I like you for that; I do, indeed. I like
you for sticking up for your poor mother. Well, now you shall have fifty
pounds a month,--say twelve pounds ten a week,--as long as you remain at
Tretton, and you may have whom you like here, as long as they bring no
cards with them. And if you want to hunt there are horses, and if they
ain't good enough you can get others. But if you go away from Tretton
there's an end of it. It will all be stopped the next day."
Nevertheless, he did make arrangements by which Mountjoy should proceed
to Buston, stopping two nights as he went to London. "There isn't a club
he can enter," said the squire, comforting himself, "nor a Jew that will
lend him a five-pound note."
Mountjoy had told the truth when he had said that nothing was a comfort.
Though it seemed to his father and to the people around him at Tretton
that he had everything that a man could want, he had, in fact,
nothing,--nothing to satisfy him. In the first place, he was quite alive
to the misery of that decision given by the world against him, which had
been of such comfort to his father. Not a club in London would admit
him. He had been proclaimed a defaulter after such a fashion that all
his clubs had sent to him for some explanation; and as he had given
none, and had not answered their letters, his name had been crossed out
in the books of them all.
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