The Martins Of Cro' Martin, Vol. II (of II). Lever Charles James
‘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, the renewed bill and the sixty per cent, the non-restored acceptances flitting about the world, sold and resold as damaged articles, but always in the end falling into the hands of a “most respectable party,” and proceeded on as a true debt; then, the compromises for time, for silence, for secrecy, – since these transactions are rarely, if ever, devoid of some unhappy incident that would not bear publicity; and there are invariably little notes beginning “Dear Moses,” which would argue most ill-chosen intimacies. These are all old stories, and the “Times” and the “Chronicle” are full of them. There is a terrible sameness about them, too. The dupe and the villain are stock characters that never change, and the incidents are precisely alike in every case. Humble folk, who are too low for fashionable follies, wonder how the self-same artifices have always the same success, and cannot conceal their astonishment at the innocence of our young men about town; and yet the mystery is easily solved. The dupe is, in these cases, just as unprincipled as his betrayer, and their negotiation is simply a game of skill, in which Israel is not always the winner.
If we have not followed Martin’s steps through these dreary labyrinths, it is because the path is a worn one; for the same reason, too, we decline to keep him company in his ponderings over them. All that his troubles had taught him was an humble imitation of the tricky natures of those he dealt with; so that he plotted and schemed and contrived, till his very head grew weary with the labor. And so we leave him.
CHAPTER III. A YOUNG DUCHESS AND AN OLD FRIEND
Like a vast number of people who have passed years in retirement, Lady Dorothea was marvellously disappointed with “the world” when she went back to it. It was not at all the kind of thing she remembered, or at least fancied it to be. There were not the old gradations of class strictly defined; there was not the old veneration for rank and station; “society” was invaded by hosts of unknown people, “names one had never heard of.” The great stars of fashion of her own day had long since set, and the new celebrities had never as much as heard of her. The great houses of the Faubourg were there, it is true; but with reduced households and dimly lighted salons, they were but sorry representatives of the splendor her memory had invested them with.
Now the Martins were installed in one of the finest apartments of the finest quarter in Paris. They were people of unquestionable station, they had ample means, lacked for none of the advantages which the world demands from those who seek its favors; and yet there they were, just as unknown, unvisited, and unsought after, as if they were the Joneses or the Smiths, “out” for a month’s pleasuring on the Continent.
A solitary invitation to the Embassy to dinner was not followed by any other attention; and so they drove along the Boulevards and through the Bois de Boulogne, and saw some thousands of gay, bright-costumed people, all eager for pleasure, all hurrying on to some scheme of amusement or enjoyment, while they returned moodily to their handsome quarter, as much excluded from all participation in what went on around them as though they were natives of Hayti.
Martin sauntered down to the reading-room, hoping