Part 12 (1/2)
”Yes,” said Teddy; ”he had been pestering me with his beastly circulars every week of my first year at Cambridge. He even wrote to me in his own fist. It was as though he knew something about me and meant getting me in his clutches; and he got me all right in the end, and bled me to the last drop as I deserved. I don't complain so far as I'm concerned. It serves me right. But I did mean to get through without coming to you again, father! I was fool enough to tell him so the other day; that was when he threatened to come to you himself. But I didn't think he was such a brute as to come to-day!”
”Or such a fool?” suggested Raffles, as he put a piece of paper into Teddy's hands.
It was his own original promissory note, the one we had recovered from Dan Levy in the morning. Teddy glanced at it, clutched Raffles by the hand, and went up to the money-lender as though he meant to take him by the throat before us all.
”Does this mean that we're square?” he asked hoa.r.s.ely.
”It means that you are,” replied Dan Levy.
”In fact it amounts to your receipt for every penny I ever owed you?”
”Every penny that you owed me, certainly.”
”Yet you must come to my father all the same; you must have it both ways-your money and your spite as well!”
”Put it that way if you like,” said Levy, with a shrug of his ma.s.sive shoulders. ”It isn't the case, but what does that matter so long as you're 'appy?”
”No,” said Teddy through his teeth; ”nothing matters now that I've come back in time.”
”In time for what?”
”To turn you out of the house if you don't clear out this instant!”
The great gross man looked upon his athletic young opponent, and folded his arms with a guttural chuckle.
”So you mean to chuck me out, do you?”
”By all my G.o.ds, if you make me, Mr. Levy! Here's your hat; there's the door; and never you dare to set foot in this house again.”
The money-lender took his s.h.i.+ny topper, gave it a meditative polish with his sleeve, and actually went as bidden to the threshold of the porch; but I saw the suppression of a grin beneath the pendulous nose, a cunning twinkle in the inscrutable eyes, and it did not astonish me when the fellow turned to deliver a Parthian shot. I was only surprised at the harmless character of the shot.
”May I ask whose house it is?” were his words, in themselves notable chiefly for the aspirates of undue deliberation.
”Not mine, I know; but I'm the son of the house,” returned Teddy truculently, ”and out you go!”
”Are you so sure that it's even your father's house?” inquired Levy with the deadly suavity of which he was capable when he liked. A groan from Mr. Garland confirmed the doubt implied in the words.
”The whole place is his,” declared the son, with a sort of nervous scorn-”freehold and everything.”
”The whole place happens to be mine-'freehold and everything!'” replied Levy, spitting his iced poison in separate syllables. ”And as for clearing out, that'll be your job, and I've given you a week to do it in-the two of you!”
He stood a moment in the open doorway, towering in his triumph, glaring on us all in turn, but at Raffles longest and last of all.
”And you needn't think you're going to save the old man,” came with a pa.s.sionate hiss, ”like you did the son-because I know all about you now!”
CHAPTER VIII
The State of the Case
Of course I made all decent haste from the distressing scene, and of course Raffles stayed behind at the solicitation of his unhappy friends. I was sorry to desert him in view of one aspect of the case; but I was not sorry to dine quietly at the club after the alarms and excitements of that disastrous day. The strain had been the greater after sitting up all night, and I for one could barely realise all that had happened in the twenty-four hours. It seemed incredible that the same midsummer night and day should have seen the return of Raffles and our orgy at the club to which neither of us belonged; the dramatic douche that saluted us at the Albany; the confessions and conferences of the night, the overthrow of the money-lender in the morning; and then the untimely disappearance of Teddy Garland, my day of it at his father's house, and the rain and the ruse that saved the pa.s.sing situation, only to aggravate the crowning catastrophe of the money-lender's triumph over Raffles and all his friends.