DO not know if there be any drug in the Pharmacopœia, or any clearly defined medical treatment, which may ever hope to grapple effectively with the strange disease of jewel-hunger, but if there be not, I have much pleasure in recommending this most singular ill to the notice of a rising generation of physicians. That it is a branch of that mystery of mysteries, la névrose, I have no manner of doubt, for I have seen it in all its forms—a malignant growth which makes night of the lives it plays upon; and flourishes to exceeding profit down in the very heart of tragedies. For the matter of that, the flunkies, who study in the kitchen—as the great master has told us—the characters of their governing acquaintances in the boudoir above over a quart pot and the Police News, get no little insight into the development of the social disaster which treads often upon the heels of jewel-hunger, as they read those extravagantly ornate reports of robbery and of mystery in which a highly moral people revels. These are but gleaners in the field—to them the inner life must remain hidden. No physician hoping to cope with the affection should turn either to gossips or to slanderers for his diagnosis. Let him get down into the caves of the trade, give his ear to the truer narrative which the jewel dealer alone can write for him, and he may hope for material and for success. And if he be wise, he will study both the comedy and the tragedy which such an investigation will bring before him, and will by this means alone set himself up as a specialist.
It is to such a one that I would recommend perusal of the following case which I record here as one of the comedies of my note-book—a story of meanness, cupidity, and stupid cunning; I doubt if there be any philosophy of medicine which could make pretence of solving it. There were but two principal actors mentioned in the argument, and, indeed, it might fairly be called a one-part play. The chief person concerned, Lord Harningham, I had known for many years. He was a man of whom a biographer wrote "that his long and unblemished career was a credit to his country," and to whom a book on the Decalogue was inscribed as to one . Yet they told you in the smoking-rooms that he had starved his first wife, and left his only son as the partner of a horse-coper in Melbourne, on the princely allowance of one hundred and fifty pounds per annum. His wealth, said common report, was anything from fifty thousand to a hundred thousand pounds per annum; and in his second childhood, for he was a septuagenarian when this comedy was played, he was suckled on the nourishing food of expiring leases and forfeited improvements until he seemed to exude sovereigns from every pore in his enormous body.
A meaner man never lived. All similes in converse were based upon his exploits. "As mean as old Harningham" was a phrase you heard every day at the "Bachelors." In the countless old stories they put upon him, telling how, at a tenants' lunch in Bedfordshire, he had cried, "Here's another quart of cider, and hang the expense!" how he had been seen in Farringdon Market buying his own fish; how he haggled with cabmen innumerable; how he had been stricken with a malignant fever on the day he gave away a sovereign for a shilling—there was but the echo of the general sentiment. The society prints were hilarious at the mere mention of his name. I recollect well his anger when a wag said in one of them, "It is rumoured that Lord Harningham is shortly about to give something away." He was in my office next day—a week rarely passed but what I saw him—and he laid the journal upon my table, beating it flat with a stick, and pointing at it with his ample finger as though his very touch would wither the writer.
"Please to read that," he said with forced calm but considerable emphasis, "and tell me if the scoundrel doesn't deserve to be hanged. He dares to mention my name, d'ye see! To mention me, and speak about my concerns. Ha! but I wish I had him under this stick!"
"Of course you don't know who wrote it," said I.
"How should I know?" he gabbled testily. "Do I go round to the taverns swilling gin-and-water with such gutter birds? Do I hobnob with all the half-starved limners in Fleet Street? Pshaw, you talk like a fool!"
I suffered his temper, for he was worth a couple of thousand a year to me. Presently he became calmer, and the humour of the thing dawned upon his dull mind.
"Ha!" he said, snuffing ferociously from the great diamond-studded box he always carried, "I shouldn't wonder if that's Master Bertie Watts—you know my nephew, eh? he owes you something, eh?—well, that's like him, and his scoundrelly impudence—the vagabond!"