Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/112



“Sorry, my lad. The simple truth is that I have not got it—that you can't wring money from a stone—who is stony broke …” He smiled grimly at his own pun.

Mr. Lewis changed from the wheedling to the minatory.

“M'lord,” he said, “if you don't pay …”

“Right-oh! I know exactly what you are going to do. Have to have your little old pound of flesh, what? And since you can't get it in coin of the realm, you'll take it out in ruin and disgrace—by dragging my son through the court of bankruptcy and through the filth of the ha'penny press. Very well. Hector ruined because of Tollemache”—he mumbled to himself; his sardonic bravado was gone; he was just an old man, feeble, pitiful, senile—“and now Tollemache! Divine Providence and all that sort of asinine drivel …”

He collapsed into a chair and cried, as old men cry, with cracked, ludicrous, high-pitched little sobs, while Tomps, the butler, showed Mr. Sam Lewis to the door.

And one of the results of the interview was that Mr. Preserved Higgins, who was pacing up and down the length of the little cobwebby office of Upper Thames Street, happening to glance at the headline of the afternoon newspaper which the sandy-haired gentleman had brought in, stopped suddenly short and uttered the word “Cricky!”

After which he laughed uproariously.

A minute earlier he had poured forth a volley of oaths, some peculiar to his native heath of Hog Lane,