212520_The_Adve ... _Way_Through_The_World.pdf - OUDL Home

ON HIS WAY THROUGH THE WORLD 563
CHAPTER XXXVII
NEC PLENA CRUORIS HIRUDO
THE reading of this precious letter filled Philip's friend with
an inward indignation which it was very hard to control or
disguise. It is no pleasant task to tell a gentleman that his
father is a rogue. Old Firmin would have been hanged a few years
earlier, for practices like these. As you talk with a very great
scoundrel, or with a madman, has not the respected reader sometimes
reflected, with a grim self-humiliation, how the fellow is of
our own kind; and homo est? Let us, dearly beloved, who are
outside—I mean outside the hulks or the asylum—be thankful that
we have to pay a barber for snipping our hair, and are entrusted
with the choice of the cut of our own jerkins. As poor Philip read
his father's letter, my thought was : " And I can remember the
soft white hand of the scoundrel, which has just been forging his
own son's name, putting sovereigns into my own palm, when I was
a schoolboy." I always liked that man :—but the story is not de
me—it regards Philip.
"You won't pay this bill?" Philip's friend indignantly said,
then.
" What can I do ?" says poor Phil, shaking a sad head.
"You are not worth five hundred pounds in the world," remarks
the friend.
"Who ever said I was? I am worth this bill, or my credit
is," answers the victim.
" If you pay this, he will draw more."
" I daresay he will :" that Firmin admits.
" And he will continue to draw as long as there is a drop of
blood to be had out of you."
"Yes," owns poor Philip, putting a finger to his lip. He
thought I might be about to speak. His artless wife and mine
were conversing at that moment upon the respective merits of some
sweet chintzes which they had seen at Shoolbred's, in Tottenham
Court Road, and which were so cheap and pleasant, and lively to
look at ! Really those drawing-room curtains would cost scarcely
anything ! Our Regulus, you see, before stepping into his torture-