“Why,” replied the Captain, with an air of intense sincerity, “I’d do it for you with pleasure--nothing would delight me more; but I promised my grandmother when first I entered the service, that I never _would_ draw a bill as long as I lived; and as a man of honor, you know, and a soldier, I can’t break my word.”
“But I thought you said you had a bill of your own coming due to-morrow,” observed the astute Spoonbill.
“So I did,” said the Captain, taken rather aback in the midst of his protestations, “but then it isn’t--exactly--a thing of _this_ sort; it’s a kind of a bond--as it were--old family matters--the estate down in Lincolnshire--that I’m clearing off. Besides,” he added hurriedly, “there are plenty of fellows who’ll do it for you. There’s young Brittles--the Manchester man, who joined just after you. I never saw anybody screw into baulk better than he does, except yourself--he’s the one. Lazarus, I know, always prefers a young customer to an old one; knowing chaps, these Jews, arn’t they?”
Captain Cushion’s last remark was, no doubt, a just one--but he might have applied the term to himself with little dread of disparagement; and the end of the conversation was, that it was agreed a bill should be drawn as proposed, “say for three hundred pounds,” the Captain undertaking to get the affair arranged, and relieving Spoonbill of all trouble, save that of “merely” writing his name across a bit of stamped paper. These points being settled, the Captain left him, and the unprotected subaltern called for brandy and soda-water, by the aid of which stimulus he was enabled to rise and perform his toilette.
Messrs. Lazarus and Sons were merchants who perfectly understood their business, and, though they started difficulties, were only too happy to get fresh birds into their net. They knew to a certainty that the sum they were asked to advance would not be repaid at the end of the prescribed three months: it would scarcely have been worth their while to enter into the matter if it had; the profit on the hundred pounds’ worth of jewelry, which Ensign Spoonbill was required to take as part of the amount, would not have remunerated them sufficiently. Guessing pretty accurately which way the money would go, they foresaw renewed applications, and a long perspective of accumulating acceptances. Lord Pelican might be a needy nobleman; but he _was_ Lord Pelican, and the Honorable George Spoonbill was his son; and if the latter did not succeed to the title and family estates, which was by no means improbable, there was Lady Pelican’s settlement for division amongst the younger children. So they advanced the money; that is to say, they produced a hundred and eighty pounds in cash, twenty they took for the accommodation (half of which found its way into the pocket of--never mind, we won’t say anything about Captain Cushion’s private affairs), and the value of the remaining hundred was made up with a series of pins and rings of the most stunning magnificence.