The strange seeker of loans at length rose to depart. He reached the door. Suddenly he turned back, his eyes blazing with the sombre radiance of despair. He strode up to the table, and planted himself, with folded arms, immediately in front of the usurer.
"Mark me!" said West, in a tone of deep suppressed passion, like the hollow murmur of the sea before a storm: "It is a question of life or death with me to get money before sunset. Lend me only twenty pounds, and within twelve months I will repay you one hundred. I will give you every power which the law can give one man over another; and I will pledge my honor, which never yet was questioned, to the bargain!"
The usurer almost smiled, so strangely sarcastic was the contraction of his features, as he listened to these words.
"I do not question your honor," he said, icily, "but honor has nothing to do with business. As for the law, there is an old axiom which says, Out of nothing, nothing comes."
Bernard West regarded the cold rocky face and the passionless mouth from which these words proceeded with that stinging wrath a man feels who has humiliated himself in vain. Nevertheless he clung to the old flinty usurer as to the last rock in a deluge, and a sense of savage recklessness came over him when he advanced yet closer to the living cash-box before him, while the latter shrank half-terrified before the burning gaze of his visitor's dilated pupils.
Laying his hand upon the money-lender's shoulder, by a gesture of terrible familiarity that insisted upon and commanded attention to his words, West spoke with a sudden clearness and even musical distinctness of utterance that made his words yet more appalling in their solemn despair—"Old man, I am desperate; I am ruined. It is but a few months since my father died, leaving me not only penniless, but encircled by petty obligations which have cramped every movement I would have made. I have had no time, no quiet, to make an effort such as my position requires. This day I have spent my last shilling. I am too proud to beg, and to borrow is to beg when a man is known to be in real distress. Within one hour from this time I shall be beyond all the tortures of a life which for my own sake I care little to preserve. And yet I have spent my youth in accumulating treasures, which but a brief space might have rendered productive of benefit to man, and of profit to myself. My father's little means and my own have vanished in the pursuit of science, and in the gulf of suffering more immediate than our own. If I die also, with me perish the results of his experiments, his studies, and his sacrifices. There are moments when all ordinary calculations and prudence are empty baubles. Life is the only real possession we have, and death the only certainty. Listen! I will make one last proposal to you. Lend me but ten pounds—that is but ten weeks of life—and I swear to you that if I live, I will repay you for each pound lent not ten or twenty, but one hundred—in all; one thousand pounds! Grant that it be but a chance upon the one hand, yet, upon the other, how small is the risk; and then, to save a human life—- is not that something in the scale?" And the stranger laughed at these last words with a bitter gayety, which caused a strange thrill to creep along the nerves of the usurer.
However, the lender of gold shrugged his shoulders without relaxing his habitual impassibility of manner. He did not speak. Possibly the idea occurred to him that his strange client meditated some act of violence upon himself or his strong box. But this idea speedily vanished, as the stranger, relapsing suddenly into silence and conventional behavior, removed his hand from the usurer's shoulder, and strode rapidly but calmly from the apartment.
The door closed behind the ruined man, and the usurer drew a long breath, while his bushy brows were contracted in a sort of agony of doubt and irresolute purpose.
Meanwhile Bernard West paused for an instant on the threshold of the outer-door, as if undecided which road to take. In truth all roads were much alike to him at that moment. Some cause, too subtle to be seized by the mental analyst, determined his course. He turned to the right, and strode rapidly onward.
He felt already like one of the dead, to join whom he was hurrying headlong. He looked neither to the right nor to the left; and before him was a mist, in which the phantoms of his imagination disported themselves, to the exclusion of all other visible objects. Nothing earthly had any further interest for him. He did not even hear the steps of some one running behind him, nor hear the voice which called after him to stop; but his course was soon more effectually arrested by the firm grasp of a man's hand, which seized him by the arm with the force and the tenacity of a vice.