Unless I could add five
thousand dollars to my ten thousand before the end of the month I
should have to bolt!
This melancholy conclusion was reenforced and rendered demonstrable by
a letter which arrived, to crown my woes, from my respected father,
informing me that he had unhappily become indebted to our chairman in
the sum of two thousand pounds, the result of a deal between them,
that he had seen the chairman, that the chairman was urgent for
payment, that he used most violent language against our family in
general, ending by declaring his intention of stopping my salary to
pay the parental debt. "If he doesn't like it he may go, and small
loss." This was a most unjustifiable proceeding, but I was hardly in a
position to take up a high moral attitude toward the chairman, and in
the result I saw myself confronted with the certainty of beggary and
the probability of jail. But for this untoward reverse of fortune I
might have taken courage and made a clean breast of my misdoings,
relying on the chairman's obligations to my father to pull me through.
But now, where was I? I was, as Donna Antonia put it, very deep in
indeed.
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