of a uniform tint, notwithstanding its original gaudy contrasts; there were absurd old engravings upon the walls—relics of the infancy of the art; and curtains to the windows, which the smoke of years had darkened from a delicate fawn to a rusty chocolate color. In the centre of the room, and, as it were, the sun of this dusty system, stood an office-table of more modern manufacture, at which was seated the old man alluded to, sole lord and master of the dismal domicile. He was by profession a money-lender. His age might be from sixty to sixty-five years; his face was long, and his features seemed carved out of box-wood or yellow sand-stone, so destitute were they of mobility; his eyes were of a cold, pale, steel color, but his brows were black and tufted like a grim old owl's; a long aquiline nose, a thin and compressed mouth, and a vast double chin, buried in a voluminous white neckcloth of more than one day's wear, completed the portrait. Nor did the expression of his countenance undergo any perceptible change as, after a timid knock, the door opened, and a young man entered of singularly interesting appearance.
The new-comer was well-dressed, though his clothes were none of the newest, and had the air of a man accustomed to society. His pale brow was marked with those long horizontal lines of which time is rarely the artist. His dark, deep-set gray eyes flashed with a painful brightness; his long chestnut hair, damp with perspiration, clung in narrow strips to his forehead; his whole manner implied the man who had made up his mind to some extraordinary course, from which no wavering or weakness on his part was likely to turn him aside, whatever the opposition of others might compel him to abandon or determine. Bending his tall figure slightly, he addressed the money-lender in a tone of constrained calmness.
"You lend money, I believe?"
"Sometimes—on good security," replied the usurer, indifferently, forming a critical summary of his visitor's costume at a glance.
The stranger hesitated: there was a discouraging sort of coldness in the mode of delivering this answer that seemed to prejudge his proposition. Nevertheless, he resumed with an effort—"I saw your advertisement in the paper." The usurer did not even nod in answer to this prelude. He sat bolt upright in his chair, awaiting further information. "I am, as you will see by these papers, entitled to some property in reversion."
The usurer stretched out his hand for the papers, which he looked over carefully with the same implacable tranquillity, while his visitor entered into explanations as to their substance.
Once only the money-lender peered over the top of a document he was scanning, and said, gruffly: "Your name, sir, is Bernard West?"
"It is," replied the stranger, mechanically taking up a newspaper, in which the first thing which caught his eye was the advertisement alluded to, which ran thus:—"Money to any amount advanced immediately on every description of security, real or personal. Apply between the hours of ten and five to Mr. John Brace, —— street, Soho-square."
After a brief interval of silence, the usurer methodically rearranged the papers, and returned them to the stranger. "They are of no use," he said, "no use whatever: the reversion is merely contingent. You have no available security to offer?"