PRESSURE AND TENSION.
A YEAR passed away — a long, long year of twelve whole weary months — during which many small but important incidents happened to Paul and to Nea also.
For one thing, a few days after Paul’s return to town, Mr. Solomons dropped in one afternoon at the young man’s chambers in the little lane off Gower street. The week had aged him much. A settled gloom brooded over his face, and that stern look about the corners of his mouth seemed more deeply ingrained in its very lines than ever. His hair was grayer and his eyes less keen. But, strange to say, the blue tint had faded wholly from his lips, and his cheeks bore less markedly the signs of that weakness of the heart which some short time before had been so painfully apparent. He sat down moodily in Paul’s easy-chair, and drew forth a folded sheet of official-looking paper from his inner breast-pocket.
“Sir Paul,” he said, bending forward, with less of familiarity and more coldness than usual, “I’ve brought up this paper for you to take care of. I’ve brought it to you rather than to anybody else because I believe I can really trust you. After the blow I’ve received — and how terrible a blow it was no man living will ever know, for I’m of the sort that these things affect internally — after the blow I’ve received, perhaps I’m a fool to trust any man. But I think not. I think I know you. As I said to that miserable woman the other evening, one ought at least to know when one has a gentleman to deal with.”
Paul bowed his head with a faint blush of modesty at so much commendation from Mr. Solomons.
“It’s very good of you,” he said, “to think so well of me. I hope, Mr. Solomons, I shall always be able to deserve your confidence.”
Mr. Solomons glanced up suspiciously once more.
“I hope so,” he said in a very dry voice. “I hope you won’t forget that a debt’s a debt, whether it’s owed to poor Leo and me or to the Metropolitan Jewish Widows and Orphans. Well, that’s neither here nor there. What I want you to do to-day is to look at this will — circumstances have compelled me to make a new one — and to see whether it meets with your approbation.”
Paul took the paper with a faint smile and read it carefully through. It resembled the former one in most particulars, except, of course, for the entire omission of Lionel’s name in the list of bequests; but it differed in two or three minor points. The bulk of Mr. Solomons’ fortune was now left, in trust, to the Jewish Board of Guardians; and the notes and acceptances of Sir Paul Gascoyne, Baronet, were specially mentioned by name among the effects bequeathed to those worthy gentlemen, to be employed for the good of the Metropolitan Hebrew community. Mention was also made of a certain sum, already paid over in trust to the Board for the benefit of Maria Agnese Solomons, widow of Lionel Solomons, deceased, which was to revert, on the death of the said Maria Agnese to the General Trust, and be employed by the Guardians for the same purposes. There was a special bequest of ten pounds to Sir Paul Gascoyne, Baronet, for a mourning ring; and a similar bequest to Faith, wife of Charles Thistleton, Esquire, ‘and one of the testator’s most esteemed friends. But beyond that small testimony of regard there was little to interest Paul in the document. He handed it back with a smile to Mr. Solomons, and said shortly, “I think there’s nothing to object to in any part of it. It was kind of you to remember myself and my sister.”
Mr. Solomons’ eyes looked him through and through.
“I want you to take care of it,” he said abruptly.
“I will,” Paul answered. “But I would like first to ask you just one favor.”
“What’s that?” Mr. Solomons asked sharply.
“If I can succeed in paying you off during — well, during your own lifetime, will you kindly remove the mention of my notes and acceptances? I wouldn’t like them to be noticed in the papers, if possible.”
“I will,” Mr. Solomons answered, looking at him harder than ever. “Sir Paul, you’re a very honorable young man.”
“Thank you,” Paul replied. “You are always very good to me.”
“They don’t all talk like that!” Mr. Solomons retorted, with temper. “They mostly call me a ‘damned old Jew.’ That’s generally all the praise a man gets for helping people out of their worst difficulties.”
And he left the will with Paul with many strict injunctions to keep it safe, and to take care nobody ever had a chance of meddling with it.
In the course of the year, too, Paul was very successful in his literary ventures. Work flowed in faster than he could possibly do it. That’s the luck of the trade: sometimes the deserving man plods on unrecognized till he’s nearly fifty before anybody hears of him; sometimes editors seem to hunt out with a rush the merest beginner who shows promise or performance. It’s all a lottery, and Paul happened to be one of the lucky few who draw winning numbers. Perhaps that magical suffix of “Bart.” stood here, too, in good stead; perhaps his own merits secured him custom; but, at any rate, he wrote hopefully to Nea, if health and strength kept up, he could get as many engagements now as ever he wanted.
Health and strength, however, were severely tried in the effort to fulfill Mr. Solomons’ exacting requirements. Paul worked early and late, at the hardest of all trades (for if you think literature is mere play, dear sir or madam, you’re profoundly mistaken); and he saved, too, much out of food and lodging in order to meet as many as possible of those hateful notes from quarter to quarter. Mr. Solomons himself remonstrated at times; he complained that Paul, by starving himself and working too hard, was running the risk in the long run of defrauding his creditor. “For all that, you know,” he said demonstratively, “your health and strength’s my only security. Of course there’s the insurance; that’s all right if you die outright; but literary men who break down don’t generally die; they linger on forever a burden to their friends or the parish, with nervous diseases. As a duty to me, Sir Paul, and to the Metropolitan Widows and Orphans, you ought to feed yourself better and take more rest. I don’t mean to say I don’t like to see a young man working hard and paying up regular; that’s only honest; but what I say is this: there’s moderation in all things. It isn’t fair to me, you see, to run the risk of laying yourself up before you’ve paid it all off to the last farthing.”
Nevertheless it must be admitted that Mr. Solomons received Paul’s hard-earned money with a certain close-fisted joy which sometimes shocked, and even surprised, his simple-hearted young debtor. To say the truth, the miserly instinct in Mr. Solomons, kept somewhat in check by many better feelings during Mr. Lionel’s lifetime, seemed now completely to have gained the upper hand in his cramped and narrowed later nature. They say the ruling passions grow fiercer in old age; doubtless they are wrong; but in Mr. Solomons’ case the proverbial paradox had at least a certain external semblance of justification. Quarter after quarter, as Paul paid in his instalments of principal and interest, the old man grumbled over and over again at the insufficiency of the amount and the slowness of the repayment. Yet what seemed to Paul strangest of all was the apparent contradiction that while Mr. Solomons thus perpetually urged him by implication to work harder and harder, he was at the same time forever urging him in so many words to take more holiday and spend more money and time on food and pleasure. Not that Mr. Solomons ever put these requests upon sympathetic grounds: he always based them solely and wholly on considerations of his own interest. “If you don’t take more care of yourself,” he would often say with that cold stern face unchanged for one moment, “you’ll make yourself ill, and go off into a nervous wreck, and come upon the parish — and then what’ll become of all the money I’ve advanced you?”
“I can’t help it,” Paul would answer. “I feel I must somehow; I can never rest till I’ve cleared it all off, and am my own master.”
“I know what that means,” Mr. Solomons said once, near the end of the year when autumn was coming round again. “You’re in a hurry to marry this young lady down in Cornwall. Ah, that’s just the way of all you borrowing people. You enter into contracts with one man first, for money down, his own hard-saved money, that he’s made and hoarded; and then, when you’ve eaten and drunk it all up, you go and fall in love with some girl you’ve never seen in your lives before, and for her sake, a stranger’s sake, you forget all about your vested obligations. I wish you’d take my advice and marry the young woman out of hand. I’d be all the safer in the end to get my money.” Paul shook his head.
“I can’t bear to, and, even if I would, Miss Blair wouldn’t. She said herself she’d never burden my life any further. I must work on now to the bitter end, and in the course of years, perhaps, I may be able to marry her.”
“In the course of years!” Mr. Solomons echoed fretfully. “In the course of years, indeed! And do you think, then, I’m going to live on forever? No, no; I want to see some pleasure and satisfaction out of my money in my own lifetime. I’m not going to stand this sort of thing much longer. You ought to marry her, and settle down in life to do better work. If you’d get a house of your own now, with Lady Gascoyne at the head of your table, and could give dinners, and invite the world, and take your proper part in London society, you’d soon be coining money — a man of your brains, with no home to entertain in! You’re keeping me out of my own — that’s just what I call it.”
“I’m sorry I disappoint you, Mr. Solomons,” Paul answered sadly, “but I’m afraid I can’t help it. I can never marry till I’m independent.”
Mr. Solomons rose and moved to the door.
“I must put a stop to this nonsense,” he murmured resolutely. “I can’t let this sort of thing go on much longer. If I have to put the Courts in action to get what I want, I must put a stop before another week to this confounded nonsense.”
“Put the Courts in action!” Paul cried, aghast at the ugly phrase. “Oh, no, Mr. Solomons, you can never mean that! You won’t expose an old friend, who has always tried his best to repay you for all your kindness, to so much unpleasantness. I’ll do anything — in reason — to prevent such a contingency.”
But Mr. Solomons only gazed back at him with that inquiring glance. Then he drew himself up and said with a stony face:
“Sir Paul Gascoyne, I’ve always said you were a gentleman. I hope you won’t compel me to be too hard upon you. I hope you’ll think it over, and see your way to marry the lady.”
Paul flung himself back in his easy-chair as Mr. Solomons closed the door behind him, and felt for once in his life very bitterly against his old benefactor, as he had always considered him. He was half inclined, in that moment of pique, to take him at his word, and to beg and implore Nea to marry him immediately.
As for Mr. Solomons, in his lonely room at Hillborough that night, he sat down by himself, with a resolute air, to write two letters which he hoped might influence his recalcitrant debtor. He wrote them in a firm, clear hand, little shaky with age, and read them over more than once to himself, admiring his own persuasive eloquence. Then he put them into two envelopes, and duly directed them. The superscription of one was to the Rev. Walter Blair, the Rectory, Lanhydran, near Fowey, Cornwall. That of the other was to Mrs. Charles Thistleton, Ward law House, The Parks, Sheffield. And what especially impelled him to write this last was the fact that Miss Nea Blair was at that moment in the north, on a long promised visit to Sir Paul’s sister.