CHAPTER XII

Edward’s engagement at his Club had been with his unfortunate cousin Algernon; who not only wanted a dinner but ‘five pounds or so’ (the hazy margin which may extend illimitably, or miserably contract, at the lender’s pleasure, and the necessity for which shows the borrower to be dancing on Fortune’s tight-rope above the old abyss).

“Over claret,” was to have been the time for the asking; and Algernon waited dinnerless until the healthy-going minutes distended and swelled monstrous and horrible as viper-bitten bodies, and the venerable Signior, Time, became of unhealthy hue.  For this was the first dinner which, during the whole course of the young man’s career, had ever been failing to him.  Reflect upon the mournful gap!  He could scarcely believe in his ill-luck.  He suggested it to himself with an inane grin, as one of the far-away freaks of circumstances that had struck him—­and was it not comical?

He waited from the hour of six till the hour of seven.  He compared clocks in the hall and the room.  He changed the posture of his legs fifty times.  For a while he wrestled right gallantly with the apparent menace of the Fates that he was to get no dinner at all that day; it seemed incredibly derisive, for, as I must repeat, it had never happened to him by any accident before.  “You are born—­you dine.”  Such appeared to him to be the positive regulation of affairs, and a most proper one, —­of the matters of course following the birth of a young being.

By what frightful mischance, then, does he miss his dinner?  By placing the smallest confidence in the gentlemanly feeling of another man!  Algernon deduced this reply accurately from his own experience, and whether it can be said by other “undined” mortals, does not matter in the least.  But we have nothing to do with the constitutionally luckless:  the calamitous history of a simple empty stomach is enough.  Here the tragedy is palpable.  Indeed, too sadly so, and I dare apply but a flash of the microscope to the rageing dilemmas of this animalcule.  Five and twenty minutes had signalled their departure from the hour of seven, when Algernon pronounced his final verdict upon Edward’s conduct by leaving the Club.  He returned to it a quarter of an hour later, and lingered on in desperate mood till eight.

He had neither watch in his pocket, nor ring on his finger, nor disposable stud in his shirt.  The sum of twenty-one pence was in his possession, and, I ask you, as he asked himself, how is a gentleman to dine upon that?  He laughed at the notion.  The irony of Providence sent him by a cook’s shop, where the mingled steam of meats and puddings rushed out upon the wayfarer like ambushed bandits, and seized him and dragged him in, or sent him qualmish and humbled on his way.

Two little boys had flattened their noses to the whiteness of winkles against the jealously misty windows.  Algernon knew himself to be accounted a generous fellow, and remembering his reputation, he, as to hint at what Fortune might do in his case, tossed some coppers to the urchins, who ducked to the pavement and slid before the counter, in a flash, with never a “thank ye” or the thought of it.