There was no want of company in the lock-up house, the bailiff's rooms were nearly always full; but Harry preferred the dingy solitude of his own room to the society round his landlady's table, and it was only on the second day of his arrest, and when his purse was emptied by the heavy charges of the place, that he made up his mind to apply to Mr. Draper. He despatched a letter then to the lawyer at the Temple, informing him of his plight, and desiring him, in an emphatic postscript, not to say one word about the matter to his aunt, Madame de Bernstein.
He had made up his mind not to apply to the old lady except at the very last extremity. She had treated him with so much kindness that he revolted from the notion of trespassing on her bounty, and for a while tried to please himself with the idea that he might get out of durance without her even knowing that any misfortune at all had befallen him. There seemed to him something humiliating in petitioning a woman for money. No! He would apply first to his male friends, all of whom might help him if they would. It had been his intention to send Sampson to one or other of them as a negotiator, had not the poor fellow been captured on his way to succour his friend.
Sampson gone, Harry was obliged to have recourse to his own negro servant, who was kept on the trot all day between Temple Bar and the Court end of the town with letters from his unlucky master. Firstly, then, Harry sent off a most private and confidential letter to his kinsman, the Right Honourable the Earl of Castlewood, saying how he had been cast into prison, and begging Castlewood to lend him the amount of the debt. “Please to keep my application, and the cause of it, a profound secret from the dear ladies,” wrote poor Harry.
“Was ever anything so unfortunate?” wrote back Lord Castlewood, in reply. “I suppose you have not got my note of yesterday? It must be lying at your lodgings, where—I hope in heaven!—you will soon be, too. My dear Mr. Warrington, thinking you were as rich as Croesus—otherwise I never should have sate down to cards with you—I wrote to you yesterday, begging you to lend me some money to appease some hungry duns whom I don't know how else to pacify. My poor fellow! every shilling of your money went to them, and but for my peer's privilege I might be hob-and-nob with you now in your dungeon. May you soon escape from it, is the prayer of your sincere CASTLEWOOD.”
This was the result of application number one: and we may imagine that Mr. Harry read the reply to his petition with rather a blank face. Never mind! There was kind, jolly Uncle Warrington. Only last night his aunt had kissed him and loved him like a son. His uncle had called down blessings on his head, and professed quite a paternal regard for him. With a feeling of shyness and modesty in presence of those virtuous parents and family. Harry had never said a word about his wild doings, or his horse-racings, or his gamblings, or his extravagances. It must all out now. He must confess himself a Prodigal and a Sinner, and ask for their forgiveness and aid. So Prodigal sate down and composed a penitent letter to Uncle Warrington, and exposed his sad case, and besought him to come to the rescue. Was not that a bitter nut to crack for our haughty young Virginian? Hours of mortification and profound thought as to the pathos of the composition did Harry pass over that letter; sheet after sheet of Mr. Amos's sixpence-a-sheet letter-paper did he tear up before the missive was complete, with which poor blubbering Gumbo (much vilified by the bailiff's followers and parasites, whom he was robbing, as they conceived, of their perquisites) went his way.
At evening the faithful negro brought back a thick letter in his aunt's handwriting. Harry opened the letter with a trembling hand. He thought it was full of bank-notes. Ah me! it contained a sermon (Daniel in the Lions' Den) by Mr. Whitfield, and a letter from Lady Warrington saying that, in Sir Miles's absence from London, she was in the habit of opening his letters, and hence, perforce, was become acquainted with a fact which she deplored from her inmost soul to learn, namely, that her nephew Warrington had been extravagant and was in debt. Of course, in the absence of Sir Miles, she could not hope to have at command such a sum as that for which Mr. Warrington wrote, but she sent him her heartfelt prayers, her deepest commiseration, and a discourse by dear Mr. Whitfield, which would comfort him in his present (alas! she feared not undeserved) calamity. She added profuse references to particular Scriptural chapters which would do him good. If she might speak of things worldly, she said, at such a moment, she would hint to Mr. Warrington that his epistolary orthography was anything but correct. She would not fail for her part to comply with his express desire that his dear cousins should know nothing of this most painful circumstance, and with every wish for his welfare here and elsewhere, she subscribed herself his loving aunt, MARGARET WARRINGTON.
Poor Harry hid his face between his hands, and sate for a while with elbows on the greasy table blankly staring into the candle before him. The bailiff's servant, who was touched by his handsome face, suggested a mug of beer for his honour, but Harry could not drink, nor eat the meat that was placed before him. Gumbo, however, could, whose grief did not deprive him of appetite, and who, blubbering the while, finished all the beer, and all the bread and the meat. Meanwhile, Harry had finished another letter, with which Gumbo was commissioned to start again, and away the faithful creature ran upon his errand.
Gumbo ran as far as White's Club, to which house he was ordered in the first instance to carry the letter, and where he found the person to whom it was addressed. Even the prisoner, for whom time passed so slowly, was surprised at the celerity with which his negro had performed his errand.
At least the letter which Harry expected had not taken long to write. “My lord wrote it at the hall-porter's desk, while I stood there then with Mr Mr. Morris,” said Gumbo, and the letter was to this effect:—
“DEAR SIR—I am sorry I cannot comply with your wish, I'm short of money at present, having paid large sums to you as well as to other gentlemen.—Yours obediently, MARCH AND R.