Part 13

Is not it appalling? But perhaps you do not know that the first stone of the quite considerable pile left by the late Mr Sam Lewis was laid by youthful ignorance of banking methods--not Samuel's ignorance, dear; _he_ knew all about banks, from his youth up, and quite frequently he took one. He was originally, you must know, a travelling jeweller, though upon a certain Monday morning when, instead of continuing to travel, he sent word to his firm that his liver was not acting--for all the world as though he expected that indispensable organ to go on at the Gaiety in tights and trunks, and a flaxen wig!--also that he was detained by an urgent matter of a lucrative character, likewise he was bidden to the funeral ceremonies of a very dear friend, not to mention his doctor's imperative orders about staying in the house with so serious a suppressed cold; many a conjecturing ear took a more forward inclination in the vain hope of learning something a little more definite. In reality, Samuel was occupied in raising twenty thousand spangles for a young gentleman who, after interviewing his pass-book, had come to the sickening conclusion that he had overdrawn his banking account to about that tune. The poor boy had, in a lucid interval between drinks, sent for the little parchment wallet and compared its totals in order to see how much more money, if any, he had got to spend before he died, and from even the most careless analysis of the figures there existed between the right-hand columns and the left-hand columns a discrepancy of £19,776, 11s. 7d. The very natural conclusion to which these figures, as well as a colossal ache in the back of his head (By Christmas! how it did throb, throb, throb!) resigned him, was that he must have had an even better time than it had seemed--a distinct chunk of consolation in a way, but one that dug no subway for the man who had got to find "a hundred" somehow for a real little topweight, quite the very best that the dear old "Guv'nor" had ever put on any stage.

It was, however, when dear old Sam (as those who paid up as well as those who only renewed, alike addressed him) called in with the cash and spread the bonnie crisp notes of the Bank of England all over the blessed table that the sun took on new brightness. For a single glance at the inside of the pass-book disclosed to the genial Hebrew the fact that, far from being overdrawn, the high-mettled lad, whose magnificent ignorance of ledger-accounts only increased his nobility, simply didn't know which side of the book was the other, and actually had at that moment £19,776, 11s. 7d. standing to his credit.

"Anyhow," he remarked apologetically, after telling his man to fly down to the bank and get four more cheque-books immediately, "there must be thunder in the air, or something, for I'll take my oath I had less to drink last night than I did all the rest of last week put together."

Fancy you, dear kid, not knowing that, unlike the big drapery houses of London, which think nothing of lending an overstrung divinity of the footlights who may be expecting a bed-and-breakfast visit from an old Girton chum, a silk nightie; of sending it home to the _recherché_ little flat at the top of the two-hundred-and-sixty-two stone steps, and of taking it back next morning after all the creases and crow's feet, bar its warehouse ones, have been pressed out by the great weight of some large literary work--Bunyan is about the heaviest in our language--and its pink ribbons have made their first rapid pass under a warm flat iron; the proprietors of les Grands Magasins do not cordially endorse the system of sending out their stock "on appro." Ample facilities for "appro rapide" are afforded on the premises to princesses of the blood and other noble damsels, who do not object to discrown themselves and slip into some lawn or batiste article of the _intime_ toilette at 9 f. 50 in the shadow of a festoon of organdi muslins, or a bunch of shop-soiled ostrich stoles, but the girl who cannot make up her unsettled mind until she has got into the things in her own bedroom and, with her biggest picture hat on and a chrysanthemum in her hair, has marched up and down in front of her cheval glass singing "Won't you come home now, Bill Bailey?" is invariably discouraged. The hierophants of the Louvre, who in their pudacity request even married men who are not accompanied by their own wives to be good enough to conceal their identity as far as possible, claim that the "appro Anglais" system demoralises both the goods and the customers, but especially the goods.

And, somehow, this vagrant mention of married men and their wives reminds me to tell you that the impossible Invernairnes have quite recently made it up and sworn eternal friendship again. It came about all unrehearsed and unexpectedly--at least so she told some two or three hundred women at her club, in strict confidence and on the distinct understanding that it went no further. They have lately been vegetating--in separate beds--in a sweetly rural spot called Hampstead, where the liver-pad and the footpad derive mutual benefit on Bank Holidays, and where all that one need do when one is hungry is to pull up a carrot and milk the cow. From a luxurious sleeping-saloon on the first floor, Lady Invernairne could gaze across miles and miles of the western heath; though the eastern view from the palleted box-room on a higher floor, where his lordship lay like a case of suspended animation, was less imposing, and, indeed, consisted principally of whitewashed walls punctuated by a green door with a small ace-of-diamonds window and a latch string in it.

One night a brilliant thunderstorm swept o'er the Heath, the thunder rolling noisily down the very roofs of rainwashed slate, the heavens parting to take flashlight pictures of the fertile valleys of North Middlesex. A forked blue flame played in the sky above the crematorium at Golder's Hill, a ball of living fire dropped into the lake at Hendon, and--the craven Lady Invernairne crept from her bed to stand by her window and shake with terror, her eyes half closed and her firm, fair bosom--in adaged phrase they used to "lay the table" on her--turned temporarily to gooseflesh. It is at such times, when Nature scolds, that woman needs someone to comfort her and hold her hand till daylight happens or the storm abates. Never dreaming of consequences, Lady Invernairne weakly called down from the box-room the case of "suspended animation," and manlike, he presumed----

But Féo, still a bunch of nerves, has just burst in to say that if a fiver is sufficient recompense for two hours in the Turkish and three plain dishes for dinner, I can be on.

It is.

Toujours a toi, VIOLA.

THE END