'YES:--A LIE!'
'So you went to Happerton after all,' said Lopez to his ally, Mr Sextus Parker.'You couldn't believe me when I told you the money was all right! What a cur you are!'
'That's right;--abuse me.'
'Well, it was horrid.Didn't I tell you that it must necessarily injure me with the house? How are two fellows to get on together unless they can put some trust in each other? Even if I did run you into a difficulty, do you really think I'm ruffian enough to tell you that the money was there if it was untrue?'
Sexty looked like a cur and felt like a cur, as he was being thus abused.He was not angry with his friend for calling him bad names, but only anxious to excuse himself.'I was out of sorts,'
he said, 'and so d-d hippish.I didn't know what I was about.'
'Brandy-and-soda,' suggested Lopez.
'Perhaps a little of that;--though, by Jove, it isn't often I do that kind of thing.I don't know a fellow who works harder for his wife and children than I do.But when one sees such things all round one,--a fellow utterly smashed here who had a string of hunters yesterday, and another fellow buying a house in Piccadilly and pulling it down because it isn't big enough, who was contented with a little box in Hornsey last summer, one doesn't quite know how to keep one's legs.'
'If you want to learn a lesson look at the two men, and see where the difference lies.He one has had some heart about him, and the other has been a coward.'
Parker scratched his head, balanced himself on the hind legs of his stool, and tacitly acknowledged the truth of all that his enterprising friend had said to him.'Has old Wharton come down well?' at last he asked.
'I have never said a word to old Wharton about money,' Lopez replied,--'except as the cost of this election I was telling you of.'
'And he wouldn't do anything in that?'
'He doesn't approve of the thing itself.I don't doubt but that the old gentleman and I shall understand each other before long.'
'You've got the length of his foot.'
'But I don't mean to drive him.I can get along without that.
He's an old man, and he can't take his money along with him when he goes the great journey.'
'There's a brother, Lopez,--isn't there?'
'Yes,--there's a brother; but Wharton has enough for two, and if he were to put either out of his will it wouldn't be my wife.
Old men don't like parting with their money, and he's like other old men.If it were not so I shouldn't bother myself coming into the city at all.'
'Has he enough for that, Lopez?'
'I suppose he's worth a quarter of a million.'
'By Jove! And where did he get it?'
'Perseverance, sir.Put by a shilling a day, and let it have its natural increase, and see what it will come to at the end of fifty years.I suppose old Wharton has been putting two or three thousand out of his professional income, at any rate for the last thirty years, and never for a moment forgetting its natural increase.That's one way to make a fortune.'
'It ain't rapid enough for you and me, Lopez.'
'No.That is the old-fashioned way, and the most sure.But, as you say, it is not rapid enough; and it robs a man of the power of enjoying his money when he has made it.But it's a very good thing to be closely connected with a man who has already done that kind of thing.There's not doubt about the money when it is there.It does not take to itself wings and fly away.'
'But the man who has it sticks to it uncommon hard.'
'Of course he does;--but he can't take it away with him.'
'He can leave it to hospitals, Lopez.That's the devil.'
'Sexty, my boy, I see you have taken an outlook into human life which does you credit.Yes, he can leave it to hospitals.But why does he leave it to hospitals?'
'Something of being afraid about his soul, I suppose.'
'No; I don't believe in that.Such a man as this, who has been hard-fisted all his life, and who has had his eyes thoroughly open, who has made his own money in the sharp intercourse of man to man, and who keeps it to the last gasp,--he doesn't believe that he'll do his soul any good by giving it to hospitals when he can't keep it himself any longer.His mind has freed itself from those cobwebs long since.He gives his money to hospitals because the last pleasure of which he is capable is that of spitting his relations.And it is a great pleasure to an old man, when his relations have been disgusted with him for being old and loving his money.I rather think I should do it myself.'
'I'd give myself a chance of going to heaven, I think,' said Parker.
'Don't you know that men will rob and cheat on their death-beds, and say their prayers all the time? Old Wharton won't leave his money to hospitals if he's well handled by those about him.'
'And you'll handle him well;--eh, Lopez?'
'I won't quarrel with him, or tell him that he's a curmudgeon because he doesn't do all that I want him.He's over seventy, and he can't carry his money with him.'