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 many horses have you got at Leighton, Dolly?”
“How many? There were five, but I think that fellow down there sold one; but then I think he bought another. I know he did something.”
“Who rides them?”
“He does, I suppose. That is, of course, I ride them myself, only I so seldom get down. Somebody told me that Grasslough was riding two of them last week. I don’t think I ever told him he might. I think he tipped that fellow of mine; and I call that a low kind of thing to do. I’d ask him, only I know he’d say that I had lent them. Perhaps I did when I was tight, you know.”
“You and Grasslough were never pals.”
“I don’t like him a bit. He gives himself airs because he is a lord, and is devilish illnatured. I don’t know why he should want to ride my horses.”
“To save his own.”
“He isn’t hard up. Why doesn’t he have his own horses? I’ll tell you what, Carbury, I’ve made up my mind to one thing, and, by Jove, I’ll stick to it. I never will lend a horse again to anybody. If fellows want horses let them buy them.”
“But some fellows haven’t got any money, Dolly.”
“Then they ought to go tick. I don’t think I’ve paid for any of mine I’ve bought this season. There was somebody here yesterday — ”
“What! here at the club?”
“Yes; followed me here to say he wanted to be paid for something! It was horses, I think because of the fellow’s trousers.”
“What did you say?”
“Me! Oh, I didn’t say anything.”
“And how did it end?”
“When he’d done talking I offered him a cigar, and while he was biting off the end went upstairs. I suppose he went away when he was tired of waiting.”
“I’ll tell you what, Dolly; I wish you’d let me ride two of yours for a couple of days, — that is, of course, if you don’t want them yourself. You ain’t tight now, at any rate.”
“No; I ain’t tight,” said Dolly, with melancholy acquiescence.
“I mean that I wouldn’t like to borrow your horses without your remembering all about it. Nobody knows as well as you do how awfully done up I am. I shall pull through at last, but it’s an awful squeeze in the meantime. There’s nobody I’d ask such a favour of except you.”
“Well, you may have them; — that is, for two days. I don’t know whether that fellow of mine will believe you. He wouldn’t believe Grasslough, and told him so. But Grasslough took them out of the stables. That’s what somebody told me.”
“You could write a line to your groom.”
“Oh my dear fellow, that is such a bore; I don’t think I could do that. My fellow will believe you, because you and I have been pals. I think I’ll have a little drop of curacoa before dinner. Come along and try it. It’ll give us an appetite.”
It was then nearly seven o’clock. Nine hours afterwards the same two men, with two others — of whom young Lord Grasslough, Dolly Longestaffe’s peculiar aversion, was one — were just rising from a card-table in one of the upstairs rooms of the club. For it was understood that, though the Beargarden was not to be open before three o’clock in the afternoon, the accommodation denied during the day was to be given freely during the night. No man could get a breakfast at the Beargarden, but suppers at three o’clock in the morning were quite within the rule. Such a supper, or rather succession of suppering, there had been tonight, various devils and broils and hot toasts having been brought up from time to time first for one and then for another. But there had been no cessation of gambling since the cards had first been opened about ten o’clock. At four in the morning Dolly Longestaffe was certainly in a condition to lend his horses and to remember nothing about it. He was quite affectionate with