Bill recognized the artist as a near neighbor of his own in Love Lane.
"Working for the Nobs, are you, Wickens?" There was a world of scorn
in the tone of William Hollis, a world of sarcasm. And yet what was
scorn and what was sarcasm in the presence of a hard fact, clear,
outstanding, fully accomplished!
The artist expectorated a silent affirmative.
"Piecework, I suppose? Cut rates?" Mr. Munt had the reputation of being
a very keen man of business.
The artist was too much absorbed in his labors to indulge in
promiscuous talk.
William Hollis peered through the gate, to the rows of newly planted
shrubs on either side the curving carriage drive. "Bleeding upstart" he
muttered; then he turned on his heel and walked on up the road.
He had gone but a few yards when quite unexpectedly he came upon a
massive figure in a black and white checked summer suit and a white
billycock hat worn at a rather rakish angle. It was his father-in-law
and they were face to face.
Mr. Munt was proceeding with a kind of elephantine dignity along the
exact center of the sidewalk, and instinctively, before he was aware of
what he had done, his son-in-law by stepping nimbly into the grassgrown
gutter had conceded it to him. But in almost the same instant he
scorned himself for his action; and the gesture of lordly indifference
with which the proprietor of the Duke of Wellington directed his gaze
upon the western gables of Strathfieldsaye, without a flicker of
recognition of the person who had made way for him, suddenly brought
William Hollis to the bursting point.
The world allows that in a stone jar of Blackhampton Old Ale there are
magic qualities; and far down in Bill himself was hidden some deep
strain of independent manhood. The City records proved--vide Bazeley's
famous Annals of Blackhampton, a second-hand copy of which was one
of his most cherished possessions--that the name of Hollis had been
known and honored in the town long before the name of Munt had been
heard of. The Hollises were an old and distinguished Blackhampton
clan. A William Hollis was mayor of the Borough in the year of the
Armada. It was a family of wide ramifications. There was the great
John Hollis the inventor, circa 1724-1798, there was Henry Hollis the
poet, circa 1747-1801. Of these their present descendant was a kinsman
so remote that the science of genealogy had lost track of their actual
relationship. But beyond a doubt his father's uncle, Troop Sergeant
Major William Hollis, had fought at Waterloo. He himself was named
after that worthy, and the old boy's portrait and portions of his kit
had long embellished the sitting room in Love Lane.
It was then, perhaps, force of ancestry quite as much as the virtue
of the Blackhampton ale that moved William Hollis to his sudden
and remarkable act of self-assertion. For as Josiah Munt passed
him, head in air, and weather eye fixed upon the western gables of
Strathfieldsaye, his son-in-law stopped, swung round and called after
him in a voice that could be heard even by the decorative artist at
work on the gate--
"Sally out of Quod yet?"