by Grant Allen
Mr. Solomons motioned Sir Emery graciously into a chair. “Sit down, Paul,” he said, turning to his younger client. “A glass of wine this cold morning, Sir Emery?”
“I thank you kindly, sir,” the baronet responded, taking it up as he spoke. “‘Ere’s your very good ‘ealth, Mr. Solomons, an’ my respex to Mr. Lionel.”
Mr. Solomons poured out a glass for Paul, and then two more, in solemn silence, for himself and his nephew. The drinking of wine has a sort of serious ceremonial importance with certain persons of Mr. Solomons’ character. After that he plunged for a while into general conversation on the atmospheric conditions and the meteorological probabilities for the immediate future — a subject which led round naturally by graceful steps to the political state of this kingdom, and the chances of a defeat for the existing ministry over the bill for the county government of Dublin. Mr. Solomons considered it becoming on these State occasions not to start too abruptly on the question of business: a certain subdued delicacy of consideration for his clients’ feelings made him begin the interview on the broader and, so to speak, neutral basis of a meeting between gentlemen.
At last, however, when the sherry and the ministry were both comfortably disposed of, and Sir Emery had signified his satisfaction and acquiescence in either process, Mr. Solomons dexterously and gracefully introduced the real subject before the house with a small set speech. “I think, Sir Emery,” he said, putting his square bullet-head a little on one side, “you intimated just now that you wished to confer with me on a matter of business?”
“Yes, sir,” the cabdriver answered, growing suddenly hot, and speaking with a visible effort of eloquence. “My son, Paul, as you know, sir, have come of age to-day, and it’s our desire, Mr. Solomons, if-so-be-as it’s ekally convenient to you, to go together over them there little advances you’ve been kind enough to make from time to time for Paul’s eddication, if I may so term it, an’ to set ’em all right and straight, in the manner o’ speakin’, by givin’ Paul’s own acknowledgment for ’em in black an’ white, now he’s no longer a minor but his own master.”
It was a great triumph for the British baronet to stumble through so long a sentence unhurt, without a single halt, or a lapse of consciousness, and he felt justly proud when he got fairly to the end of it. Frequently as he had rehearsed it to himself in bed the night before, he never thought that when the moment for firing it off in actual practice really arrived he would have got pat through it all with such distinguished success.
Mr. Solomons smiled a smile of grateful recognition, and bowed, with one hand spread carelessly over his ample and expansive waistcoat. “If I’ve been of any service to you and your son, Sir Emery,” he answered with humility, not untempered by conscious rectitude and the sense of a generous action well performed (at twenty per cent, interest and incidentals) “I’m more than repaid, I’m sure, for all my time and trouble.”
“And now,” Mr. Lionel remarked, with a curl of his full Oriental lips under the budding mustache, “let’s get to business.”
To business Mr. Solomons thereupon at once addressed himself with congenial speed. He brought out from their pigeon-hole in the safe (with a decorous show of having to hunt for them first among his multifarious papers, though he had put them handy before his client entered) the bundle of acknowledgments tied up in pink tape, and duly signed, sealed, and delivered by Paul and his father. “These,” he said, unfolding them with studious care, and recapitulating them one by one, “are the documents in the case. If you please, Mr. Paul” — he had never called him Mr. Paul before, but he was a free man now, and this was business—” we’ll go over them together and check their correctness.”
“I have the figures all down here in my pocket-book,” Paul answered hastily, for he was anxious to shorten this unpleasant interview as much as possible, “will you just glance at their numbers and see if they’re accurate?”
But Mr. Solomons was not to be so put off. For his part, indeed, he was quite otherwise minded. This ceremony was to him a vastly agreeable one, and he was anxious rather to prolong it, and to increase his sense of its deep importance by every conceivable legal detail in his power.
“Excuse me,” he said blandly, taking up the paper and laying it open with ostentatious scrupulousness. “This is law, and we must be strictly lawyer-like. Will you kindly look over the contents of this document and see whether it tallies with your recollection?”
Paul took it up and resigned himself with a sigh to the unpleasant ordeal. “Quite right,” he answered, handing it back again formally.
“Will you be so good as to initial it on the back, then, with date assigned?” Mr. Solomons asked.
Paul did as he was bid, in wondering silence.
Mr. Solomons took up the next in order, and then the third, and after that the fourth, and so on through all that hateful series of bills and renewals. Every item Paul acknowledged in solemn form, and each was duly handed over for the inspection as he did so of Mr. Lionel, who also initialed them in his quality of witness.
At last, the whole lot was fairly disposed of, and the dreadful total alone now stared Paul in the face with its blank insolvency. Then Mr. Solomons took from his desk yet another paper — this time a solemn document in due legal form, which he proceeded to read aloud in a serious tone and with deep impressiveness. Of “this indenture” and its contents Paul could only remember afterward that it contained many allusions to Sir Emery Gascoyne, of Plowden’s Court, Hillborough, in the County of Surrey, baronet, and Paul Gascoyne, of Christ Church, in the University of Oxford, gentleman, of the first part, as well as to Judah Prince Solomons, of High street, Hillborough aforesaid, auctioneer and estate agent of the second part; and that it purported to witness, with many unnecessary circumlocutions and subterfuges of the usual legal sort, to the simple fact that the two persons of the first part agreed and consented, jointly and severally, to pay the person of the second part a certain gross lump-sum, which so far as human probability went they had no sort of prospect or reasonable chance of ever paying. However, it was perfectly useless to say so to Mr. Solomons at that exact moment; for the pleasure which he derived from the perusal of the bond was too intense to permit the intervention of any other feeling. So when the document had been duly read and digested, Paul took up the pen and did as he was bid, signing opposite a small red wafer on the face of the instrument, and then remarking, as he handed it back to Mr. Solomons, with his finger on the wafer, in accordance with instructions, “I deliver this as my act and deed” — a sentence which seemed to afford the person of the second part the profoundest and most obviously heartfelt enjoyment.
And well it might indeed, for no loophole of escape was left to Paul and his father anywhere. They had bound themselves down, body and soul, to be Mr. Solomons’ slaves and journeyman hands till they had paid him in full for every stiver of the amount to the uttermost farthing.
When all the other signing and witnessing had been done, and Paul had covenanted by solemn attestations never to plead infancy, error, or non-indebtedness, Mr, Solornons sighed a sigh of mingled regret and relief as he observed once more, “And now, Paul, you owe the seven-and-six for the stamp you’ll notice.”
Paul pulled out his purse and paid the sum demanded without a passing murmur. He had been so long accustomed to these constant petty exactions that he took them now almost for granted, and hardly even reflected upon the curious fact that the sum in which he was now indebted amounted to more than double the original lump he had actually received, without counting these perpetual minor drawbacks.
Mr. Solomons folded up the document carefully, and replaced it in its pigeon-hole in the iron safe.
“That finishes the past,” he said; “there we’ve got our security, Leo. And for the future, Mr. Paul, is there any temporary assistance you need just now to return to Oxford with?”
A terrible light burst across Paul’s soul. How on earth was he to live till he took his degree? Now that he had fully ma
de up his mind that he couldn’t and wouldn’t marry an heiress, how could he go on accepting money from Mr. Solomons, which was really advanced on the remote security of that supposed contingency? Clearly, to do so would be dishonest and unjust. And yet, if he didn’t accept it how could he ever take his degree at all? And if he didn’t take his degree how could he possibly hope to earn anything anywhere, either to keep himself alive or repay Mr. Solomons?
Strange to say, this terrible dilemma had never before occurred to his youthful intelligence. He had to meet it, and solved it off-hand now, without a single minute for consideration.
It would not have been surprising, with the training he had had, if Paul, accustomed to live upon Mr. Solomons’ loans, as most young men live upon their father’s resources, had salved his conscience by this clear plea of necessity, and had decided that to take his degree anyhow was of the first importance both for himself and Mr. Solomons.
But he didn’t. In an instant he had thought all these things over, and, being now a man and a free agent, had decided in a flash what course of action his freedom imposed upon him.
With trembling lips he answered firmly, “No, thank you, Mr. Solomons; I’ve enough in hand for my needs for the present.” And then he relapsed into troubled silence.
What followed he hardly noticed much. There was more political talk, and more sherry all round, with plum cake accompaniment and serious faces. And then they rose to leave: Paul thinking to himself that now the crisis had come at last, and he could never return to his beloved Oxford. Those three years of his life would all be thrown away. He must miss his degree — and break his father’s heart with the disappointment.
But Sir Emery observed as he reached the open air, rubbing his hands together in the profundity of his admiration, “‘E’s a rare clever chap, to be sure, Mr. Solomons. Barr and Wilkie aint nothin’ by the side of him. Why, ’e read them documents out aloud so as no lawyer couldn’t ‘a’ drawed ’em up better.”
And Mr. Lionel, within, was observing to his uncle, “Well, you are a simple one, and no mistake, to let that fellow Gascoyne see where you keep his acknowledgments! For my part, I wouldn’t trust any man alive to know where I keep any papers of importance.”
CHAPTER XV.
COMMITTEE OF SUPPLY.
WHEN Paul got home, he put his dilemma at lunchtime before Faith, who went out with him once more on the Knoll to discuss it.
“And what do you mean to do now?” Faith asked, as soon as he’d finished outpouring his difficulties into her sympathetic ear. “Anyhow, you must go back to Oxford.”
“I can’t,” Paul answered shortly; “I’ve no money to go with.”
“You’ve Thistleton’s tenner,” Faith replied with simple straightforwardness, unconscious of the impropriety of such language on the lips of the female instructor of youth; for she had seen so little of anybody but Paul that Paul’s phrases came naturally to the tip of her tongue whenever she discussed the things that pertain to men, and more especially to Oxford. “That’ll pay your way up and settle you in, at any rate.”
“But my battels!” Paul objected. “I won’t have anything to meet my battels with.”
Faith was too well up in University language not to be well aware by this time that “battels” are the college charges for food, lodging, sundries, and tuition, so she made no bones about that technical phrase, but answered boldly: “Well, the battels must take care of themselves; they won’t be due till the beginning of next term, and meanwhile you can live on tick, as all the big people do at Hillborough, can’t you?”
“Faith!” Paul cried, looking down into her face aghast. “Et tu, Brute! You who always pitch into them so for not paying their little bills promptly!”
“Oh, I don’t really mean that!” Faith answered, coloring up, and somewhat shocked herself at her own levity in this fall from grace; for, to Faith, the worst of all human sins was living on credit. “I only meant, can’t you try to get some more private pupils in the course of term-time, and stand your chance at the end of being able to pay your battels?”
Paul reflected profoundly. “It’s a precious poor chance!” he responded with perfect frankness. “There aren’t many fellows who care to read nowadays with an undergraduate. And besides, it spoils a man’s own prospects for his examinations so much if he has to go teaching and reading at once — driving two teams abreast, as learner and tutor.”
“It does,” Faith answered. “That’s obvious of course. But then, you’ve got to do something, you know, to keep the ball rolling.”
It’s a great thing for a man to have an unpractical woman to spur him on. It makes him boldly attempt the impossible. So in the end, after much discussing of pros and cons between them, it was finally decided that Paul must go up to Oxford, as usual, and do his best to hang on somehow for the present. If the worst came to the worst, as Faith put it succinctly, he must make a clean breast of it all to Mr. Solomons. But if not, he might manage by hook or by crook to earn enough money to pull through two terms; for in two terms more he would take his degree, and then he might really begin to work for money.
It was a desperate attempt — how desperate those only know who have themselves been through it. But Paul resolved to try, and the resolve itself had in it a gentle touch of the heroic.
Next day, in fact, he bade farewell to Faith and his mother, and returned, with his ten pound note, to Oxford.
Ten pounds is a slender provision for a term’s expenses, but it would enable him at least to look about him for the moment, and see what chances arose of taking pupils.
And, indeed, that very night fortune favored him, as it sometimes favors these forlorn hopes of workaday heroes. To his great surprise, Thistleton came round after all to his rooms, to ask if Paul would take him on for the term as a private pupil. “It’s to read this time,” he explained, with his usual frankness, “not to satisfy the governor. I really must get through my Mods at last, and if I don’t look sharp, I shall be plowed again, and that’d set the governor’s back up, so that he’d cut my allowance, for he won’t stand my failing again, the governor won’t, that’s certain.” With great joy, therefore, Paul consented to take him on for the term, and so double that modest tenner.
Thistleton stopped talking long and late in his friend’s rooms, and about twelve o’clock one of those confidential fits came over Paul which are apt to come over young men, and others, when they sit up late into the small hours of the night over the smoldering embers of a dying fire. He had impressed upon Thistleton more than once already the absolute need for his making a little money, and his consequent desire to obtain pupils; and Thistleton in return had laughingly chaffed him about those mysterious claims to which Paul was always so vaguely alluding. Then Paul had waxed more confidential and friendly still, and had imparted to Thistleton’s sympathetic ear the fact that, if he didn’t succeed in earning his own living for the next two terms, he would be obliged to leave Oxford without taking his degree at all, and so cut off all hope of making a livelihood in future and satisfying the mysterious claims in question. How so? Thistleton asked; and Paul answered him in guarded phrase that his means of subsistence had, since his return from Mentone, been suddenly and quite unexpectedly cut from under him.
“What! The respected bart.’s not dead, is he?” the blond young man asked, opening his big blue eyes as wide as he could open them.
Paul replied with a somewhat forced smile that the respected bart still continued to walk this solid earth, and that his disappearance, indeed, from the mortal scene would have produced very little effect one way or the other upon his son’s fortunes.
Then Thistleton grew more curious and inquisitive still, and Paul more confidential; till the end of it all was that Paul gradually unfolded to his friend the whole of Mr. Solomons’ scheme for his education and future life, with the financial details of yesterday’s indenture, and the supposed way in which he was himself to discharge thereafter those serious obligations. When Thistleton he
ard the entire story he would have laughed outright had it not been for the obvious seriousness of Paul’s dilemma. To borrow money on the strength of a prospective heiress unknown was really too ridiculous. But as soon as he began fully to grasp the whole absurd incident, its graver as well as its more comic aspects, his indignation got the better of his amusement at the episode. He declared roundly, in very plain terms, that Mr. Solomons, having taken Paul’s life into his own hands while Paul was yet too young to know good from evil, and having brought Paul up like a gentleman at Oxford, was clearly bound to see the thing through to the bitter end — at least till Paul had taken his degree, and was, therefore, in a position to earn his own livelihood.
“If I were you, Gascoyne,” the blond young man asserted vigorously (with an unnecessary expletive, here suppressed), “I wouldn’t have the very slightest compunction in the world in taking his money for the next two terms, and then telling him right out he might whistle for his cash till you were able and ready to pay him back again. It’s his own fault entirely if he’s made a bad investment on a grotesque security. At least that’s how we’d look at the matter in Yorkshire.”
“I think,” Paul answered, with that gravity beyond his years that fate had forced upon him, “if it were somebody else’s case I was judging, instead of my own, I should judge as you do, either in Yorkshire or elsewhere. I should say a fellow wasn’t bound by acts imposed upon him, as it were, by his father or others, before he arrived at years of discretion. But then, when I was asked to sign those papers yesterday, if I was going to protest at all, that was the moment when I ought to have protested. I ought to have plainly said, ‘I’ll sign for the money, if you’ll go on finding me in ready cash till I take my degree; but, mind, I don’t engage to do anything in the world to catch an heiress.’ Only, I hadn’t the courage to say so then and there. You see, it’s been made a sort of religious duty for me, through all my life, to marry for money; and if I’d blurted out my refusal point blank like that, I’m afraid my father would have been grieved and annoyed at it.”
