The Works of George W. M. Reynolds — page 381: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

364 THE COURT OF LONDON Emmerson resigned himself to a prolonged interval of the cruellest suspense, but so desperate was his position, that he feared to anger the young man by any further demonstration of impatience. “In the first place, Mr. Emmerson,’’ resumed Theodore Varian, in that cold, measured voice and deliberate manner which was the same as heaping torture upon torture, agony upon agony, in respect to the miserable wretch who wished only to hear one word, yes or no, so that it might be decisive of his fate, and if of the very worst, at least put him out of suspense, ‘‘ Mr. Emmerson,” said Varian, “ in the first place, I wish to enlighten you on a few of those proceedings which since my return into your service I have been conducting against you. It was I who threw in your way those news- papers that contained such flaming accounts of specula- tions and enterprises which I full well conjectured to be worthless, and in your greediness to augment your gains, as well as to counterbalance your extravagances, you nibbled at the bait. Next, when your vanity led you to stand as a candidate for the aldermanic gown of one of the City wards, I went among those who had promised you their support, and thus was it that although your canvass gave promise of complete success, the result of the poll proved the most mortifying, the most humiliating. At the moment you were vapouring and declaiming about ‘ our blessed Constitution,’ ‘our glorious laws,’ and ‘our admirable social system,’ I was darkly and insidiously undermining you amongst all your civic friends. To me, then, did you owe your defeat, and secretly I gloried in your discomfiture. Then, about the same time, you began to observe that many of your most influential City friends began to look coldly upon you. It was I who secretly propagated rumours tending to destroy your character, and consequently to diminish your credit. I managed, though with some little difficulty, to scrape an acquaintance and form an intimacy with a clerk at your banker’s — ” “Ah!” ejaculated Emmerson, with a sudden start, for his guilty conscience instantaneously suggested to him that Theodore had most probably become acquainted with the fact of the bill so near due. “And from that clerk,’ continued Varian, without appearing to take the slightest notice of either Emmerson’s ) EORNICLIOO KS (E(0)