Miser Farebrother Volume Ii Part 15

Then came the result, and Jeremiah could scarcely refrain from shouting when he heard the name of the winner--Praxis.

"Here's your money," said Captain Ablewhite, after "All right!" was called out by the man at the tape. He handed Jeremiah four ten-pound notes. "Easy, isn't it? Done the trick this time. Major Rex-Schon backed it; he has a system, and has won eight thousand this year if he's won a penny."

"A system?" said Jeremiah, handling the forty pounds with delight.

"Yes. See which horse he backs in the next race, and follow him. Reckon you've won thirty pounds, and back the Major's fancy for a tenner."

Jeremiah, after some hesitation, decided to take the advice, and backed the Major's fancy for ten pounds at six to one. Again he was fortunate, and he won sixty pounds. His head throbbed with the possibilities of the future. Major Rex-Schon, satisfied with his winnings, took his departure, and Jeremiah bet no more on that occasion.

"What are you going to do to-night?" asked Captain Ablewhite.

"Nothing," replied Jeremiah.

"Come and have a bit of dinner with me," said the Captain.

To enjoy anything at another man's expense was an opportunity which Jeremiah never neglected, and he and Captain Ablewhite had their bit of dinner at a French restaurant. The Captain was a man of expensive tastes, and the dinner was the best meal which Jeremiah had ever sat down to. The wines were hock, champagne, and claret, and Jeremiah took his share; he was entering upon a new world. When the dinner was over, and they were finis.h.i.+ng the claret and smoking the Captain's best cigars, Jeremiah's host gave his views of betting on horse-racing.

"The great thing," he said, "is a head for figures. Most men lose; the clever ones win great fortunes. Major Rex-Schon, when he began to bet, was a ruined man. He has been at it three years, and is worth fifty thousand--every penny of it. What he can do, others can do. For my part, I don't mind confessing it, I haven't a level head, and I lose when I ought to win. I make up my mind beforehand, and I don't keep to it; I get led away. If I had been wise, being in the swim as I am, I ought to be a millionaire; but it's not too late. There are better chances now than ever. Yes, I ought to have been a millionaire, and I should have been if I had had a man like you at my back. It's a great thing, you know, being in the swim, in a position to get at the stable secrets.

Why, there was only yesterday now: the owner of Robert Macaire dropped me a hint to bet against his horse for the Liverpool Cup. Instead of taking his advice I, like a fool, mentioned it to Major Rex-Schon. What does he do? An hour afterwards he bets seven thousand to one against Robert Macaire, and to-day at one o'clock the horse is scratched.

Result, the level-headed Major is a clear thousand in pocket, which should have been in mine. Waiter, bring me the _Daily Telegraph_ and the special _Standard_. Now, look here at the _Telegraph_ this morning. Ah, here it is. 'Liverpool Cup, 7000 to 1000 against Robert Macaire.' That was the Major's bet, made last night. Here's the special _Standard_.

'Scratchings: Robert Macaire out of the Liverpool Cup, at 1.10 P.M.' I don't cry, 'What infernal luck!' I know that I lost a thousand pounds by my own folly--that's the long and the short of it. I'll tell you what the best of this kind of speculation is. You get your money; no owings.

Ready money down, if you like; that's what would suit you?"

"Yes," said Jeremiah, sucking in every word, and yet believing that it was he who was pumping Captain Ablewhite, and not Captain Ablewhite who was pumping him; "that is the best plan."

"Of course it is. You got your money to-day, didn't you? And how long did it take? Forty pounds in ten minutes on Praxis. You ought to have done as I told you, and made a hundred."

"I ought," groaned Jeremiah, feeling as if somebody had cheated him out of sixty pounds.

"I don't blame you entirely; you are not used to this sort of thing, and you were cautious. But I'll be bound you never made forty pounds first and sixty pounds afterward so quickly. That's the beauty of the thing."

"Do you know," inquired Jeremiah, "what the Major's system is?"

"Catch the Major telling anybody!" said Captain Ablewhite. "No, sir; he keeps it to himself--as you would do if you had a sure thing, as I would do, as anybody would do. If he finds any one watching him he puts him off the scent, or drops betting. Know his system! I would give ten thousand pounds to know it. But what matters? There are more systems than one, and if there's a man in the country who can discover them, you are the man. A long head like yours--such a calculator as you! There's backing first favourites; there's backing second favourites; there's backing them both together; there's backing outsiders; there's backing short odds and long odds; there's backing jockeys. If one thing won't do alone, there are combinations. Why, there never was such a field and such opportunities for a head like yours! With what I can learn from the stables, and what you could discover, such an absolute certainty never presented itself. Everything hasn't been discovered yet. There are a thousand fortunes in figures and calculations which some fellows will make. Why not you, for one, and me, for another? I won't make a pretence of disguising from you that I want a little bit of it. That's natural enough, and you won't make a pretence of denying it. Fair play's a jewel. Then there's the people I can introduce you to--young men who come into great estates and get into messes. There's another field for you. Keep it all to yourself; but give me a commission. I don't ask for more than that. The puddings shall be yours; give me a little plum now and then. Then there's such games as you saw going on last night in my rooms. There are kites and pigeons, and _we_ know it. Why, some of the fellows know about as much of baccarat and poker as a blue-bottle--and they _will_ play when they get a chance! Always have done, and always will. But the great thing is racing. It's waiting for you and made for you every day for nine months in the year. Wants a little pluck now and then; but the result is a moral. Your slow, timid, cautious ones, what do they make? A hundred a year instead of a hundred thousand."

In this way Captain Ablewhite talked, and Jeremiah listened and took it all in. A golden field lay before him, a veritable Tom Tiddler's ground.

What a fool he would be to turn his back upon it! Such a chance would never present itself again.

Behold him, then, a few weeks after this conversation, secretly hand and glove with Captain Ablewhite, going occasionally to the Captain's rooms and picking up a few sovereigns; going occasionally to a race-course and coming home a pound or two the richer, and night after night covering pages upon pages with figures and calculations from racing-books. He was very cautious in these gambling transactions, and he suffered tortures upon nearly every occasion when he sat down in Miser Farebrother's office, which he regarded as his own, and reckoned up what he might have won had he been able to screw his courage to the sticking-point. "Had I done this or that," he thought, "had I had pluck, I should have been so much in pocket. The Captain told me I should require pluck now and then, and that the result would be a certainty--and it would have been." At the end of some three months, during which he was feeling his way, he calculated that a little courage would have made him the richer at least by a couple of thousand pounds--for, as is the case with every person who calculates after the event--he had no doubt that he would have backed such or such a horse or such and such a jockey, or have adopted such or such a combination, the issue of which would have been to put him on the straight, or the crooked, road to fortune. At length he was convinced that he had discovered a certain system of winning. What that system was it would be imprudent to explain here, for the reason that it might lead misguided persons to ruin. Sufficient that Jeremiah was convinced that it was impossible of failure, and that he had very nearly nerved himself to plunge boldly into it.

Meanwhile the fever and the infatuation of betting and gambling had taken such complete possession of him that he thought of little else, except the safety which lay in his marriage with Phoebe. "For," as he argued with himself, "supposing that by some extraordinary combination of circ.u.mstances luck should go against me, I should still be all right if I were the master of Miser Farebrother's business, and if his money were mine." As for anything in shape of sentiment, that was entirely outside his domain; his nature was not capable of it. He thought only of himself, and worked and schemed only for himself.

Meanwhile, also, the course of events was--so far as Jeremiah Pamflett was mixed up in his affairs--fairly satisfactory to Captain Ablewhite.

Instead of being dunned for the money he owed Jeremiah--which by Jeremiah's cunning methods of compound interest, was beginning to swell into an important amount--he borrowed more of him; small sums at a time, certainly, but, as Captain Ablewhite said to himself, "Little fish are sweet." As Jeremiah had him in his power, so also the smiling Captain had managed to obtain a hold upon the man from whom, in ordinary circ.u.mstances, he knew he would get no mercy. Of a different quality of cunning from Jeremiah's was the standard of Captain Ablewhite's intellect, but, properly handled, it was scarcely less powerful. All his life had Captain Ablewhite lived upon his wits, eating and drinking of the best, a member of good clubs, living in fas.h.i.+onable quarters, owing money right and left, and yet managing somehow to keep out of water too hot for him. He entertained a very thorough and sincere contempt for Jeremiah, laughed in his sleeve at his meanness, fooled him on and on, allowed him to win a little at his card-parties, introduced him to men as impecunious and unscrupulous as himself, who borrowed money of Jeremiah, and would have pulled his nose upon the smallest provocation.

But Jeremiah was always humble, cringing, and subservient, biding his time for the grand coup which would make him as good as the best among them. And so the game went on, its minutest detail a.s.sisting to bring to a terrible climax the tragedy in which Phoebe's life was presently to be engulfed. This brings us to the day upon which our heroine, accompanied by Fred Cornwall and dear Aunt Leth, journeyed to Parksides to ask her father's consent to her engagement with the young lawyer.

CHAPTER XIV.

A DAUGHTER'S DUTIES.

Upon that day Jeremiah Pamflett, arrayed in a brand-new suit of clothes, with a flower in his b.u.t.ton-hole (copying Captain Ablewhite as the pink of fas.h.i.+on), and carrying a bouquet of flowers for the girl whom he was now to commence wooing openly, had the satisfaction, while sitting in the railway carriage which was to convey him to Parksides, of seeing her and her friends hurry on to the platform just as the signal was given for the departure of the train. They had had the misfortune to get into a growler, the driver of which, in addition to crawling to the railway station at the rate of three miles an hour, stopped on the road to exchange the reverse of urbanities with a rival cabby who had excited his ire. Fred's urgent requests to the driver to get along quickly, so that they might catch the train, were received with supreme indifference; he was an old hand, and insisted upon having his little joke, the consequence of which was that they arrived too late, and had to wait three-quarters of an hour for the next train. It was no serious trouble to Fred. A house, a railway station, a barn, England, Timbuctoo--they were all the same to him so long as Phoebe was with him.

Jeremiah rushed to his mother with the news.

"What does it mean?" he asked.

"Don't trouble yourself," said Mrs. Pamflett. "Perhaps it is all for the best."

"You talk like a fool," snarled Jeremiah, who was never happier than when he had some one to bully. "How can it be all for the best?"

"It will bring matters to a head, Jeremiah. It is much better for our enemies to work in the light than in the dark. You have nothing to fear.

Miser Farebrother and I had a conversation to-day about you. He told me that everything was settled, and that you and Phoebe were to be married. He is very ill and frightened. The doctor told him if he wasn't very careful he would die. He has been moaning and groaning ever since.

'You mustn't think,' the doctor said to him, 'of stirring out of the house.'"

"Ah!" said Jeremiah, with a sigh of relief, "that is good. Anything more? And was there any special reason for the doctor giving him that caution?"

"It came," said Mrs. Pamflett, "through his expressing a wish to go to London."

"What for?" said Jeremiah, his face growing very white.

"I can't tell you," replied Mrs. Pamflett; "except it was to look after the business."

"To pry into what I am doing! Let him be careful, or it will be the worse for him!"

"Jeremiah!"

"Don't 'Jeremiah' me! I won't stand it! What do I care for that--that image? Do you think I will have him come spying into my affairs? Let him look to himself--that's all I've got to say."

"At any rate," said Mrs. Pamflett, whose face had grown as white as her son's, "he can't leave Parksides."

"You take care that he doesn't--that's what you've got to see to. If he gets any better, make it impossible for him to leave."

"Jere--!" But a warning look from her son prevented her from getting farther with his name. Then she wrung her hands, and cried, "Oh! what are you doing--what are you doing?"

From fever-heat he went down to zero. "What do you think I am doing?"

"I don't know what to think, Jeremiah. You frighten me!"

He did not speak for a moment or two, and in her agony of impatience she cried, "Why don't you answer me?"

"I am puzzling my head to find out," he said, frigidly, "why I have frightened you." He suddenly changed his tone, and spoke with warmth.

"Just you mind what I say, mother. What I choose to tell you, I'll tell you; what I choose to keep to myself, I'll keep to myself. I'm on the road to a great fortune--a glorious fortune; and I'm not going to miss it. I've made a discovery, and if I'm idiot enough to blurt it out, everything will be spoiled. Besides, you wouldn't understand it. Can't you be satisfied? I'm working for you as well as for myself. Do you want to go on slaving here all your life, instead of being mistress of a fine house of your own, with servants and horses and carriages, and the best people in the country bowing down to you? Take your choice. But mind, if anything's got to be done to bring this all about--I don't care whether it is you or I who's got to do it--done it must be. If I'm lucky, you shall share my luck. If I'm unlucky--Well, now, what have you got to say to that?"

"Jeremiah," she answered, and he did not reprove her, because he was too intent upon her response, "there's nothing in the world I wouldn't do for you."