It depends altogether on whether they wish to flatter or snub a fellow.”
“You don’t suppose that I wish to snub you?”
“Upon my word I don’t know. I wonder whether you can let me have twenty pounds?”
“My dear Felix!”
“Just so, mother; — but how about the twenty pounds?”
“What is it for, Felix?”
“Well; — to tell the truth, to carry on the game for the nonce till something is settled. A fellow can’t live without some money in his pocket. I do with as little as most fellows. I pay for nothing that I can help. I even get my hair cut on credit, and as long as it was possible I had a brougham, to save cabs.”
“What is to be the end of it, Felix?”
“I never could see the end of anything, mother. I never could nurse a horse when the hounds were going well in order to be in at the finish. I never could pass a dish that I liked in favour of those that were to follow. What’s the use?” The young man did not say “carpe diem,” but that was the philosophy which he intended to preach.
“Have you been at the Melmottes’ to-day?” It was now five o’clock on a winter afternoon, the hour at which ladies are drinking tea, and idle men playing whist at the clubs, — at which young idle men are sometimes allowed to flirt, and at which, as Lady Carbury thought, her son might have been paying his court to Marie Melmotte the great heiress.
“I have just come away.”
“And what do you think of her?”
“To tell the truth, mother, I have thought very little about her. She is not pretty, she is not plain; she is not clever, she is not stupid; she is neither saint nor sinner.”
“The more likely to make a good wife.”
“Perhaps so. I am at any rate quite willing to believe that as wife she would be ‘good enough for me.’“
“What does the mother say?”
“The mother is a caution. I cannot help speculating whether, if I marry the daughter, I shall ever find out where the mother came from. Dolly Longestaffe says that somebody says that she was a Bohemian Jewess; but I think she’s too fat for that.”
“What does it matter, Felix?”
“Not in the least”
“Is she civil to you?”
“Yes, civil enough.”
“And the father?”
“Well, he does not turn me out, or anything of that sort. Of course there are half-a-dozen after her, and I think the old fellow is bewildered among them all. He’s thinking more of getting dukes to dine with him than of his daughter’s lovers. Any fellow might pick her up who happened to hit her fancy.”
“And why not you?”
“Why not, mother? I am doing my best, and it’s no good flogging a willing horse. Can you let me have the money?”
“Oh, Felix, I think you hardly know how poor we are. You have still got your hunters down at the place!”
“I have got two horses, if you mean that; and I haven’t paid a shilling for their keep since the season began. Look here, mother; this is a risky sort of game, I grant, but I am playing it by your advice. If I can marry Miss Melmotte, I suppose all will be right. But I don’t think the way to get her would be to throw up everything and let all the world know that I haven’t got a copper. To do that kind of thing a man must live a little up to the mark. I’ve brought my hunting down to a minimum, but if I gave it up altogether there would be lots of fellows to tell them in Grosvenor Square why I had done so.”
There was an apparent truth in this argument which the poor woman was unable to answer. Before the interview was over the money demanded was forthcoming, though at the time it could be but ill afforded, and the youth went away apparently with a light heart, hardly listening to his mother’s entreaties that the affair with Marie Melmotte might, if possible, be brought to a speedy conclusion.
Felix, when he left his mother, went down to the only club to which he now belonged. Clubs are pleasant resorts in all respects but one. They require ready money or even worse than that in respect to annual payments, — money in advance; and the young baronet had been absolutely forced to restrict himself. He, as a matter of course, out of those to which he had possessed the right of entrance, chose the worst. It was called the Beargarden, and had been lately opened with the express view of combining parsimony with profligacy. Clubs were ruined, so said certain young parsimonious profligates, by providing comforts for old fogies who paid little or nothing but their subscriptions, and took out by their mere presence three times as much as they gave. This club was not to be opened till three o’clock in the afternoon, before which hour the promoters of the Beargarden thought it improbable that they and their fellows would want a club. There were to be no morning papers taken, no library, no morning-room. Dining-rooms, billiard-rooms, and cardrooms would suffice for the Beargarden. Everything was to be provided by a purveyor, so that the club should be cheated only by one man. Everything was to be luxurious, but the luxuries were to be achieved at first cost. It had been a happy thought, and the club was said to prosper. Herr Vossner, the purveyor, was a jewel, and so carried on affairs that there was no trouble about anything. He would assist even in smoothing little difficulties as to the settling of card accounts, and had behaved with the greatest tenderness to the drawers of cheques whose bankers had harshly declared them to have “no effects.” Herr Vossner was a jewel, and the Beargarden was a success. Perhaps no young man about town enjoyed the Beargarden more thoroughly than did Sir Felix Carbury. The club was in the close vicinity of other clubs, in a small street turning out of St. James’s Street, and piqued itself on its outward quietness and sobriety. Why pay for stonework for other people to look at; — why lay out money in marble pillars and cornices, seeing that you can neither eat such things, nor drink them, nor gamble with them? But the Beargarden had the best wines — or thought that it had — and the easiest chairs, and two billiard-tables than which nothing more perfect had ever been made to stand upon legs. Hither Sir Felix wended on that January afternoon as soon as he had his mother’s cheque for £20 in his pocket.
He found his special friend, Dolly Longestaffe, standing on the steps with a cigar in his mouth, and gazing vacantly at the dull brick house opposite. “Going to dine here, Dolly?” said Sir Felix.
“I suppose I shall, because it’s such a lot of trouble to go anywhere else. I’m engaged somewhere, I know; but I’m not up to getting home and dressing. By George! I don’t know how fellows do that kind of thing. I can’t.”
“Going to hunt tomorrow?”
“Well, yes; but I don’t suppose I shall. I was going to hunt every day last week, but my fellow never would get me up in time. I can’t tell why it is that things are done in such a beastly way. Why shouldn’t fellows begin to hunt at two or three, so that a fellow needn’t get up in the middle of the night?”
“Because one can’t ride by moonlight, Dolly.”
“It isn’t moonlight at three. At any rate I can’t get myself to Euston Square by nine. I don’t think that fellow of mine likes getting up himself. He says he comes in and wakes me, but I never remember it.”
“How
