"Yes, sir, please. Didn't get up this morning. He expected you two hours ago, sir."

Levi nodded.

"What doctor did you fetch?" he asked.

"No doctor, please, sir. I thought you and _him_ would choose."

Levi made no answer; so she could not tell by his surly face, which underwent no change, whether he approved or not. He looked at his watch.

"Larkin wasn't here to-day?"

"Mr. Larkin? No, sir, please."

"Show me Dingwell's room, till I have a look at him," said the Jew, gloomily.

So he followed her up-stairs, and entered the darkened room without waiting for any invitation, and went to the window, and pulled open a bit of the shutter.

"What's it for?" grumbled Dingwell indistinctly from his bed.

"So you've bin and done it, you have," said the Jew, walking up with his hands in his pockets, and eyeing him from a distance as he might a glandered horse.

Dingwell was in no condition to retort on this swarthy little man, who eyed him with a mixture of disgust and malignity.

"How long has he been thish way?" said the Jew, glowering on Sarah Rumble.

"Only to-day in bed, please, sir; but he has bin lookin' awful bad this two or three days, sir."

"Do you back it for _fever_?"

"I think it's _fever_, sir."

"I s'pose you'd twig fever fasht enough? Seen lotsh of fever in your time?"

"Yes, sir, please."

"It _ish_ fever, ten to one in fifties. Black death going, ma'am--_my_ luck. Look at him there, d----n him, he'sh got it."

Levi looked at him surlily for a while with eyes that glowed like coals.

"This comsh o' them cursed holes you're always a-going to; there's always fever and everything there, you great old buck goat."

Dingwell made an effort to raise himself, and mumbled, half awake--

"Let me--I'll talk to him--how dare you--when I'm better--_quiet_"--and he laid down his head again.

"When you _are_, you cursed sink. Look at all we've lost by you."

He stood looking at Dingwell savagely.

"He'll _die_," exclaimed he, making an angry nod, almost a b.u.t.t, with his head toward the patient, and he repeated his prediction with a furious oath.

"See, you'll send down to the apothecary's for that chloride of lime, and them vinegars and things--or--no; you must wait here, for Larkin will come; and don't you let him go, mind. Me and Mr. Goldshed will be here in no time. Tell him the doctor's coming; and us--and I'll send up them things from the apothecary, and you put them all about in plates on the floor and tables. Bad enough to lose our money, and cursed bad; but I won't take this--come out o' this room--if _I_ can help."

And he entered the drawing-room, shutting Dingwell's door, and spitting on the floor, and then he opened the window.

"He'll _die_--do you _think_ he'll die?" he exclaimed again.

"He's in the hands of G.o.d, sir," said Sally Rumble.

"He won't be long there--he'll die--I say he _will_--he will;" and the little Jew swore and stamped on the floor, and clapped his hat on his head, and ran down the stairs, in a paroxysm of business and fury.

CHAPTER XII.

IN WHICH HIS FRIENDS VISIT THE SICK.

MR. LEVI, when Sarah Rumble gave him her lodger's message, did not, as he said, "vally it a turn of a half-penny." He could not be very ill if he could send his attendant out of doors, and deliver the terms in which his messages were to be communicated. Mr. Levi's diagnosis was that Mr. Dingwell's attack was in the region of the purse or pocket-book, and that the "dodge" was simply to get the partners and Mr. Larkin together for the purpose of extracting more money.

Mr. Larkin was in town, and he had written to that gentleman's hotel; also he had told Mr. Goldshed, who took the same view, and laughed in his lazy diapason over the weak invention of the enemy.

Levi accordingly took the matter very easily, and hours had pa.s.sed before his visit, which was made pretty late in the afternoon, and he was smiling over his superior sagacity in seeing through Dingwell's little dodge, as he walked into the court, when an officious little girl, in her mother's bonnet, running by his knee, said, pompously--

"You'd better not go there, sir."

"And why so, chickabiddy?" inquired Mr. Levi, derisively.

"No, you'd better not; there's a gentleman as has took the fever there."

"Where?" said Mr. Levi, suddenly interested.

"In Mrs. Rumble's."

"_Is_ there?--how do you know?"

"Lucy Maria Rumbles, please, sir, she told me, and he's _very bad_."

The fashion of Levi's countenance was changed as he turned from her suddenly, and knocked so sharply at the door that the canary, hanging from the window in his cage over the way, arrested his song, and was agitated for an hour afterwards.

So Mr. Levi was now thoroughly aroused to the danger that had so suddenly overcast his hopes, and threatened to swallow in the bottomless sea of death the golden stake he had ventured.

It was not, nevertheless, until eight o'clock in the evening, so hard a thing is it to collect three given men [what then must be the office of whip to Whig or Tory side of the House?] that the two Jews and Mr.

Larkin were actually a.s.sembled in Mr. Dingwell's bed-room, now reeking with disinfectants and prophylactic fluids.

The party were in sore dismay, for the interesting patient had begun to maunder very preposterously in his talk. They listened, and heard him say--