had drawn in
her marriage ventures, was to benefit no man. And though the one, in a
manner, neutralised the other, and the appearance of Amory or Altamont
in public would be the signal for his instantaneous withdrawal and
condign punishment,--for the fugitive convict had cut down the officer
in charge of him,--and a rope would be inevitably his end; if he came
again under British authorities; yet, no guardian would like to secure
for his ward a wife, whose parent was to be got rid of in such a way;
and the old gentleman's notion always had been that Altamont, with the
gallows before his eyes, would assuredly avoid recognition; while, at
the same time, by holding the threat of his discovery over Clavering,
the latter, who would lose everything by Amory's appearance, would be a
slave in the hands of the person who knew so fatal a secret.

But if the Begum paid Clavering's debts many times more, her wealth
would be expended altogether upon this irreclaimable reprobate; and her
heirs, whoever they might be, would succeed but to an emptied treasury;
and Miss Amory, instead of bringing her husband a good income and a seat
in Parliament, would bring to that individual her person only, and her
pedigree with that lamentable note of sus. per coll. at the name of the
last male of her line.

There was, however, to the old schemer revolving these things in his
mind, another course yet open; the which will appear to the reader who
may take the trouble to peruse a conversation, which presently ensued,
between Major Pendennis and the honourable Baronet, the Member for
Clavering.

When a man, under pecuniary difficulties, disappears from among his
usual friends and equals,--dives out of sight, as it were, from the
flock of birds in which he is accustomed to sail, it is wonderful at
what strange and distant nooks he comes up again for breath. I have
known a Pall Mall lounger and Rotten Row buck, of no inconsiderable
fashion, vanish from amongst his comrades of the Clubs and the Park, and
be discovered, very happy and affable, at an eighteenpenny ordinary
in Billingsgate: another gentleman, of great learning and wit, when
outrunning the constable (were I to say he was a literary man, some
critics would vow that I intended to insult the literary profession),
once sent me his address at a little public-house called the "Fox under
the Hill," down a most darksome and cavernous archway in the Strand.
Such a man, under such misfortunes, may