High houses, broad, jolly, and red-faced, standing now on the edges of quays or at the feet of bridges, now in quaint trim little gardens, whose close-shaven turf is gaudy with brilliant bulbs, or overshadowed by box and yew, but always fringing the long, shallow, black canals, whose sluggish waters scarcely ripple under the passing barge. Water, water, everywhere, and requiring everybody's first consideration, dammed out by vast dykes and let in through numerous sluices, spanned by nearly three hundred bridges, employing a perfect army of men to watch it and tend it, to avail themselves of its presence and yet to keep it in subjection; for if not properly looked after and skilfully managed, it might at any moment submerge the city; avenues of green trees running along the canal banks and blooming freshly in the thickest portions of the commerce-crowded quays; innumerable windmills on the horizon; picture-galleries rich in treasures of Rubens, Rembrandt, Vandyke, and Teniers; dock-yards, where square and sturdy ships are built by square and sturdy men, in solemn silence and with much pipe-smoking; asylums, homes, alms-houses, through which a broad stream of well-administered charity is always flowing. A population of grave burghers, and chattering vrows, and the fattest, shiniest, and most old-fashioned children; of outlandish sailors and Jews of the grand old type, who might have sat, and whose ancestors probably did sit, as models to Rembrandt; of stalwart bargemen and canal-tenders, of strangers, some pleasure-seeking, but the great majority intent on business; for whatever may be the solemn delights of its inhabitants, to a stranger accustomed to other capitals there are few gaieties to be met with in the city to which George Dallas had wended his way--Amsterdam.
To George Dallas this mattered very little. Of the grosser kinds of pleasure he had had enough and more than enough; the better feelings of his nature had been awakened, and nothing could have induced him to allow himself to drift back into the slough from which he had emerged. Wandering through the long picture-galleries and museums, and gloating over their contents with thorough artistic appreciation, dreamily gazing out of his hotel window over a prospect of barge-dotted and tree-bordered canals which would gradually dissolve before his eyes, the beech avenue of the Sycamores arising in its place, recalling Clare Carruthers's soft voice and ringing laugh and innocent trusting manner, George Dallas could scarcely believe that for months and months of his past life he had been the companion of sharpers and gamblers, and had been cat off from all communication with everything and everybody that in his youth he had been taught to look up to and respect. He shuddered as he recollected the orgies which he had taken part in, the company he had kept, the life he had led. He groaned aloud and stamped with rage as he thought of time lost, character blighted, opportunities missed. And his rage this time was vented on himself: he did not, as usual, curse his stepfather for having pronounced his edict of banishment; he did not lay the blame on luck or fate, which generally bore the burden; he was man enough to look his past life fairly in the face, and to own to himself that all its past privations, and what might have been its future miseries, were of his own creation. What might have been, but what should not be now. A new career lay before him, a career of honour and fame, inducements to pursue which such as he had never dreamed of were not wanting, and by Heaven's help he would succeed.
It was on the first morning after his arrival in Amsterdam that George Dallas, after much desultory thought, thus determined. Actuated by surroundings in an extraordinary degree, he had, while in London, been completely fascinated by the combined influence of Routh and Harriet; and had he remained with them he would, probably, never have shaken off that influence, or been anything but their ready instrument. But so soon as he had left them the fascination was gone, and his eyes were open to the degradation of his position, and the impossibility, so long as he continued with his recent associates, of retrieving himself in the eyes of the world--of being anything to Clare Carruthers. This last thought decided him--he would break with Stewart Routh, yes, and with Harriet, at once! He would sell the bracelet and send the proceeds to Routh with a letter, in which he would delicately but firmly express his determination and take farewell of him and Harriet. Then he would return to London, and throw himself into business at once. There was plenty for him to do at the Mercury, the chief had said, and--No! he must not go back to London, he must not expose himself to temptation; at all events until he was more capable of resisting it. Now, there would be Routh, with his jovial blandishments, and Deane, and all the set, and Harriet, most dangerous of all! In London he would fall back into George Dallas, the outcast, the reprobate, the black sheep, not rise into Paul Ward, the genius; and it was under the latter name that he had made acquaintance with Clare, and that he hoped to rise into fame and repute.
But though the young man had, as he imagined, fully made up his mind as to his future course, he lounged through a whole day in Amsterdam before he took the first step necessary for its pursuance--the negotiation of the bracelet and the transmission of the money to Routh--and it is probable that any movement in the matter would have been yet further delayed had he not come to the end of the slender stock of money which he had brought with him from England. The reaction from a life of fevered excitement to one of perfect calm, the atmosphere of comfortable, quiet, staid tranquillity by which he was surrounded, the opportunity for indulging his artistic sympathies without the slightest trouble, all these influences were readily adopted by a man of George Dallas's desultory habits and easy temperament; but, at last, it was absolutely necessary that some action should be taken, and George consulted the polyglot waiter of the hotel as to the best means of disposing of some valuable diamonds which he had with him.
The question was evidently one to which the polyglot waiter was well accustomed, for he answered at once, "Dimants to puy is best by Mr. Dieverbrug, in Muiderstraat."
Not thoroughly comprehending the instance of the polyglottiness of the polyglot, George Dallas again advanced to the charge, and by varying his methods of attack, and diligently patching together such intelligible scraps as he rescued from the polyglot, he at length arrived at the fact that Mr. Dieverbrug, a Jew, who lived in the Muiderstraat, was a diamond merchant in a large way of business, speaking English, frequently visiting England, and likely to give as good, if not a better price than any one else in the trade. The polyglot added that he himself was not a bad judge of what he persisted in calling "dimants;" and as this speech was evidently a polite hint, George showed him the stones. The polyglot admired them very much, and pronounced them, in his opinion, worth between two and three hundred pounds--a valuable hint to George, who expected Mr. Dieverbrug would call upon him to name his price, and if any absurd sum was asked, the intending vendor might be looked upon with suspicion. The polyglot then owned that he himself frequently did a little business in the way of jewel-purchasing from visitors to the hotel, but frankly confessed that the "lot" under consideration was beyond him; so George thanked him and set out to visit Mr. Dieverbrug.
The Muiderstraat is the Jews' quarter of Amsterdam, which said, it is scarcely necessary to add that it is the dirtiest, the foulest, the most evil-smelling. There all the well-known characteristics of such places flourish more abundantly even than in the Frankfort Judengasse or our own Houndsditch. There each house is the repository of countless suits of fusty clothes, heaped up in reckless profusion on the floors, bulging out from cupboards and presses, horribly suggestive of vermin, hanging from poles protruding from the windows. There every cellar bristles with an array of boots of all kinds and shades, amongst which the little Hebrew children squall and fight, and play at their little games of defrauding each other. There are the bric-à-brac shops, crammed with cheap odds and ends from every quarter of the globe, all equally undistinguishable under an impartial covering of dust and dirt; there are the booksellers, with their worm-eaten folios and their copies of the Scriptures, and their written announcements in the Hebrew character; there are the cheap printsellers, with smeary copies from popular pictures and highly coloured daubs of French battle-fields and English hunting-scenes. The day was fine, and nearly all the population was either standing outside its doors or lolling at its windows, chaffering, higgling, joking, scolding. George Dallas, to whom such a scene was an entire novelty, walked slowly along with difficulty, threading his way through the various groups, amused with all he saw, and speculating within himself as to the probable personal appearance of Mr. Dieverbrug. The diamond merchant, George imagined, would probably be an old man, with gray hair and spectacles, and a large hooked nose, like one of Rembrandt's "Misers," seated in a small shop, surrounded by the rarest treasures exquisitely set. But when he arrived at the number which the polyglot had given him as Mr. Dieverbrug's residence, he found a small shop indeed, but it was a bookseller's, and it was not until after some little time that he spied a painted inscription on the door-post directing Mr. Dieverbrug's visitors to the first floor, whither George at once proceeded.
At a small wooden table, on which stood a set of brass balance weights, sat a man of middle height and gentlemanly appearance dressed in black. The Hebraic character was not strongly marked in any of his features, though it was perceptible to an acute observer in the aquiline nose and the full red lips. He raised his eyes from a small red-leather memorandum-book or diary which he had been studying, as Dallas entered the room, and gave his visitor a grave salutation.
"Am I addressing Mr. Dieverbrug?" said Dallas, in English.
"I am Mr. Dieverbrug," he replied, in the same language, speaking with perfect ease and with very little foreign accentuation, "at your service."
"I have been recommended to come to you. I am, as you have probably already recognized, an Englishman, and I have some jewels for sale, which it may, perhaps, suit you to buy."
"You have them with you?"
"Yes, they are here;" and George took out his cherished case and placed it in Mr. Dieverbrug's hand.
Mr. Dieverbrug opened the case quietly, and walked with it towards the window. He then took out the stones and held them to the light, then taking from his waistcoat pocket a small pair of steel nippers, he picked up each stone separately, breathed upon it, examined it attentively, and then replaced it in the case. When he had gone through this operation with all the stones, he said to George:
"You are not a diamond merchant?"
"No, indeed!" said Dallas, with a half-laugh; "not I."
"You have never," said Mr. Dieverbrug, looking at him steadfastly from under his bushy eyebrows,--"you have never been in a jewel-house?"
"In a jewel-house?" echoed George.
"What you call a jeweller's shop?"
"Never have been in a jeweller's shop? O yes, often."
"Still you fail my meaning. You have never been in a jeweller's shop as employé, as assistant?"
"Assistant at a jeweller's--ah! thank you! now I see what you're aiming at. I've never been an assistant in a jeweller's shop, you ask, which is a polite way of inquiring if I robbed my master of these stones! Thank you very much; if you've that opinion of me, perhaps I had better seek my bargain elsewhere." And George Dallas, s............