“You’d like a chap to lend you a twenty-pound note, wouldn’t you now?” the other asked.
“If you would, I’d be grateful to you for ever—for ever, my dearest friend,” cried Clavering.
“How much would you give? Will you give a fifty-pound bill, at six months, for half down and half in plate?” asked Altamont.
“Yes, I would, so help me——, and pay it on the day,” screamed Clavering. “I’ll make it payable at my banker’s: I’ll do anything you like.”
“Well, I was only chaffing you. I’ll give you twenty pound.”
“You said a pony,” interposed Clavering; “my dear fellow, you said a pony, and I’ll be eternally obliged to you; and I’ll not take it as a gift—only as a loan, and pay you back in six months. I take my oath, I will.”
“Well—well—there’s the money, Sir Francis Clavering. I ain’t a bad fellow. When I’ve money in my pocket, dammy, I spend it like a man. Here’s five-and-twenty for you. Don’t be losing it at the hells now. Don’t be making a fool of yourself. Go down to Clavering Park, and it’ll keep you ever so long. You needn’t ’ave butchers’ meat: there’s pigs, I dare say, on the premises: and you can shoot rabbits for dinner, you know, every day till the game comes in. Besides, the neighbours will ask you about to dinner, you know, sometimes: for you are a Baronet, though you have outrun the constable. And you’ve got this comfort, that I’m off your shoulders for a good bit to come—p’raps this two years—if I don’t play; and I don’t intend to touch the confounded black and red: and by that time my lady, as you call her—Jimmy, I used to say—will have come round again; and you’ll be ready for me, you know, and come down handsomely to yours truly.”
At this juncture of their conversation Strong returned, nor did the Baronet care much about prolonging the talk, having got the money: and he made his way from Shepherd’s Inn, and went home and bullied his servant in a manner so unusually brisk and insolent that the man concluded his master must have pawned some more of the house furniture, or, at any rate, have come into possession of some ready money.
“And yet I’ve looked over the house, Morgan, and I don’t thin he has took any more of the things,” Sir Francis’s valet said to Major Pendennis’s man, as they met at their Club soon after. “My lady locked up a’most all the bejews afore she went away, and he couldn’t take away the picters and looking-glasses in a cab and he wouldn’t spout the fenders and fire-irons—he ain’t so bad as that. But he’s got money somehow. He’s so dam’d imperent when he have. A few nights ago I sor him at Vauxhall, where I was a-polkin with Lady Hemly Babewood’s gals—a wery pleasant room that is, and an uncommon good lot in it, hall except the ’ousekeeper, and she’s methodisticle—I was a-polkin—you’re too old a cove to polk, Mr. Morgan—and ’ere’s your ’ealth—and I ’appened to ’ave on some of Clavering’s abberdashery, and he sor it too: and he didn’t dare so much as speak a word.”
“How about the house in St. John’s Wood?” Mr. Morgan asked.