The Uninhabited House | Page 7

eccentric in her manner, and
bewildering in the vagaries of her accent, well, most Irish people, the
highest in rank not excepted, were the same. Why, there was Lord
So-and-so, who stated at a public meeting that "roight and moight were
not always convartible tarms"; and accepted the cheers and laughter
which greeted his utterance as evidence that he had said something
rather neat.
Miss Blake's accent was a very different affair indeed from those
wrestles with his foe in which her brother-in-law always came off
worsted. He endured agonies in trying to call himself Elmsdale, and
rarely succeeded in styling his wife anything except Mrs. HE. I am told
Miss Blake's mimicry of this peculiarity was delicious: but I never was
privileged to hear her delineation, for, long before the period when this
story opens, Mr. Elmsdale had departed to that land where no
confusion of tongues can much signify, and where Helmsdale no doubt

served his purpose just as well as Miss Blake's more refined
pronunciation of his name.
Further, Miss Helena Elmsdale would not allow a word in depreciation
of her father to be uttered when she was near, and as Miss Helena could
on occasion develop a very pretty little temper, as well as considerable
power of satire, Miss Blake dropped out of the habit of ridiculing Mr.
Elmsdale's sins of omission and commission, and contented herself by
generally asserting that, as his manner of living had broken her poor
sister's heart, so his manner of dying had broken her--Miss
Blake's--heart.
"It is only for the sake of the orphan child I am able to hold up at all,"
she would tell us. "I would not have blamed him so much for leaving us
poor, but it was hard and cruel to leave us disgraced into the bargain";
and then Miss Blake would weep, and the wag of the office would take
out his handkerchief and ostentatiously wipe his eyes.
She often threatened to complain of that boy--a merry, mischievous
young imp--to Mr. Craven; but she never did so. Perhaps because the
clerks always gave her rapt attention; and an interested audience was
very pleasant to Miss Blake.
Considering the nature of Mr. Elmsdale's profession, Miss Blake had
possibly some reason to complain of the extremely unprofitable manner
in which he cut up. He was what the lady described as "a dirty
money-lender."
Heaven only knows how he drifted into his occupation; few men, I
imagine, select such a trade, though it is one which seems to exercise
an enormous fascination for those who have adopted it.
The only son of a very small builder who managed to leave a few
hundred pounds behind him for the benefit of Elmsdale, then clerk in a
contractor's office, he had seen enough of the anxieties connected with
his father's business to wash his hands of bricks and mortar.
Experience, perhaps, had taught him also that people who advanced
money to builders made a very nice little income out of the capital so
employed; and it is quite possible that some of his father's
acquaintances, always in want of ready cash, as speculative folks
usually are, offered such terms for temporary accommodation as
tempted him to enter into the business of which Miss Blake spoke so
contemptuously.

Be this as it may, one thing is certain--by the time Elmsdale was thirty
he had established a very nice little connection amongst needy men:
whole streets were mortgaged to him; terraces, nominally the property
of some well-to-do builder, were virtually his, since he only waited the
well-to-do builder's inevitable bankruptcy to enter into possession. He
was not a sixty per cent man, always requiring some very much better
security than "a name" before parting with his money; but still even
twenty per cent, usually means ruin, and, as a matter of course, most of
Mr. Elmsdale's clients reached that pleasant goal.
They could have managed to do so, no doubt, had Mr. Elmsdale never
existed; but as he was in existence, he served the purpose for which it
seemed his mother had borne him; and sooner or later--as a rule, sooner
than later--assumed the shape of Nemesis to most of those who "did
business" with him.
There were exceptions, of course. Some men, by the help of
exceptional good fortune, roguery, or genius, managed to get out of Mr.
Elmsdale's hands by other paths than those leading through Basinghall
or Portugal Streets; but they merely proved the rule.
Notably amongst these fortunate persons may be mentioned a Mr.
Harrison and a Mr. Harringford--'Arrison and 'Arringford, as Mr.
Elmsdale called them, when he did not refer to them as the two
Haitches.
Of these, the first-named, after a few transactions, shook the dust of Mr.
Elmsdale's office off his shoes, sent him the money