I woke up the next morning without that sense of something delightful
about to happen to me to which I had grown accustomed since my arrival
in Upsidonia, but soon brightened again as I laid my plans for acquiring
an easy and immediate fortune. I knew that a rich man in Upsidonia would
present me with twenty or thirty thousand pounds as readily as a poor
man in England would allow me to present him with it, and would thank
his lucky stars at finding a fool big enough to take it. I only had to
find the rich man.
It seemed to me that I already knew who to apply to. I had made the
acquaintance of a very rich man indeed, when I had gone district
visiting with Mrs. Perry. His name was Hobson, and he had not always
been as rich as he was at present. Mining speculations had ruined him.
He could not touch a thing that turned out right. So sure as he bought
shares in a mine that was supposed to have no gold in it, it turned out
to be one of the richest ever heard of. And even silver played him
false; he had come his biggest cropper over a worked-out silver mine, in
which antimony or some such metal was discovered the moment the shares
seemed to be worth nothing, with the consequence that they had jumped up
again to unheard-of altitudes.
When the crash had come Mr. Hobson had put a bold face on it, and his
wife had behaved nobly. She had given up the confined home in which she
had been so happy without a murmur, and had bought every stick of
furniture that she could cram into a large house. She had bought silks
and laces, furs and jewels, for herself, and clothed her young children
in the richest attire; and she had given up without flinching the
household work in which she had taken such a delight, and engaged a
large staff of servants. All Mr. Hobson's debtors had been allowed to
pay him in full, and he and his family had retired to their mansion,
with a name free of all reproach, it is true, but to such misery as only
people of refinement could experience from such a change in their
surroundings.
And that was not the worst. Mr. Hobson was a kind husband and an
affectionate father. But he had the gambler's fever in his blood, and
the hard lesson he had received had not sufficed to purge him of it.
Since his downfall he had continued to speculate, but with no greater
success than before, and it was much to be feared that unless some help
came to him, not only he, but his blameless wife and his innocent young
children, would sink into yet deeper depths of degradation, and be
obliged at last to go to the playhouse.
Mrs. Perry had come home one afternoon from a round of her district,
full of the troubles of the Hobsons. Mr. Hobson had broken out again,
and had risked a small fortune, not this time in mining, but in a patent
for increasing the amount of petrol to be used in motor-cars. His excuse
was that he had some mechanical knowledge, and had spotted an error in
the invention which he thought would make it useless. But,
unfortunately, he had mentioned his discovery to others, the errors had
been pointed out to the patentees, and they had succeeded in putting
them right. Or, as was darkly hinted, there had been no error at all,
and Mr. Hobson had fallen into a trap. But, in any case, he had had to
realise at a high figure, and had come out of the deal more overloaded
with wealth than ever.
We had all sympathised deeply over the picture of misery that Mrs. Perry
had drawn. Mr. Hobson, she said, was overcome with remorse, and like a
man distracted. He had sat in his overfurnished dining-room with his
head in his hands, while his wife, scintillating with diamonds, though
it was early in the afternoon, had tried to comfort him, her face pale
but full of courage. It had been almost insupportable to hear the
children crying at the table loaded with provisions, and to think that
the father, the bread-loser of the family, was powerless to help them.
"Cannot we do something for them, Samuel?" Mrs. Perry cried.
But her husband shook his head sadly, and said he was afraid not.
"Hobson has himself to thank for it," he said, "and I fear he is
incorrigible. If we were to take the burden of this mistake on our
shoulders he would only make another one. The fact is, he is unfitted
for business affairs. You can lose more money in the city than anywhere
else, but you have to get up very early in the morning to do it, and the
men who are successful at it, and lose large fortunes, are a good deal
cleverer than poor Hobson."
I had offered then and there to look into the case and see if I could do
anything to help. But although everybody said that it was very generous
of me, they all tried to dissuade me from risking the small number of
debts I already possessed. Edward did more. He rather annoyed me by
taking me aside and telling me that my duty was now towards Miriam, and
that it would not be right for me to be charitable at her expense, which
was what it would come to if I tried to straighten out the Hobsons'
badly involved affairs.
But I had now made up my mind that nothing should stand in the way of my
charitable instincts. I was not in a position to do much. I could not
set the unfortunate Hobson on his feet again as a poor man. But I could
go and see him, and come away leaving him a good deal poorer than he was
before.
My heart glowed as I thought of the blessings I should call down upon my
head from him and his sorely tried family. I should be almost in the
position of a walking miracle, bringing relief that must have been
despaired of. The warm gratitude of that unfortunate family would follow
me wherever I went, even if I went out of Upsidonia, as I fully intended
to do, after having relieved Mr. Hobson of part of his burden.
As I jumped out of bed I had already made up my mind. I would go and see
him that very morning. When one has decided upon an errand of mercy one
should lose no time in setting about it.