“You have given me the chance of a career, you put the world within reach of me, you trust me down to the ground, all in one breath. Look here!”
For one minute he was about to throw back the salvation waiting under his nose with most laudable self-respect, but he looked at Strange and his heart got soft again.
“I’d black your boots for you, why shouldn’t I be dependent on you? I’ll take your offer, and—and—and—”
“I told you the conditions, I shall stick to them, we don’t thank one another or get emotional in these transactions, I mean to have my money back, principal and interest, my full pound of flesh. I’m doing a trade with you—take it or leave it, as you like.”
“Do you know I’d die for you?” cried Brydon, in a burst of low-diet mawkishness.
“Die, before you’ve paid in a penny of your premium! If we can come to terms off-hand, I should like to finish up the matter at once, and start for my lawyer’s.”
Brydon got up without a word, and began to make himself decent with shaking hands. At last he found safety in a wild burst of gaiety and by the time he had his best coat on, he was bubbling over with a nervous gentle sort of fun peculiar to his kind.
When they were going downstairs he stopped, and remarked in a soft deprecatory sort of way,
“I say! I believe my heart’s next to gone. Three goes of rheumatic fever leaves that part of a fellow not worth mentioning. Won’t that make the premium pretty stiff?”
“Probably, I never thought of that. However, it’s you will have to pay the piper, not I.”
“You’re an artist in conferring favours—”
“I wouldn’t take your offer, by Jove! I wouldn’t, but that I mean to repay you.”
“But I’ve already taken good care of that!”
“The money isn’t everything,” said Brydon impatiently, “there is such a thing as being proud of a fellow you’ve made, of valuing your own creation—”
“All that comes in the contract, the sense of moral elevation it gives one to run a successful concern, even if it’s only an artist, pleases the carnal mind. There was only the choice between you and a patent medicine, I’d have gone for that but that I heard at the last moment that peppermint was the active principle in its manufacture—I draw the line at peppermint—and you were the only alternative. And look here, old man—But, good Lord! See that child there? Which is more human, the child’s face or the monkey’s on the organ? Upon my word, the imp scores off the beast only in the matter of cheek pouch. Gru! how it hangs!”