Paydirt

“ With money in my pocket, and a consciousness, moreover, that I was doing nothing that was either imprudent, unworthy, or really mean, I own it mortified and vexed me to find myself obliged to put up with this impudent ill-usage from people who ought to reflect that they are but the servants of the public, and little likely to recommend themselves to the high by being insolent to the low. ”

“ What wretched amends I can make must be made. I must clear my unfortunate partner’s reputation. I must retain nothing for myself. I must resign to our creditors the power of management I have so much abused, and I must work out as much of my fault—or crime—as is susceptible of being worked out in the rest of my days.’
‘Is it impossible, sir, to tide over the present?’
‘Out of the question. Nothing can be tided over now, Pancks. The sooner the business can pass out of my hands, the better for it. ”

“ Come and work for me as you work for other people; forget that I did you a service which my purse never so much as discovered, and thus force me to be your debtor, since you will accept, in satisfaction of an irreparable outrage, the most paltry of reparations—money. ”

“ In the previous spring a lawyer, whom he had consulted on the state of his affairs, described him in a professional letter as having ‘used the utmost of his endeavours to raise money for the payment of his debts, without success.’ Having vainly tried to raise enough money for the mere payment of his debts, he may well have despaired to raise enough for the satisfaction of his creditors, and his own subsistence to the end of his days. ”

“ He receives the amount advanced to him with an oath and a bitter smile of contempt, letting the money fall into his pocket as if it were an offering of propitiation to an offended deity; then, scowling upon the assembled multitude, he retires, muttering maledictions and vowing to revenge himself upon society in general. ”

“ Nowadays even about business transactions there is a strong spice of adventure. I took risks. In these things there is invariably a certain amount of give and take, and it fell to me finally to do the giving. Reluctantly enough. Even when I had got out of everything, one cantankerous creditor saw fit to be malignant. Perhaps you have met that flaming sense of outraged virtue, or perhaps you have only felt it. He ran me hard. It seemed to me, at last, that there was nothing for it but to write a play, unless I wanted to drudge for my living as a clerk. ”

“ That lavish mode of life renewed with the dawning sun! not a care for the morrow; and I dare not conjecture how few the shillings in that purse. What aggravation, too, of guilt! Bills incurred without means under a borrowed name! I don’t pretend to be a lawyer; but it looks to me very much like swindling. Yet the wretch sleeps. But are we sure that we are not shallow moralists? Do we carry into account the right of genius to draw bills upon the Future? Does not the most prudent general sometimes burn his ships? ”

“ A time was settled between us for paying the money back; and when the time came, I found it (as thousands of other honest men have found it) impossible to keep my engagement. I sent the man a bill. My name was unfortunately too well known on such documents: he failed to negotiate it. His affairs had fallen into disorder, in the interval since I had borrowed of him; bankruptcy stared him in the face; and a relative of his, a French lawyer, came to England to find me, and to insist upon the payment of my debt. ”

“ I wish to inform you that I alone am answerable for the charge brought against, or supposed to exist, against this young man. I lost the money, and replaced the amount with a packet of false notes—no one else. I acknowledge it was my intention to have confessed it all on the following day. I have never had or spent a single penny of the amount, but lost it all by some unaccountable means the same evening on which I neglected to return to the India House. Prosecute me, and I will suffer cheerfully; anything is better than the hellish remorse which I have already suffered. ”

“ One by one he recalled the fraudulent works in which he had had a part,—the school from which he had tried to steal some of the money his uncle had denied him, and finally this hotel, which had crumbled at the touch of fire. That was the strange, dramatic climax of the story, fated so to be from the first petty lust for money, from the first fraud.
Greed, greed! The spirit of greed had eaten him through and through, the lust for money, the desire for the fat things of the world, the ambition to ride high among his fellows. In the world where he had lived this passion had a dignified name ”

“ If you assume the character of a debtor for your own convenience, you must be content to maintain it for ours. If you have not been arrested, we have been disturbed; and it is but just and reasonable you should pay for occasioning such disturbance. ”

“ Mel imperiously spoke. “What are brains given you for? To be played the fool with by idiots and women? You have 5000l. to pay to save your father from being called a rogue. You can only make the money in one way, which is open to you. This business might produce a thousand pounds a-year and more. In seven or eight years you may clear your father’s name, and live better all the time than many of your bankrupt gentlemen. You have told the creditors you will pay them. ”

“ I have seen a creditor come with his wife and children, and beg of the debtor only to let him have part of his own goods again, which he had bought, knowing and designing to break. I have seen him with tears and entreaties petition for his own, or but some of it, and be taunted and sworn at, and denied by a saucy insolent bankrupt. That the poor man has been wholly ruined by the cheat. ”

“ Everybody demands payment, and he who fails to pay is a failure. Owing to the competition, owing to the complexity of modern life, owing to the thousand things that must be known in order to succeed in any direction, on either side of the great highway that is called Progress, are innumerable wrecks. As a rule, failure in some honest direction, or at least in some useful employment, is the dawn of crime. ”

“ It has delivered you bound hand and foot into the hands of the very people you have defrauded of the money you promised them for removing your financial accomplice, Albert Pudleigh—people who, as you have the best reason in the world to know, stick at nothing. ”

“ Then the lights go out, the voices stop, and only the dark tumultuous streets surround us, and the grime of life is ours again. Whereupon we go heavily to hard beds of despair, having eaten the cake we bought, and now must pay for unto Penalty, the dark inordinate creditor. ”

“ When such a fellow made a fuss, it was occasionally necessary to return his money if it was found impossible to bully him into silence. In one or two instances, where I had promised a cure upon prepayment of two or three hundred dollars, I was either sued or threatened with suit, and had to refund a part or the whole of the amount; but most people preferred to hold their tongues rather than expose to the world the extent of their own folly. ”

“ In doing so you will pass by the door of a servant who sleeps so lightly that the chances are that he will hear you; he is armed with a blunderbuss, and with pistols. You say to me, 'Your money or your life.' I say to you, in reply, 'Neither: attempt to seize the money, and your own life is lost. ”

“ I could not consent to banish myself from my country; to flee like a felon; to skulk from society with the base view of defrauding my creditors. No, I have lived honestly, and honestly will I die. By fair application and long industry my wealth has been obtained; and it shall never justly be said, that the reputation of my latter days was stained with acts of baseness and meanness. I have notified and procured a meeting of the creditors, and have laid the matters before them. ”

“ Having already failed by fair means to disprove the genuineness of these manuscripts, you have bought over this ungrateful lad to your side. “If you will perjure yourself,“ you have said to him, “and admit yourself to be a forger, we will see that you do not lose by it; we will give you money—since the old man will not—upon which you and yours can subsist together. ”

“ I do not desire to add to the pain of your position by any extended remarks of my own; but I cannot let the occasion pass without expressing my emphatic condemnation of your offense. The misapplication of public money has become the great crime of the age. If not promptly and firmly checked, it will ultimately destroy our institutions. ”

“ All my affairs are suspended; and this happens on a day when my paper appears, and almost on the eve of the 30th, when I have three thousand francs to pay.
This is one of the thousand accidents of our Parisian life; and every day the like happens in all business. A man on whom you count to do you a service is in the country, and your plan fails. A sum that should have been paid to you is not paid. You must make ten tramps to find some one (and often at the last moment) for the success of some important matter. ”

“ The stranger was inexorable, and nothing would satisfy him but the payment of the money down, or, in default thereof, he threatened to return direct, with a party of the army, and lead, drive, and carry away all that he could find upon the island. At length, fearing such a catastrophe, and finding every effort to soften the hard heart of the excise man completely fruitless, the poor man paid down the amount demanded, and got a regular acknowledgement for the same ”

“ If you once evince symptoms of fear, standing silently horror-struck, at the preposterousness of the imputation, they repeat the blow with redoubled force, and you are lost, at least your money; for it is to obtain your money that the charge is made. ”

“ So much excitement the last three or four months has upset you. It will have to be settled—all will be settled after Pearson gets located, and now it is late, and we must retire. Good night.”
“Good night, officer.”
Pat muttered: “As I hear the big iron door slam after me it makes me blood run cold. I am in a fix. What is money for? To make criminals, I belave. I belave every convict under this blooming roof is here for or on account of money. The vile stuff! We get a living, and have to work, or should if we don’t, and it only keeps us out of mischief—and then it don’t. ”

“ Doing charmingly.’
‘I am very happy and very thankful to know it,’ said the debtor, ‘though I little thought once, that—’
‘That a child would be born to you in a place like this?’ said the doctor. ‘Bah, bah, sir, what does it signify? A little more elbow-room is all we want here. We are quiet here; we don’t get badgered here; there’s no knocker here, sir, to be hammered at by creditors and bring a man’s heart into his mouth. Nobody comes here to ask if a man’s at home, and to say he’ll stand on the door mat till he is. Nobody writes threatening letters about money to this place. ”

“ In speaking of the state of suspension or denial of payment, we say, bankrupt; that is, a merchant who, committing certain acts, gives evidence, that he is criminally disinclined to pay, and who may nevertheless not be insolvent: or, we say, an insolvent; any man who is at once poor and in prison; who surrenders all he has; pays as far as he can; and who, from the absolute want of means, is physically incompetent to pay more. ”

“ For they have not pardoned, nor pardon, nor intend to pardon, for the least thing they want, much less excuse any payment of money. It is money, I say, that they want, and more money, though it be torn from men’s entrails. This I have seen, and how much the loss comes in, so much the more money they want ”

“ When the reckoning is paid, he says, It must not be so, yet is strait pacified, and cries, What remedy? His borrowings are like subsidies, each man a shilling or two, as he can well dispend; which they lend him, not with a hope to be repaid, but that he will come no more. He holds a strange tyrrany over men, for he is their debtor, and they fear him as a creditor. ”

“ Payson repeated the communication in a dispirited tone.
"Bad as that, is it?" said Masterson. "One foot in the grave, so to speak. Well, I tell you what I'll do. I'm interested in your case, for if I can go to work and cure you it'll be more or less of a feather in my cap. See here; I won't charge you but fifty dollars a week till you're cured, and if you ain't a well man in thirty days, I'll hand your money back. That's a fair business proposition, ain't it? I guarantee to put all my time on your case."
Mr. Payson gratefully accepted the terms. ”

“ By this easy way of purchasing pardons, any notorious highwayman, any plundering soldier, or any bribe-taking judge, shall disburse some part of their unjust gains, and so think all their grossest impieties sufficiently atoned for; so many perjuries, lusts, drunkenness, quarrels, bloodsheds, cheats, treacheries, and all sorts of debaucheries, shall all be, as it were, struck a bargain for, and such a contract made, as if they had paid off all arrears, and might now begin upon a new score. ”

“ When time for payment arrives, if you exhibit a familiarity with legal rates you come to know what contempt is; if you find that you have left your pocketbook behind you are made to realise the mildness of Dante’s imagination. ”

“ But besides all this, let his revenues be as great as they will, the demands upon them are commonly greater. Every service done him costs him dear; and it is well if he pays not equally dear for disservice and treachery; a price which yet he is obliged sometimes knowingly to pay, to deceive and flatter an enemy, or a false friend, whom he dares not crush. ”