Sophy, who had an excellent memory, instantly recognized the name of Goldhanger as being the one she had read on the scrap of paper discovered in her bedroom, but she made no comment on this, merely enquiring whether the perfidious horse had lost his race.
‘Unplaced!’ said Hubert, with a groan.
She nodded wisely. ‘Sir Horace says that if ever you trust to a horse to set your fortune to rights he always is unplaced,’ she observed. ‘He says also that if you game when your pockets are to let you will lose. It is only when you are very well-breeched that you may expect to win. Sir Horace is always right!’
Declining to argue this point, Hubert spoke for several embittered minutes on the running of his horse, casting such grave aspersions upon the owner, the trainer, and the jockey as must have rendered him liable to prosecution for slander had they been uttered to anyone less discreet than his cousin. She let him run on, listening sympathetically, and only when he had talked himself to a standstill did she bring him back to what she thought a far more important point.
‘Hubert, you are not of age,’ she said. ‘And I know that it is quite illegal to lend money to minors, because when young Mr – well, never mind the name, but we knew him well! – when a young man of my acquaintance got into just such a fix, he came to Sir Horace for advice, and that is what Sir Horace said. I believe there are excessively heavy penalties for doing such a thing.’
‘Well, I know that,’ Hubert answered. ‘Most of ’em won’t do it, but – well, the thing is that a friend of mine knew of this fellow, Goldhanger, and gave me his direction, and – and told me what I should say, and the sort of interest I should have to pay – not that that seemed to matter then, because I thought –’
‘Is it very heavy?’ Sophy interrupted.
He nodded. ‘Yes, because, though I lied about my age he knew, of course, that I’m not yet twenty-one, and – and he had me pretty well at his mercy. And I thought I should have been able to have paid it all off after that race.’
‘How much did you borrow, Hubert?’
‘Five hundred,’ he muttered.
‘Good gracious, did you lose all that at cards?’ she exclaimed.
‘No, but I wanted a hundred to lay on that curst screw, you see,’ he explained. ‘It was of no use only to borrow enough to pay my debts, because how was I to pay back Goldhanger?’
Sophy could not help laughing at this ingenious method of finance, but as Hubert looked rather hurt she begged pardon, and said: ‘It is evident to me that your Mr Goldhanger is an infamous rascal!’
‘Yes,’ Hubert said, looking a little haggard. ‘He’s an old devil, and I was a fool ever to go near him. I didn’t know as much about him then as I do now, of course, but still, as soon as I saw him – But it’s too late to be repining over that!’
‘Yes, much too late, besides there is no need to be in despair! I am certain that you have nothing to fear, because he must know he cannot recover his money from a minor, and would never dare to sue you for it.’
‘Dash it, Sophy, I must pay the fellow back what I owe him! Besides, there’s worse. He insisted on my giving him a pledge, and – and I did!’
He sounded so guilty that several hair-raising possibilities flashed through Sophy’s mind. ‘Hubert, you did not pledge a family heirloom, or – or something of that nature, did you?’
‘Good God, no! I’m not as bad as that!’ he cried indignantly. ‘It was mine, and I shouldn’t call it an heirloom, precisely, though if ever it was discovered that I had lost it I daresay there would be the deuce of a kick-up, and I should be abused as though I were a pickpocket! Grandfather Stanton-Lacy left it to me: stupid sort of thing, I think, because men don’t wear ’em nowadays. He did, of course, and my mother says the sight of it brings him back to her as nothing else could, because she never saw him without it on his hand – so you may judge what would happen if she knew I had pledged it! It’s a ring, you know: a great, square emerald, with diamonds all round it. Fancy wearing such a thing as that! Why, one would look like Romeo Coates, or some wealthy cit trying to lionize! Mama always kept it, and I never knew it had been left to me until I went to a masquerade last year, and she gave it to me to wear, and told me it was mine. And when Goldhanger demanded I should give him a pledge, I – I couldn’t think of anything else, and – well, I knew where Mama kept it, and I took it! And don’t tell me I stole it from her, because it was no such thing, and she only kept it because I had no use for it!’
‘No, no, of course I know you would not steal anything!’ Sophy said hastily.
He studied his knuckles with rapt interest. ‘No. Mind, I don’t say I ought to have taken it from my mother’s case, but – it was my own!’
‘Well, naturally you ought not!’ said Sophy. ‘I daresay she would be vexed with you, so we must recover it at once.’
‘I wish I might, but there’s no chance of that now! I don’t know what to do! When that horse failed, I was ready to blow my brains out! I shan’t do so, because I don’t suppose it would mend matters, besides creating a dashed scandal.’
‘What a good thing you told me the whole! I know exactly what you should do. Make a clean breast of the business to your brother! He will very likely give you a tremendous scold, but you may depend upon his helping you out of this fix.’
‘You don’t know him! Scold, indeed! Depend upon it, he would make me come down from Oxford, and thrust me into the Army, or some such thing! I’ll try everything before I apply to him!’
‘Very well, I will lend you five hundred pounds,’ said Sophy.
He flushed. ‘You’re a great gun, Sophy – no, but I don’t mean that! – a capital girl! I’m devilish grateful, but of course I could not borrow money from you! No, no, pray don’t say any more! It is out of the question! Besides, you don’t understand! The old bloodsucker made me sign a bond to pay him fifteen per cent interest a month!’
‘Good God, you never agreed to such an iniquitous thing!’
‘What else could I do! I had to have the money to pay my gaming debts, and I knew it was useless to go to Howard and Gibbs, or any of those fellows, for they would have shown me the door.’
‘Hubert, I am persuaded there is nothing he can do to extort one penny of interest from you! Why, in law he could not even recover the principal! Only let me lend you five hundred pounds, and take it to him, and insist upon his restoring to you the bond you signed, and your ring! Tell him that if he does not choose to accept the principal he may do his worst!’
‘And have him inform at Oxford against me! I tell you, Sophy, he is an out-and-out villain! He would do me all the harm that lay in his power! He is not a regular money-lender: in fact, I’m pretty certain he’s what they call a lock, or a fence: a receiver, you know. What’s more, he would refuse to give me back the ring, and even if I brought him to book he would have sold it, I expect.’
Nothing that Sophy could urge had the power to move him. He was plainly in considerable dread of Mr Goldhanger, and since she found this incomprehensible she could only suppose that some darker threat than had been disclosed to her was being held over his head. She made no attempt to discover what this might be, for she felt reasonably certain that it would not have impressed her. Instead, she asked him what he intended to do to extricate himself from his difficulties, if he would neither apply to his brother nor accept a loan from her. The answer was not very definite, Hubert being young enough still to cherish youth’s ineradicable belief in timely miracles. He said several times that he had a month left to him before he need do anything desperate, and while agreeing reluctantly that he might in the end be forced to go to his brother evidently felt that something would happen to make this unnecessary. With an attempt at lightheartedness, he begged Sophy not to trouble her head over it, and as she perceived that it would be useless to continue arguing with him she said no more.
But when he had left her she sat for some time with her chin in her hand, pondering the matter. Her first impulse, which was to
place the whole affair in the hands of Sir Horace’s lawyer, she regretfully discarded. She was well-enough acquainted with Mr Meriden to know that he would most strenuously resist her determination to pay five hundred pounds into a moneylender’s hands. Any advice he might be expected to give her could only lead to the disclosure of Hubert’s folly, which was naturally unthinkable. Her mind flitted through the ranks of her friends, but they too had to be discarded, for the same reason. But since she was not one to abandon any project she had once decided on she did not for as much as an instant entertain the idea of leaving her young cousin to settle his difficulties for himself. There seemed to be no other course open to her but to confront the villainous Mr Goldhanger herself. This decision was not reached without careful consideration, for although she was not in the least afraid of Mr Goldhanger she was perfectly well-aware that young ladies did not visit usurers, and that such conduct would be thought outrageous by any person of breeding. However, since she could perceive no reason why anyone, except perhaps, Hubert, should ever know anything at all about it, she came to the conclusion, that to hang back from missish scruples would be stupid and spiritless: not the sort of behaviour to be expected of Sir Horace Stanton-Lacy’s daughter.
Having made up her mind to intervene in Hubert’s affairs, it was characteristic of her that she wasted no time in further heart-burnings. It was also characteristic of her that she made no attempt to persuade herself that she might with propriety draw upon Sir Horace’s funds to defray Hubert’s debt. In her view, which he would undoubtedly have shared, it was one thing to spend five hundred pounds on a ball to launch herself into London society, and quite another to force him into an act of generosity towards a nephew of whose very existence he was in all probability oblivious. Instead, she unlocked her jewel-case, and, after turning over its contents, abstracted from it the diamond ear-rings Sir Horace had bought for her at Rundell and Bridge only a year earlier. They were singularly fine stones, and it cost her a slight pang to part with them; but the rest of her more valuable jewelry had been left to her by her mother, and although she had not the smallest recollection of this lady her scruples forbade her to part with her trinkets.
Upon the following day, she contrived to excuse herself from accompanying Lady Ombersley and Cecilia to a silk warehouse in the Strand, and instead, sallied forth quite unaccompanied to those noted jewellers, Rundell and Bridge. The shop was empty of customers when she arrived, but the sight of a young lady of commanding height and presence, and dressed, moreover, in the first style of elegance, brought the head salesman hurrying forward, all eagerness to oblige. He was an excellent man of business who prided himself on never forgetting the face of a valued customer. He recognized Miss Stanton-Lacy at a glance, set a chair for her with his own august hands, and begged to be told what he might have the honour of showing her. When he discovered the true nature of her business he looked thunder-struck, but swiftly concealed his amazement, and, by a flicker of the eyelids, conveyed to an intelligent underling an order to summon on to the scene Mr Bridge himself. Mr Bridge, gliding into the shop, and bowing politely to the daughter of a patron who had bought many expensive trinkets of him (though mostly for quite a different class of female), begged Sophy to go with him into his private office at the back of the show-room. Whatever he may have thought of her wish to dispose of ear-rings carefully chosen by herself only a year before he kept to himself. A civil enquiry for Sir Horace having elicited the information that he was at present in Brazil, Mr Bridges, putting two and two together, instantly resolved to buy the ear-rings back at a handsome figure, instead of resorting, as had been his first intention, to the time-honoured custom of explaining to his client just why the price of diamonds had fallen so low. He had no intention of selling the ear-rings again; he would put them by until the return of Sir Horace from Brazil. Sir Horace, he shrewdly suspected, would repurchase them; and his gratification at being able to do so reasonably would no doubt find expression, in the future, in buying a great many more expensive trifles from the jewellers who had behaved in so gentlemanly a way towards his only daughter. The transaction, therefore, between Miss Stanton-Lacy and Mr Bridges was conducted on the most genteel lines possible, each party being perfectly satisfied with the bargain, Mr Bridges, the soul of discretion, kept Miss Stanton-Lacy in his private office until two other customers had left the shop. He fancied that Sir Horace might not wish it to be known that his daughter had been reduced to selling her jewelry. Without a blink he agreed to pay Sophy five hundred pounds in bills; without a blink he counted them out on the table before her; and without the least diminution in respect did he presently bow her out of the shop.
The bills stuffed into her muff, Sophy next hailed a hackney, and desired the coachman to drive her to Bear Alley. The vehicle she selected was by no means the first or the smartest which lumbered past her, but it was driven by the most prepossessing jarvey. He was a burly, middle-aged man, with a rubicund and jovial countenance, in whom Sophy felt that she might repose a certain degree of confidence, this belief being strengthened by the manner in which he received her order. After eyeing her shrewdly, and stroking his chin with one mittened hand, he gave it as his opinion that she had mistaken the direction, Bear Alley not being, to his way of thinking, the sort of locality to which a lady of her quality would wish to be taken.
‘No, is it a back-slum?’ asked Sophy.
‘It ain’t the place for a young lady,’ repeated the jarvey, declining to commit himself on this point. He added that he had daughters of his own, begging her pardon.
‘Well, back-slum or not, that is where I wish to go,’ said Sophy. ‘I have business with a Mr Goldhanger there, who, I daresay, is a great rogue; and you look to me just the sort of man I may trust not to drive off, and leave me there.’
She got up into the hackney; the jarvey shut the door upon her; climbed back on to the box, and, after expressing to the ambient air his desire to be floored if ever he should be so betwattled again, besought his horse to get up.
Bear Alley, which led eastward from the Fleet Market, was a narrow and malodorous lane, where filth of every description lay mouldering between the uneven cobbles. The shadow of the great prison seemed to brood over the whole district, and even the people who trod the streets, or lounged on doorsteps, had a depressed look not entirely attributable to their circumstances. The coachman enquired of a man in a greasy muffler whether he knew Mr Goldhanger’s abode, and was directed to a house half-way up the alley, his informant hesitating palpably before answering, and seemingly disinclined to enter into any sort of conversation.
A dingy hackney, once a gentleman’s coach, attracted little notice, but when it drew up, and a tall, well-dressed young woman alighted, holding up her flounced skirts to avoid soiling them against a pile of garbage, several loafers and two small, ragged boys drew near to stare at her. Various comments were made, but these were happily phrased in such cant terms as were quite incomprehensible to Sophy. She had been stared out of countenance in too many Spanish and Portuguese villages to be in any way discomposed by the attention she was attracting, and after running a critical eye over her audience beckoned to one of the small boys, and said with a smile: ‘Tell me, does a man called Goldhanger live here?’
The urchin gaped at her, but when she held out a shilling to him, caught his breath sharply, and, stretching out a claw of a hand, uttered: ‘Fust floor!’ He then grabbed the coin and took to his heels before any of his seniors could relieve him of it.
The glimpse of largesse made the crowd converge on Sophy, but the jarvey climbed down from the box, his whip in his hand, and genially invited anyone who had a fancy for a little of the home-brewed to come on. No one accepted the invitation, and Sophy said: ‘Thank you, but pray do not start a brawl! I wish you will wait for me here, if you please.’
‘If I were you, missie,’ said the jarvey earnestly, ‘I’d keep out of a ken like this here, that’s what I’d do! You don’t know what might happen to you!’
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‘Well, if anything happens to me,’ responded Sophy cheerfully, ‘I shall give a loud scream, and you may come in and rescue me. I shall not, I think, keep you waiting for very long.’
She then picked her way through the kennel, and entered the house which had been pointed out to her. The door stood open, and a flight of uncarpeted stairs lay at the end of a short passage. She went up them, and found herself on a small landing. Two doors gave on to this, so she knocked on them both, in an imperative way. There was a pause, and she had an unpleasant feeling that she was being watched. She looked round, but there was no one in sight, and it was only when she turned her head again that she saw that an unmistakable eye was regarding her through a small hole in one of the panels of the door at the back of house. It disappeared instantly, there was the sound of a key turning in a lock, and the door was slowly opened to reveal a thin, swarthy individual, with long greasy curls, a semitic nose, and an ingratiating leer. He was dressed in a suit of rusty black, and nothing about him suggested sufficient affluence to lend as much as five hundred pence to anyone. His hooded eyes rapidly took in every detail of Sophy’s appearance, from the curled feathers in her high-crowned hat to the neat kid boots upon her feet.
‘Good-morning!’ said Sophy. ‘Are you Mr Goldhanger?’
He stood, a little bent, before her, wiping his hands together. ‘And what would you be wanting with Mr Goldhanger, my lady?’ he asked.
‘I have business with him,’ replied Sophy. ‘So if you are he please do not keep me standing in this dirty passage any longer! I cannot conceive why you do not at least sweep the floor!’
Mr Goldhanger was considerably taken aback, a thing that had not happened to him for a very long time. He was accustomed to receiving all sorts and conditions of visitors, from furtive persons who stole into the house under cover of darkness and spilled strange wares upon the desk under the light of one oil lamp, to haggard-eyed young men of fashion seeking relief from their immediate obligations, but never before had he opened his door to a self-possessed young lady who took him to task for not sweeping the floors.