CHAPTER V OMENS
One day this late June, or one morning, rather, Miss Hancock's dreams of the future and her part in it became again troubled.
James Hancock, to use a simile taken from the garden, showed signs of sprouting. A new hat had come home the night before from the hatter's, and he had bought a new necktie himself. Hitherto he had paid for his neckties and Patience had bought them, sombre neckties suitable to a lawyer and a celibate. This thing from Amery and Loders, a thing of lilac silk suitable enough for a man of twenty, caused Patience to stare when it appeared at breakfast one morning round the neck of her brother.
But she said nothing, she poured out the tea and watched her brother opening his letters and reading his newspaper, and munching his toast. She listened to his remarks on the price of consols and the fall in Russian bonds, and his grumbles because the "bacon was fried to a cinder," just as she had watched and listened for the last thirty years. Then, when he had finished and departed, she rose and went downstairs to bully the cook and terrorise the maids, which accomplished, she retired to her own room to dress preparatory to going out.
The house in Gordon Square had the solidity of structure and the gloom peculiar to the higher class houses in Bloomsbury. The great drawing-room had a chandelier that lived in a bag, and sofas and chairs arrayed in brown holland overalls; there were things in woolwork that Amelia Sedley might have worked, and abominations of art, deposited by the early Victorian age, struggled for pride of place with Georgian artistic attempts. The dining-room was furnished with solid mahogany, and everything in and about the place seemed solid and constructed with a view to eternity and the everlasting depression of man.
A week's sojourn in this house explained much of a certain epoch in English History to the mind of the sojourner; at the termination of the visit one began to understand dimly the humours of Gillray and the fidelity to truth of that atmosphere of gloom pervading the pictures of Hogarth. One understood why, in that epoch, men drank deep, why women swooned and improved swooning into a fine art, why Society was generally beastly and brutal, and why great lords sat up all night soaking themselves with brandy and waiting to see the hangman turn off a couple of poor wretches in the dawn; also, why men hanged themselves without waiting for the hangman, alleging for reason "the spleen."
Miss Hancock, having arranged herself to her own satisfaction, took her parasol from the stand in the hall, and departed on business bent.
She held three books in her hand—the butcher's, the baker's, and the greengrocer's. She felt in a cheerful mood, as her programme included and commenced with an attack on the butcher—Casus Belli—an overcharge made on the last leg of mutton but one. Having defeated the butcher, and tackled the other unfortunates and paid them, she paused near Mudie's Library as if in thought. Then she made direct for Southampton Row and the office of her brother, where, as she entered the outer office, Bridgewater was emerging from the sanctum of his master, holding clutched to his breast an armful of books and papers.
Bridgewater would have delighted the heart of John Leech. He had a red and almost perfectly round face; his spectacles were round, his body was round, his eyes were round, and the expression of his countenance, if I may be allowed the figure, was round. It was also slightly mazed; he seemed forever lost in a mild astonishment, the slightest thing out of the common, heightened this expression of chronic astonishment into one of acute amazement. A rat in the office, a fall in the funds, a clerk giving notice to leave, any of these little incidents was sufficient to wreathe the countenance of Mr Bridgewater with an expression that would not have been out of place had he been gazing upon the ruins of Pompeii, or the eruption of Mont Pelée. He had scanty white hair and enormous feet, and was, despite his bemazed look, a very acute old gentleman in business hours. The inside of his head was stuffed with facts like a Whitaker's almanac, and people turned to him for reference as they would turn to "Pratt's Law of Highways" or "Archbold's Lunacy."
Bridgewater seeing Miss Hancock enter, released somewhat his tight hold on the books and papers, and they all slithered pell mell on to the floor. She nodded to him, and, stepping over the papers, tapped with the handle of her parasol at the door of the inner office. Mr Hancock was disengaged, and she went in, closing the door behind her carefully as though fearful of some secret escaping.
She had no secret to communicate, however, and no business to transact, she only wanted a loan of Bridgewater for an hour to consult him about the lease of a house at Peckham. (Miss Hancock had money in her own right.) Having obtained the loan and stropped her brother's temper to a fine edge, so that he was sharp with the clerks and irritable with the clients till luncheon time, Miss Hancock took herself off, saying to the head clerk as she passed out, "I want you to come round to luncheon, Bridgewater, to consult you about a lease; my brother says he can spare you. Come at half-past one sharp; Good-day."
"Well to be sure!" said Bridgewater scratching his encyclopædic head, and gazing in the direction of the doorway through which the lady had vanished.
CHAPTER VI LAMBERT V. BEVAN
Now the germinal spot of this veracious history consists in the fact that numbered amongst Mr James Hancock's most prized clients was a young gentleman of the name of Bevan; the gentleman, in short, whom Miss Fanny Lambert described as "frightfully rich and a beast."
Mr Charles Maximilian Bevan, to give him his full title, inhabited a set of chambers in the "Albany," midway between the Piccadilly end and the end opening upon Vigo Street.
He was a young man of about twenty-three years of age, of a not unpleasing but rather heavy appearance, absolutely unconscious of the humour that lay in himself or in the world around him, and possessed of a fine, furious, old-fashioned temper; a temper that would burst out over an ill-cooked beef steak or a missing stud, and which vented itself chiefly upon his valet Strutt. In most of us the port of our ancestors runs to gout; in Mr Bevan it ran to temper.
He was a bachelor. Hamilton Cox, the author of "The Pillar of Salt," once said that the Almighty had appointed Charles Bevan to be a bachelor, and that he had taken up his appointment. To his friends it seemed so, and it seemed a pity, for he was an orphan and very wealthy, and had no unpleasant vices. He possessed Highshot Towers and five thousand acres of land in the richest part of Buckinghamshire, a moor in Scotland which he let each autumn to a man from Chicago, and a house in Mayfair which he also let.
Mr Bevan was not exactly a miser, but he was careful; no cabman ever received more from him than his legal fare; he studied the city news in the Times each morning, and Strutt was kept informed as to the price of Consols by the state of his master's temper, also as to the dividends declared by the Great Northern, South Eastern, London North Western Railways, and the Glasgow Gas Works, in all of which concerns Mr Bevan was a heavy holder.
In his life he had rarely been known to give a penny to a beggar man, yet each year he gave a good many pounds to the Charity Organisation Society, and the Hospitals, feeling sure that money invested in these institutions would not be misspent, and might even, perhaps, bear some shadowy dividend in the life to come.
He had a horror of cardsharpers, poets, foreigners, inferior artists, and badly dressed people in general—every one, in fact, beyond the pale of what he was pleased to call "Respectability"—but beyond all these and above all these, he had a horror of spendthrifts.
The Bevans had always been like that; there had been drinking Bevans, and fighting Bevans, and foolish Bevans of various descriptions, even open-handed Bevans, but there had never been a thoroughpaced squandering Bevan. Very different was it with the Lamberts, whose estate lay contiguous to that of Bevan, down in Bucks. How the Lamberts had held together as a family for four hundred years, certain; through the spacious times of Elizabeth, the questionable time of Charles, the winter of the Commonwealth; how the ship of Lambert passed entire between the Scylla of the Cocoa tree and the charybdis of Crockfords; how it weathered the roaring forties, are question constituting a problem indissoluble, even when we take into account the known capacity of the Lamberts for trimming, swashbuckling and good fellowship generally. A problem, however, upon which the present story will, perhaps, cast some light.
How jolly Jack Lambert played with Gerald Fiennes till he lost his house, his horses, his carriages, and his deaf and dumb negro servant. How with a burst of laughter he staked his wife and won back his negro, staked both, and retrieved his horses and his carriages, and at five o'clock of a bright May morning rose from the table having eternally broken and ruined Fiennes, was a story current in the days when William, the first of the Bevans, was a sober cloth merchant in Wych Street, and Charles, the first of the Stuarts, held his pleasant Court at Windsor—Carpe Diem, it was the motto of jolly Jack Lambert. Festina Lente said William of the cloth-yard.
The houses of Bevan and Lambert had never agreed, brilliancy and dulness rarely do, they had intermarried, however, with the result that the present George Lambert and the present Charles Bevan were cousins of a sort, cousins that had never spoken one to the other, and, moreover, at the present moment, were engaged, as we know, in active litigation as to the rights of fishing in an all but fishless stream some twelve feet broad, which separated the estates and the kinsmen.
Some twelve months previously it appears Strutt being sent down to Highshot Towers to superintend some alterations, had found in the gun-room a fishing-rod, and yielding to his cockney instincts, had fished, catching by some miracle a dilapidated looking jack.
He had promptly been set upon and beaten by a person whom Lambert called his keeper, and who, according to Strutt, swam the stream like an otter, hit him in the eye, broke the rod, and vanished with the jack.
So began the memorable action of Bevan v. Lambert, which, having been won in the Queen's Bench by Charles Bevan, was now at the date of our story, waiting its turn to appear before the Lords Justices of Appeal. It was stated, such was the animus with which this lawsuit was conducted, that George Lambert was cutting down timber to defray the costs of the lawyers, a fallacious statement, for the estate of Lambert was mortgaged beyond the hope of redemption.