No. 11 was a sitting-room of a class peculiar to those old-fashioned
inns which are rapidly being improved off the length and breadth of
Britain, large, low-ceiled, with a sloping floor that attained its
highest elevation beside the broad bay-window. A dark room, it must be
confessed, and an airless, but snug and warm on winter-nights, when
the glow of the firelight combined with the lustre of many wax-candles
to defy the storm and blackness without. There had been jovial dinners
in that room, and drawing together of arm-chairs around the huge
fireplace, and tapping of dusty magnums of rare old port, and calling
for more punch as the night waned, in those hard-living days of which
so many of us innocent, pay the penalty in neuralgia and dyspepsia.
In No. 11 stood Sir Sykes, pale but resolute. The traveller with the
black bag came in, and for the second time their eyes met. ‘You wished
to see me, sir,’ began Mr Wilkins, with a slight bow. ‘Ah! I remember
you now, sir, as it happens,’ he added in a different tone; ‘remember
you very distinctly indeed, Mr’——
‘Hush!’ interrupted Sir Sykes, with uplifted fore-finger. ‘A place
like this is the very last in which to mention anything best left
unspoken—the very walls, I believe, have ears to hear and tongues to
tattle. I am Sir Sykes Denzil, of Carbery Chase, within a very few
miles of this, at your service, Mr Wilkins.’
‘Sir Sykes Denzil! Well, this _is_ a surprise,’ exclaimed the owner
of the name of Wilkins wonderingly, and yet with a sort of dry humour
mingling with his evidently genuine astonishment. ‘Dear me, dear me!
They say the world is very little, and people constantly meeting and
jostling in it; but I never so thoroughly realised the truth of the
saying as I do now. So I’ve the honour of talking to Sir Sykes Denzil,
when I thought I was addressing’——
‘Be cautious, sir,’ interposed the baronet, with an energy that
impressed the other in spite of himself. ‘Let us have no reference, if
you please, to a past that is dead and buried. I sent for you, certain
as I was that sooner or later your memory must recall me to your
remembrance, and well aware too how easily you could learn who I was
here.’
‘No great trouble about that, Mr—I mean Sir Sykes,’ rejoined the
traveller smirkingly. ‘The people seem to know you well enough, and any
fellow in the stable-yard would have told me whose was the carriage
with the brown liveries.’
‘And having met and recognised one another,’ said Sir Sykes, ‘on what
footing is our future intercourse to be conducted? We are not as we
once were, lawyer and client, and’——
‘No, Sir Sykes, I grant you that; but we might be,’ returned Mr
Wilkins, rubbing his fleshy hands together, as though they had been
two millstones between which the bones of suitors might be ground to
make his bread. ‘You can’t, a man of your landed property—I’ve heard
something as to your acreage, and could give a shrewd guess as to your
rent-roll—be without law business. Devonshire isn’t Arcadia, I suppose.
Are there not leases to draw, inclosure bills to promote, poachers to
prosecute, paths to stop up, bills to file, actions to bring, defend,
compromise? Ten to one, some of your best farms are let on leases of
lives, and—— But no matter! You’ve your own legal advisers; hey, Sir
Sykes?’
The baronet bowed coldly by way of assent.
‘Pounce and Pontifex, of Lincoln’s Inn—_I_ know,’ pursued the unabashed
lawyer. ‘A brace of respectable twaddling old stagers. There was a
saying, soon after I got my articles, as to that firm, to the effect
that Pounce and Pontifex were fit for a marriage settlement, a will,
and a Chancery suit, and that was about all. If you care about raising
your rents, crushing an enemy, or gratifying a whim—and most rich men
have a hankering after one or other of these fancies—why, you’ll need a
brisker counsellor at your elbow than the jog-trots of Lincoln’s Inn.’
Again the baronet bent his head, and his eyes moved towards the door.
Mr Wilkins noted their movement.
‘You hardly derived a fair judgment of my capabilities,’ he said, ‘by
the little I had to do in that Sandston business’——
‘Again I ask you, sir, to make no mention of that subject. It—it is
naturally painful to me—and—and’—— Sir Sykes here fairly broke down.
The lawyer’s eyes twinkled as he saw his advantage. ‘So long as _you_
remember it, Sir Sykes,’ he made haste to say, ‘I shall be only too
happy to forget the whole concern. What was that story about the
organ-blower and Handel? “Shan’t it be ‘we,’ then?” said the fellow,
when the great organist couldn’t get a note out of his instrument
for want of the necessary but humble bellows. And the musician was
compelled to acknowledge that there was a sort of partnership between
the man who fingered the stops and the man who raised the wind. I’m
in no hurry. Think it over. I have a client to see here to-day; but
perhaps you will let me have a word with you before you drive back to
Carbery Chase.’
A long deep line, which might have been mistaken for the furrow of some
old sword-cut, running from the angle of the mouth obliquely upwards,
became visible in the baronet’s comely face as he listened. He was one
of those men who can better endure misfortune than disrespect, and to
whom the bitterest sting of ruin is the withdrawal of the deference and
lip-service which environ them. But it was in an amicable tone that he
made answer: ‘I shall be happy to pursue our conversation, Mr Wilkins,
to-day or at any time which you may deem suitable. At present, however,
you will excuse me if I leave you. My son, Captain Denzil, has been
hurt—badly hurt, I fear, in the steeplechase to-day, and I have been
called here to see him, where he lies, in this very hotel.’ And the
baronet moved towards the door.
‘Hurt, is he?’ exclaimed Mr Wilkins, with inconsiderate roughness. ‘Ah,
then, I shall look to you, Sir Sykes, to indemnify me in case’——
Then came an awkward pause. The solicitor was a remarkably plain-spoken
man, but he did not quite like to say, ‘in case your son’s accident
prove fatal,’ and so stopped, and left his eloquent silence to complete
his words. Sir Sykes, with his hand on the door, turned, astonished,
upon the attorney.
‘What, pray, have you to do with the illness or the recovery of Captain
Denzil?’ he asked in evident ill-humour. He had borne up to this with
Mr Wilkins, but the lawyer’s interference with regard to his son
appeared to him in the light of a gratuitous piece of insolence.
‘Simply,’ returned Mr Wilkins, thrusting his hand into an inner pocket
of his coat, ‘because I am the holder of certain acceptances, renewed,
renewed afresh, and finally dishonoured; acceptances amounting, with
expenses, to a gross amount of—shall we say some eleven or twelve
thousand, Sir Sykes? Nearer the twelve than the eleven, I suspect.
A flea-bite of course to a gentleman of your fortune, but a very
important sum to a plain man like yours truly.’
‘I have been put to heavy expense, very heavy, for my son’s debts,’
said Sir Sykes, almost piteously. ‘I have paid every’——
‘Now, my very good sir,’ interrupted the attorney, ‘don’t, I beg you,
don’t fall into the common error of fathers, and imagine that your
own particular son is either a miracle of ingenuous candour or a
prodigal worse than his neighbours. You think that you’ve paid all his
liabilities, Sir Sykes, and no doubt you have paid all you knew of. But
as a man of the world, if not as a parent, you ought to be aware that
nobody ever did tell all that he owed—excess of modesty, perhaps! They
always leave a margin, these interesting penitents; and in this case,
as you will see by these documents’ (and Mr Wilkins produced several
pieces of stamped paper), ‘the margin is tolerably ample.’
The baronet was now thoroughly roused to wrath. He strode to and fro
with frowning brow and hands that were fast clenched together, then
walked to the window and stood still, idly tapping the panes with one
white finger, on which there glistened a great diamond that had been an
heirloom at Carbery Chase before ever a Denzil crossed its threshold.
‘I’ll not give him a shilling or leave him a shilling!’ he said in a
voice that quivered with anger. ‘Carbery Chase is my very own, and I
can deal with it as I please. My daughters at anyrate have deserved
better of me than that thankless graceless boy.’
Sir Sykes, under the influence of this new emotion, seemed to have
forgotten the lawyer’s presence, or merely to regard Mr Wilkins in the
light of the impartial Chorus in a Greek tragedy; but the attorney,
who was by no means pleased by the turn which the affair seemed to be
taking, intervened.
‘Come, come, Sir Sykes. It’s natural that you should be annoyed at
having such a heavy bill presented, when you thought it settled. But
between ourselves, boys will be boys. The captain has turned over a
new leaf, and rely on it he will be a credit to you yet. I’ve a pretty
wide acquaintance amongst wild young gentlemen of his kind, and I give
you my word I don’t know one who is more wide-awake. He had paid his
’prentice fees, and that smartly; but I expect before I die to hear of
him as an ornament to the bench of magistrates and perhaps a county
member. As for these bills and notes of hand’——
‘I’m not liable for a sixpence!’ exclaimed Sir Sykes petulantly. ‘My
son may go through the Court if he chooses, and perhaps will learn a
wholesome lesson from the exposure, which’——
‘Fie, fie, Sir Sykes!’ broke in the lawyer. ‘A coat of whitewash,
believe me, sticks to a youngster’s back to that extent that no amount
of scrubbing can get rid of it. Fume and fret as you please, you
know, and I know, that you mean Captain Jasper to have Carbery after
you, and to keep the place in the Denzil line. Better so, than to
have so fine an estate sold or cut in two for division between your
daughters’ husbands. And the captain won’t bear the ‘bloody hand’ in
his escutcheon the better because he has been made an insolvent in his
youth. As for these claims, I don’t press for an immediate settlement;
not I; I don’t exact my pound of flesh down on the nail, Sir Sykes.’
There was a hard struggle in the baronet’s breast. Time had been
given him for reflection, and he had used it. To hear of his son’s
extravagance, of his son’s deceit, and from such lips, was bad enough.
To be compelled to endure the familiarity of the lawyer’s manner was
to have to swallow a still more bitter pill. He could remember Mr
Wilkins of old, blunt and jocose certainly, but by no means so jaunty
in his bearing as he now was, although Sir Sykes had not then been
the rich county magnate he had blossomed. He felt, and writhed as he
felt, that it was the attorney’s sense of his hold upon him by reason
of his knowledge of his past life, which had emboldened Mr Wilkins to
deal with him as he had done. But the most provoking feature of the
affair was that Sir Sykes felt that this man’s advice, coarsely and
offensively administered as it was, yet contained a solid kernel of
truth. Jasper was by no means a model son. He had committed fearful
follies, and incurred debts which even the Master of Carbery had
thought twice before discharging. His profligacy was redeemed by no
brilliant talents, softened by no affectionate qualities. There are
spendthrifts who remain lovable to the last, as there are others who
dazzle the world by the glitter of their wit or valour. To neither
category did the graceless offspring of Sir Sykes belong. And yet, in
spite of his occasional menaces on the subject of his will, the baronet
felt that national manners and family pride combined to constitute a
sort of moral entail, of which Jasper was to reap the benefit.
‘I must see my son,’ said Sir Sykes smoothly, after a pause; ‘and when
I have time to think over the matter, Mr Wilkins, I will write to you
appointing as early an interview as possible. In the meantime I feel
assured that you will see the propriety of not urging personally your
claims on Captain Denzil in his present condition.’
Mr Wilkins was amenity itself. He would but eat a morsel in the
coffee-room, he said, and would then go back to London by the next
train, confident that he could not leave his interests in better hands
than those of Sir Sykes.
‘The old address, sir! You used to know it well enough!’ said the
lawyer with a leer, as he took the hand which the baronet did not dare
to refuse in sign of friendship; and so they parted.