BOOK THE THIRD: A LONG LANE
Chapter 13: Give a Dog a Bad Name, and Hang Him (continued)
'I have no pride at all, myself,' said Fledgeby, 'and perhaps I don't
cut things so fine as to know one from t'other. But I know this is a
place where even a man of business needs his wits about him; and
if mine can be of any use to you here, you're welcome to them.'
'You are very good,' said Twemlow, faltering. 'But I am most
unwilling--'
'I don't, you know,' proceeded Fledgeby with an ill-favoured
glance, 'entertain the vanity of supposing that my wits could be of
any use to you in society, but they might be here. You cultivate
society and society cultivates you, but Mr Riah's not society. In
society, Mr Riah is kept dark; eh, Mr Twemlow?'
Twemlow, much disturbed, and with his hand fluttering about his
forehead, replied: 'Quite true.'
The confiding young man besought him to state his case. The
innocent Twemlow, expecting Fledgeby to be astounded by what
he should unfold, and not for an instant conceiving the possibility
of its happening every day, but treating of it as a terrible
phenomenon occurring in the course of ages, related how that he
had had a deceased friend, a married civil officer with a family,
who had wanted money for change of place on change of post, and
how he, Twemlow, had 'given him his name,' with the usual, but in
the eyes of Twemlow almost incredible result that he had been left
to repay what he had never had. How, in the course of years, he
had reduced the principal by trifling sums, 'having,' said
Twemlow, 'always to observe great economy, being in the
enjoyment of a fixed income limited in extent, and that depending
on the munificence of a certain nobleman,' and had always pinched
the full interest out of himself with punctual pinches. How he had
come, in course of time, to look upon this one only debt of his life
as a regular quarterly drawback, and no worse, when 'his name'
had some way fallen into the possession of Mr Riah, who had sent
him notice to redeem it by paying up in full, in one plump sum, or
take tremendous consequences. This, with hazy remembrances of
how he had been carried to some office to 'confess judgment' (as
he recollected the phrase), and how he had been carried to another
office where his life was assured for somebody not wholly
unconnected with the sherry trade whom he remembered by the
remarkable circumstance that he had a Straduarius violin to
dispose of, and also a Madonna, formed the sum and substance of
Mr Twemlow's narrative. Through which stalked the shadow of
the awful Snigsworth, eyed afar off by money-lenders as Security
in the Mist, and menacing Twemlow with his baronial truncheon.
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