“I’ll give you your revenge another time,” said McBane, as they rose. “Luck is against you tonight, and I’m unwilling to take advantage of a clever young fellow like you. Meantime,” he added, tossing the notes of hand carelessly on a bureau, “don’t worry about these bits of paper. Such small matters shouldn’t cut any figure between friends; but if you are around the hotel tomorrow, I should like to speak to you upon another subject.”
“Very well, captain,” returned Tom somewhat ungraciously.
Delamere had been completely beaten with his own weapons. He had tried desperately to cheat McBane. He knew perfectly well that McBane had discovered his efforts and had cheated him in turn, for the captain’s play had clearly been gauged to meet his own. The biter had been bit, and could not complain of the outcome.
The following afternoon McBane met Delamere at the hotel, and bluntly requested the latter to propose him for membership in the Clarendon Club.
Delamere was annoyed at this request. His aristocratic gorge rose at the presumption of this son of an overseer and ex-driver of convicts. McBane was good enough to win money from, or even to lose money to, but not good enough to be recognized as a social equal. He would instinctively have blackballed McBane had he been proposed by someone else; with what grace could he put himself forward as the sponsor for this impossible social aspirant? Moreover, it was clearly a vulgar, cold-blooded attempt on McBane’s part to use his power over him for a personal advantage.
“Well, now, Captain McBane,” returned Delamere diplomatically, “I’ve never put anyone up yet, and it’s not regarded as good form for so young a member as myself to propose candidates. I’d much rather you’d ask some older man.”
“Oh, well,” replied McBane, “just as you say, only I thought you had cut your eye teeth.”
Delamere was not pleased with McBane’s tone. His remark was not acquiescent, though couched in terms of assent. There was a sneering savagery about it, too, that left Delamere uneasy. He was, in a measure, in McBane’s power. He could not pay the thousand dollars, unless it fell from heaven, or he could win it from someone else. He would not dare go to his grandfather for help. Mr. Delamere did not even know that his grandson gambled. He might not have objected, perhaps, to a gentleman’s game, with moderate stakes, but he would certainly, Tom knew very well, have looked upon a thousand dollars as a preposterous sum to be lost at cards by a man who had nothing with which to pay it. It was part of Mr. Delamere’s creed that a gentleman should not make debts that he was not reasonably able to pay.
There was still another difficulty. If he had lost the money to a gentleman, and it had been his first serious departure from Mr. Delamere’s perfectly well understood standard of honor, Tom might have risked a confession and thrown himself on his grandfather’s mercy; but he owed other sums here and there, which, to his just now much disturbed imagination, loomed up in alarming number and amount. He had recently observed signs of coldness, too, on the part of certain members of the club. Moreover, like most men with one commanding vice, he was addicted to several subsidiary forms of iniquity, which in case of a scandal were more than likely to come to light. He was clearly and most disagreeably caught in the net of his own hypocrisy. His grandfather believed him a model of integrity, a pattern of honor; he could not afford to have his grandfather undeceived.
He thought of old Mrs. Ochiltree. If she were a liberal soul, she could give him a thousand dollars now, when he needed it, instead of making him wait until she died, which might not be for ten years or more, for a legacy which was steadily growing less and might be entirely exhausted if she lived long enough—some old people were very tenacious of life! She was a careless old woman, too, he reflected, and very foolishly kept her money in the house. Latterly she had been growing weak and childish. Some day she might be robbed, and then his prospective inheritance from that source would vanish into thin air!
With regard to this debt to McBane, if he could not pay it, he could at least gain a long respite by proposing the captain at the club. True, he would undoubtedly be blackballed, but before this inevitable event his name must remain posted for several weeks, during which interval McBane would be conciliatory. On the other hand, to propose McBane would arouse suspicion of his own motives; it might reach his grandfather’s ears, and lead to a demand for an explanation, which it would be difficult to make. Clearly, the better plan would be to temporize with McBane, with the hope that something might intervene to remove this cursed obligation.
“Suppose, captain,” he said affably, “we leave the matter open for a few days. This is a thing that can’t be rushed. I’ll feel the pulse of my friends and yours, and when we get the lay of the land, the affair can be accomplished much more easily.”
“Well, that’s better,” returned McBane, somewhat mollified—“if you’ll do that.”
“To be sure I will,” replied Tom easily, too much relieved to resent, if not too preoccupied to perceive, the implied doubt of his veracity.
McBane ordered and paid for more drinks, and they parted on amicable terms.
“We’ll let these notes stand for the
