“As I am a living man, I thought them real,” gasped the grey-bearded man, who had been seized with a convulsive trembling, awful to see.
“And you advanced money upon them?”
“Yes.”
“Much?”
“All I have in the world. All! All!” he repeated passionately. “I am a ruined man. For God’s sake give me half a tumbler of brandy, if you don’t want me to drop down dead in your house.”
The man’s condition was so dejected that Mr. Mosheh, though inclined to believe him a swindler, took compassion upon him. He opened the door leading into his dining-room, and called to his wife.
“Rachel, bring me the brandy and a tumbler.”
Mrs. Mosheh obeyed. She was a large woman magnificently attired in black satin and gold ornaments, like an ebony cabinet mounted in ormolu. Nobody could have believed that she had fried a large consignment of fish that very day before putting on her splendid raiment.
“Is the gentleman ill?” she asked kindly.
“He feels a little faint. There, my dear, that will do. You can go back to the children.”
“They’re uncommonly clever,” said Mr. Mosheh, fingering the stones, and testing them one by one, sometimes with his file, sometimes by the simpler process of wetting them with the tip of his tongue, and looking to see if they retained their fire and light while wet. “But there’s not a real diamond among them. If you’ve advanced money on ’em, you’ve been had. They’re of French manufacture, I’ve no doubt. I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you. If you’ll leave ’em with me, I’ll try and find out where they were made, and all about them.”
“No, no,” answered the other, breathlessly, drawing the parcel out of Mr. Mosheh’s reach, and rolling up the cotton wool hurriedly. “It’s not worth while, it’s no matter. I’ve been cheated, that’s all. It can’t help me, to know who manufactured the stones, or where they were bought. They’re false, you say, and if you are right I’m a ruined man. Good night.”
He had drunk half a tumbler of raw brandy, and the brandy had stopped that convulsive trembling which affected him a few minutes before. He put his parcel in his breast pocket, pulled himself together, and walked slowly and stiffly out of the room and out of the house, Mr. Mosheh accompanying him to the door.
“You can show those stones to as many dealers, as you like,” said the Jew; “you’ll find I’m right about ’em. Good night.”
“Good night,” the other answered faintly, and so disappeared in the wintry fog that wrapped the street round like a veil.
“Is the fellow a knave or a fool, I wonder?” questioned Mr. Mosheh.
XIX
“To a Deep Lawny Dell They Came”
It was summer time again, the beginning of June, the time when summer is fairest and freshest, the young leaves in the woods tender and transparent enough to let the sunlight through, the ferns just unfurling their broad feathers, the roses just opening, the patches of common land and fuzzy corners of meadows ablaze with gold, the sky an Italian blue, the day so long that one almost forgets there is such a thing as night in the world.
It was a season that Laura had always loved, and even now, gloomy as was the outlook of her young life, she felt her spirits lightened with the brightness of the land. Her cheerfulness astonished Celia, who was in a state of chronic indignation against John Treverton, which was all the more intense because she was forbidden to talk of him.
“I never knew anyone take things so lightly as you do, Laura,” she exclaimed, one afternoon when she found Mrs. Treverton just returned from a long ramble in the little wood that adjoined the Manor House grounds.
“Why should I make the most of my troubles? Earth seems so full of gladness and hope at this season that one cannot help hoping.”
“You cannot, perhaps. Don’t say one cannot,” Celia retorted, snappishly, “if you mean to include me. I left off hoping before I was eighteen. What is there to hope for in a parish where there are only two eligible bachelors, one of the two as ugly as sin, and the other an incorrigible flirt, a man who seems always on the brink of proposing, yet never proposes?”
“You have not counted your devoted admirer, Mr. Sampson. He makes a third.”
“Sandy-haired, and a village solicitor. Thank you, Laura. I have not sunk so low as that. If I married him I should have to marry his sister Eliza, and that would be quite too dreadful. No, dear, I can manage to exist as I am, ‘in maiden meditation, fancy free.’ When I change my situation I shall expect to better myself. As for you, Laura, you are a perfect wonder. I never saw you looking so well. Yet in your position I am sure I should have cried my eyes out.”
“That wouldn’t have made the position better. I have not left off hoping, Celia, and when I feel low-spirited I set myself to work to forget my own troubles. There is so much to be looked after on an estate like this—the house, the grounds, the poor people—I can always find something to do.”
“You are a paragon of industry. I never saw
