The Martins Of Cro' Martin, Vol. II (of II). Lever Charles James

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ at all. I never was more serious. But here he comes! Look only how the fellow lolls back in the phaeton. Just see how contemptuously he looks down on the foot-travellers. I’d lay on another hundred for that stare; for, assuredly, he has already made the purchase in his own mind.”

      “Well, Merl, what do you say to Sir Spencer’s taste in horseflesh?” said Martin, as he entered.

      “They ‘re nice hacks; very smart.”

      “Nice hacks!” broke in Cavendish, “why, sir, they’re both thoroughbred; the near horse is by Tiger out of a Crescent mare, and the off one won the Acton steeple-chase. When you said hacks, therefore, you made a cruel blunder.”

      “Well, it’s what a friend of mine called them just now,” said Merl; “and remarked, moreover, that the large horse had been slightly fired on the – the – I forget the name he gave it.”

      “You probably remember your friend’s name better,” said Cavendish, sneeringly. “Who was he, pray?”

      “Massingbred, – we call him Jack Massingbred; he’s the Member for somewhere in Ireland.”

      “Poor Jack!” muttered Cavendish, “how hard up he must be!”

      “But you like the equipage, Merl?” said Martin, who had a secret suspicion that it was now Cavendish’s turn for a little humiliation.

      “Well, it’s neat. The buggy – ”

      “The buggy! By Jove, sir, you have a precious choice of epithets! Please to let me inform you that full-blooded horses are not called hacks, nor one of Leader’s park-phaetons is not styled a buggy.”

      Martin threw himself into a chair, and after a moment’s struggle, burst out into a fit of laughter.

      “I think we may make a deal after all, Sir Spencer,” said Merl, who accepted the baronet’s correction with admirable self-control.

      “No, sir; perfectly impossible; take my word for it, any transaction would be difficult between us. Good-bye, Martin; adieu, Claude.” And with this brief leave-taking the peppery Sir Spencer left the room, more flushed and fussy than he had entered it.

      “If you knew Sir Spencer Cavendish as long as we have known him, Mr. Merl,” said Lord Claude, in his blandest of voices, “you’d not be surprised at this little display of warmth. It is the only weakness in a very excellent fellow.”

      “I ‘m hot, too, my Lord,” said Merl, with the very slightest accentuation of the “initial H,” “and he was right in saying that dealings would be difficult between us.”

      “You mentioned Massingbred awhile ago, Merl. Why not ask him to second you at the Club?” said Martin, rousing himself suddenly from a train of thought.

      “Well, somehow, I thought that he and you did n’t exactly pull together; that there was an election contest, – a kind of a squabble.”

      “I ‘m sure that he never gave you any reason to suspect a coldness between us; I know that I never did,” said Martin, calmly. “We are but slightly acquainted, it is true, but I should be surprised to learn that there was any ill-feeling between us.”

      “One’s opponent at the hustings is pretty much the same thing as one’s adversary at a game, – he is against you to-day, and may be your partner to-morrow; so that, putting even better motives aside, it were bad policy to treat him as an implacable enemy,” said Lord Claude, with his accustomed suavity. “Besides, Mr. Merl, you know the crafty maxim of the French moralist, ‘Always treat your enemies as though one day they were to become your friends.’” And with this commonplace, uttered in a tone and with a manner that gave it all the semblance of a piece of special advice, his Lordship took his hat, and, squeezing Martin’s hand, moved towards the door.

      “Come in here for a moment,” said Martin, pushing open the door into an adjoining dressing-room, and closing it carefully after them. “So much for wanting to do a good-natured thing,” cried he, peevishly. “I thought to help Cavendish to get rid of those ‘screws,’ and the return he makes me is to outrage this man.”

      “What are your dealings with him?” asked Willoughby» anxiously.

      “Play matters, play debts, loans, securities, post-obits, and every other blessed contrivance you can think of to swamp a man’s present fortune and future prospects. I don’t think he is a bad fellow; I mean, I don’t suspect he ‘d press heavily upon me, with any fair treatment on my part. My impression, in short, is that he’d forgive my not meeting his bill, but he ‘d never get over my not inviting him to a dinner!”

      “Well,” said Willoughby, encouragingly, “we live in admirable times for such practices. There used to be a vulgar prejudice in favor of men that one knew, and names that the world was familiar with. It is gone by entirely; and if you only present your friend – don’t wince at the title – your friend, I say – as the rich Mr. Merl, the man who owns shares in mines, canals, and collieries, whose speculations count by tens of thousands, and whose credit rises to millions, you’ll never be called on to apologize for his parts of speech, or make excuse for his solecisms in good breeding.”

      “Will you put up his name, then, at the Club?” asked Martin, eagerly. “It would not do for me to do so.”

      “To be sure I will, and Massingbred shall be his seconder.” And with this cheering pledge Lord Claude bade him good-bye, and left him free to return to Mr. Merl in the drawing-room. That gentleman had, however, already departed, to the no small astonishment of Martin, who now threw himself lazily down on a sofa, to ponder over his difficulties and weave all manner of impracticable schemes to meet them.

      They were, indeed, very considerable embarrassments. He had raised heavy sums at most exorbitant rates, and obtained money – for the play-table – by pledging valuable reversions of various kinds, for Merl somehow was the easiest of all people to deal with; one might have fancied that he lent his money only to afford himself an occasion of sympathy with the borrower, just as he professed that he merely betted “to have a little interest in the race.” Whatever Martin, then, suggested in the way of security never came amiss; whether it were a farm, a mill, a quarry, or a lead mine, he accepted it at once, and, as Martin deemed, without the slightest knowledge or investigation, little suspecting that there was not a detail of his estate, nor a resource of his property, with which the wily Jew was not more familiar than himself. In fact, Mr. Merl was an astonishing instance of knowledge on every subject by which money was to be made, and he no more advanced loans upon an encumbered estate than he backed the wrong horse or bid for a copied picture. There is a species of practical information excessively difficult to describe, which is not connoisseurship, but which supplies the place of that quality, enabling him who possesses it to estimate the value of an object, without any admixture of those weakening prejudices which beset your mere man of taste. Now, Mr. Merl had no caprices about the color of the horse he backed, no more than for the winning seat at cards; he could not be warped from his true interests by any passing whim, and whether he cheapened a Correggio or discounted a bill, he was the same calm, dispassionate calculator of the profit to come of the transaction.

      Latterly, however, he had thrown out a hint to Martin that he was curious to see some of that property on which he had made such large advances; and this wish – which, according to the frame of mind he happened to be in at the moment, struck Martin as a mere caprice or a direct menace – was now the object of his gloomy reveries. We have not tracked his steps through the tortuous windings of his moneyed difficulties; it is a chapter in life wherein there is wonderfully little new to record; the Jew-lender and his associates, СКАЧАТЬ