Fledgeby, ‘and which money can’t produce; you are boastful of your manners and your conversation; you wanted to pull my nose, and you have let me in for a failure, and your wife says I am the cause of it. I’ll bowl you down. I will, though I have no whiskers,’ here he rubbed the places where they were due, ‘and no manners, and no conversation!’
Having thus relieved his noble mind, he collected the legs of the Turkish trousers, straightened himself on his knees, and called out to Riah in the next room, ‘Halloa, you sir!’ At sight of the old man re-entering with a gentleness monstrously in contrast with the character he had given him, Mr Fledgeby was so tickled again, that he exclaimed, laughing, ‘Good! Good! Upon my soul it is uncommon good!’
‘Now, old ‘un,’ proceeded Fledgeby, when he had had his laugh out, ‘you’ll buy up these lots that I mark with my pencil—there’s a tick there, and a tick there, and a tick there—and I wager two-pence you’ll afterwards go on squeezing those Christians like the Jew you are. Now, next you’ll want a cheque—or you’ll say you want it, though you’ve capital enough somewhere, if one only knew where, but you’d be peppered and salted and grilled on a gridiron before you’d own to it—and that cheque I’ll write.’
When he had unlocked a drawer and taken a key from it to open another drawer, in which was another key that opened another drawer, in which was another key that opened another drawer, in which was the cheque book; and when he had written the cheque; and when, reversing the key and drawer process, he had placed his cheque book in safety again; he beckoned the old man, with the folded cheque, to come and take it.
‘Old ‘un,’ said Fledgeby, when the Jew had put it in his pocketbook, and was putting that in the breast of his outer garment; ‘so much at present for my affairs. Now a word about affairs that are not exactly mine. Where is she?’
With his hand not yet withdrawn from the breast of his garment, Riah started and paused.
‘Oho!’ said Fledgeby. ‘Didn’t expect it! Where have you hidden her?’
Showing that he was taken by surprise, the old man looked at his master with some passing confusion, which the master highly enjoyed.
‘Is she in the house I pay rent and taxes for in Saint Mary Axe?’ demanded Fledgeby.
‘No, sir.’
‘Is she in your garden up atop of that house—gone up to be dead, or whatever the game is?’ asked Fledgeby.
‘No, sir.’
‘Where is she then?’
Riah bent his eyes upon the ground, as if considering whether he could answer the question without breach of faith, and then silently raised them to Fledgeby’s face, as if he could not.
‘Come!’ said Fledgeby. ‘I won’t press that just now. But I want to know this, and I will know this, mind you. What are you up to?’
The old man, with an apologetic action of his head and hands, as not comprehending the master’s meaning, addressed to him a look of mute inquiry.
‘You can’t be a gallivanting dodger,’ said Fledgeby. ‘For you’re a “regular pity the sorrows”, you know—if you do know any Christian rhyme—“whose trembling limbs have borne him to”—et cetrer. You’re one of the Patriarchs; you’re a shaky old card; and you can’t be in love with this Lizzie?’
‘O, sir!’ expostulated Riah. ‘O, sir, sir, sir!’
‘Then why,’ retorted Fledgeby, with some slight tinge of a blush, ‘don’t you out with your reason for having your spoon in the soup at all?’
‘Sir, I will tell you the truth. But (your pardon for the stipulation) it is in sacred confidence; it is strictly upon honour.’
‘Honour too!’ cried Fledgeby, with a mocking lip. ‘Honour among Jews. Well. Cut away.’
‘It is upon honour, sir?’ the other still stipulated, with respectful firmness.
‘Oh, certainly. Honour bright,’ said Fledgeby.
The old man, never bidden to sit down, stood with an earnest hand laid on the back of the young man’s easy chair. The young man sat looking at the fire with a face of listening curiosity, ready to check him off and catch him tripping.
‘Cut away,’ said Fledgeby. ‘Start with your motive.’
‘Sir, I have no motive but to help the helpless.’
Mr Fledgeby could only express the feelings to which this incredible statement gave rise in his breast, by a prodigiously long derisive sniff.
‘How I came to know, and much to esteem and to respect, this damsel, I mentioned when you saw her in my poor garden on the house-top,’ said the Jew.
‘Did you?’ said Fledgeby, distrustfully. ‘Well. Perhaps you did, though.’
‘The better I knew her, the more interest I felt in her fortunes. They gathered to a crisis. I found her beset by a selfish and ungrateful brother, beset by an unacceptable wooer, beset by the snares of a more powerful lover, beset by the wiles of her own heart.’
‘She took to one of the chaps then?’
‘Sir, it was only natural that she should incline towards him, for he had many and great advantages. But he was not of her station, and to marry her was not in his mind. Perils were closing round her, and the circle was fast darkening, when I—being as you have said, sir, too old and broken to be suspected of any feeling for her but a father’s—stepped in, and counselled flight. I said, “My daughter, there are times of moral danger when the hardest virtuous resolution to form is flight, and when the most heroic bravery is flight.” She answered, she had had this in her thoughts; but whither to fly without help she knew not, and there were none to help her. I showed her there was one to help her, and it was I. And she is gone.’
‘What did you do with her?’ asked Fledgeby, feeling his cheek.
‘I placed her,’ said the old man, ‘at a distance;’ with a grave smooth outward sweep from one another of his two open hands at arm’s length; ‘at a distance—among certain of our people, where her industry would serve her, and where she could hope to exercise it, unassailed from any quarter.’
Fledgeby’s eyes had come from the fire to notice the action of his hands when he said ‘at a distance.’ Fledgeby now tried (very unsuccessfully) to imitate that action, as he shook his head and said, ‘Placed her in that direction, did you? Oh you circular old dodger!’
With one hand across his breast and the other on the easy chair, Riah, without justifying himself, waited for further questioning. But, that it was hopeless to question him on that one reserved point, Fledgeby, with his small eyes too near together, saw full well.
‘Lizzie,’ said Fledgeby, looking at the fire again, and then looking up. ‘Humph, Lizzie. You didn’t tell me the other name in your garden atop of the house. I’ll be more communicative with you. The other name’s Hexam.’
Riah bent his head in assent.
‘Look here, you sir,’ said Fledgeby. ‘I have a notion I know something of the inveigling chap, the powerful one. Has he anything to do with
