She picked up the empty tankard, and reached the door before he could find words in his numbed brain to answer her. On the threshold she paused.
“I’ll bring you your score presently,” she said. “When you’ve settled that, you may pack and quit.” She went out, slamming the door.
The score! It was a small thing compared with that terrible menace of gaol and gallows. It mattered little that--save in intent--he was still completely innocent of any complicity in the rash republican plot which had been discovered. Let him be denounced for association with Tucker and Rathbone, and there would be no mercy for the son of Randal Holles the Regicide. His parentage and antecedents would supply the crowning evidence against him. That was plain to him. And yet the score, whilst a comparatively negligible evil, was the more immediate, and therefore gave him at the moment the greater preoccupation.
He knew that it would be heavy, and he knew that the balance of his resources was utterly inadequate to meet it. Yet unless it were met he could be assured that Mrs. Quinn would show him no mercy; and this fresh trick of Fate’s, in bringing him into association with Tucker on the very eve of that conspirator’s arrest, placed him in the power of Mrs. Quinn to an extent that did not bear considering.
It was, of course, he reflected bitterly, the sort of thing that must be for ever happening to him. And then he addressed his exasperated mind to the discovery of means to pay his debt. Like many another in his case, it but remained for him to realize such effects as he possessed. Cursing his confident extravagance of the morning, he set about it.
And so you behold him presently, arrayed once more in the shabby garments that he had thought to have discarded for ever, emerging from the Paul’s Head carrying a bundle that contained his finery, and making his way back to those shops in Paternoster Row where it had been so lately and so jubilantly acquired.
Here he discovered that there is a world of difference between the treatment offered to a seller and to a buyer. He further discovered that the main value of a suit of clothes would appear to be the mere bloom upon it. Once this has been a little rubbed, the garments become, apparently, next-door to worthless. The fact is that he was a soldier who understood soldiering, and they were traders who understood trade. And the whole art of successful trading, in whatsoever degree, lies in a quick perception of the necessities of others and a bowelless readiness to take advantage of them.