CHAPTER XXV

It requires, happily, many years of an ordinary man’s life to teach him to believe in the exceeding variety and quantity of things money can buy:  yet, when ingenuous minds have fully comprehended the potent character of the metal, they are likely enough to suppose that it will buy everything:  after which comes the groaning anxiety to possess it.

This stage of experience is a sublime development in the great souls of misers.  It is their awakening moment, and it is their first real sense of a harvest being in their hands.  They have begun under the influence of the passion for hoarding, which is but a blind passion of the finger-ends.  The idea that they have got together, bit by bit, a power, travels slowly up to their heavy brains.  Once let it be grasped, however, and they clutch a god.  They feed on everybody’s hunger for it.  And, let us confess, they have in that a mighty feast.

Anthony Hackbut was not a miser.  He was merely a saving old man.  His vanity was, to be thought a miser, envied as a miser.  He lived in daily hearing of the sweet chink of gold, and loved the sound, but with a poetical love, rather than with the sordid desire to amass gold pieces.  Though a saving old man, he had his comforts; and if they haunted him and reproached him subsequently, for indulging wayward appetites for herrings and whelks and other sea-dainties that render up no account to you when they have disappeared, he put by copper and silver continually, weekly and monthly, and was master of a sum.

He knew the breadth of this sum with accuracy, and what it would expand to this day come a year, and probably this day come five years.  He knew it only too well.  The sum took no grand leaps.  It increased, but did not seem to multiply.  And he was breathing in the heart of the place, of all places in the world, where money did multiply.

He was the possessor of twelve hundred pounds, solid, and in haven; that is, the greater part in the Bank of England, and a portion in Boyne’s Bank.  He had besides a few skirmishing securities, and some such bits of paper as Algernon had given him in the public-house on that remarkable night of his visit to the theatre.

These, when the borrowers were defaulters in their payments and pleaded for an extension of time, inspired him with sentiments of grandeur that the solid property could not impart.  Nevertheless, the anti-poetical tendency within him which warred with the poetical, and set him reducing whatsoever he claimed to plain figures, made it but a fitful hour of satisfaction.

He had only to fix his mind upon Farmer Fleming’s conception of his wealth, to feel the miserable smallness of what seemed legitimately his own; and he felt it with so poignant an emotion that at times his fears of death were excited by the knowledge of a dead man’s impotence to suggest hazy margins in the final exposure of his property.  There it would lie, dead as himself! contracted, coffined, contemptible!