CHAPTER XXII.—ARCADES AMBO.
Hot, dusty, and conventionally empty as London now was, and stifling as was the confined air of St Nicholas Poultney, Mr Enoch Wilkins was in gay good-humour. He shewed it by the urbanity with which he was dismissing a shabby-genteel man of middle age, to whose remonstrances he had listened with a bland semi-serious patience unusual to him.
‘Now, really, Mr Greening, really we must have no more of this,’ he said, shewing his white front teeth in an affable smile. ‘“Can’t pay” and “Won’t pay” are, I fancy, convertible phrases. The Loan Office cannot afford to do business on sentimental principles. And it’s all very well to say that you only had in cash nine seven eleven, as consideration for your notes of hand, amounting to—let me see.’ And the solicitor glanced at a bundle of papers on the table.
‘To twenty-eight pounds six and fourpence,’ said the debtor piteously; ‘two-thirds of which are for interest and commission.’
‘But that,’ pursued the solicitor, ‘by no means affects the legal aspect of the case. The bill of sale over your furniture is none the less valid. I didn’t quite catch your last remark.—Ah! to sell you up would be to you sheer ruin? Then, my good Mr Greening, I advise you to stave off the ruin by prompt payment, to escape the very heavy expenses to which you will otherwise be put. Good-day to you.—Now,’ he added to his clerk, ‘I will see this Mr Hold.’ And as the impecunious Greening took his melancholy leave, the sunburnt countenance of Richard Hold became visible in the doorway.
‘From abroad, I presume?’ said Mr Wilkins affably, as his observant eye noted the seafaring aspect of his visitor and the bronze on his cheek, which might well have become a successful Australian digger, fresh with his dust and nuggets from the gold-fields.
‘Well—I have been abroad; I have knocked about the world a goodish bit,’ answered Hold slowly, ‘but just latterly I’ve stayed ashore.’
Mr Wilkins picked up the office penknife and tapped the table with the buckhorn handle of it somewhat impatiently. He did not entertain quite so high an opinion of the swarthy stranger as before. The first glance had suggested damages in a running-down case at sea; the second, some claim for salvage; the third, an investment of savings earned, according to the picturesque phrase, ‘where the gold grows.’ But the solicitor knew life well enough to be aware that those who have knocked, in Hold’s words, about the world, are rolling stones whereon seldom grows the moss of profit.
‘What, Mr Hold, may be your business with me?’ he asked curtly.
Richard Hold was not in the least nettled at this chilling reception. His dark roving eyes made their survey of the lawyer’s surroundings, from the heavy silver inkstand to the prints on the walls, and then settled on the face of Mr Enoch Wilkins himself.
‘That depends,’ said Hold, with a lazy good-humour, as he leaned against the door-post nearest to him, ‘on what you call business, skipper!’
Mr Wilkins frowned; but the words, sharp and peremptory, that rose to his lips, remained unspoken. His first idea had been that this was the saucy freak of an ill-conditioned sailor, and that a word to his clerk and a summons to the policeman on his beat hard by, would rid him of the intruder. But the man was quite sober. There must be some reason for his singular tone and bearing. Wherefore, when Mr Wilkins spoke again, it was urbanely enough: ‘If I can be of use to you professionally, sir, you may command me; at least I shall be glad to hear what you have got to say. Perhaps you feel somewhat strange in a lawyer’s office?’
‘I haven’t seen the inside of one since six years ago I was in trouble at Singapore about—never mind what!’ returned Hold, checking his too communicative flow of words, and then added: ‘Now I hail from Devonshire—Dartmoor way—Carbery Chase way, not to mince matters.’
Mr Wilkins started. ‘Have you a message for me—from Sir Sykes, I mean?’ he inquired, in an altered voice.
‘No!’ replied Hold, in a dubious tone, and coughing expressively behind his broad brown hand; ‘not exactly that.’
The lawyer looked keenly at his visitor. Hold’s bold eyes met his. The man’s unabashed confident air was not lost on so shrewd an observer of human nature as was Enoch Wilkins. ‘Take a chair, I beg, Mr Hold,’ he said civilly; and Hold took a chair, placed it sideways, and seating himself upon it in a careless informal attitude, rested one elbow on the chair-back, and contemplated the lawyer with serene scrutiny.
‘You come from Sir Sykes, however, although you do not bring a message?’ asked Mr Wilkins.
‘Take your affidavy of that, squire!’ returned Hold, in an assured tone. ‘We ought to be friends, you and I,’ he added, with what was meant for an engaging smile, ‘for we are both, I reckon, in the same boat.’
‘In the same boat, hey?’ repeated Mr Wilkins cautiously. ‘How’s that?’
‘I mean,’ said Hold, knitting his black brows, ‘that we are both pretty much on the same lay—that we know a thing or two about a rich party that shall be nameless, and about certain old scores, and a certain young lady, and—— Why should I do all the chat, master? Is this Greek to you, or do you catch my meaning?’
Mr Wilkins, whose eyes had opened very widely as he listened, here started as though he had been electrified. ‘I understand you to imply,’ he said smoothly, ‘that our interests are identical?’
‘Well, I guess they are,’ responded Hold, in the blunt fashion that was natural to him. ‘We both, I suppose, want as many of Sir Sykes Denzil’s yellow coins as we can conjure out of his pocket; and both need no teaching to turn the screw pretty smartly when we see our way to it; eh, mister?’
Enoch Wilkins, gentleman, winced before this over-candid home-thrust. It is indeed one thing to be guilty of a particular act and another to hear it defined with unmannerly plainness of speech. And he did not quite like the being bracketed, as to his motives and position, with a piratical-looking fellow, such as he saw Hold to be. But to take offence was not his cue; so he laughed softly, as at the sallies of some rough humorist, and rattled his watch-guard to and fro, as he warily made answer: ‘All men, I believe, are supposed to take care of Number One. I do not profess to be a bit more disinterested than my neighbours, and if I did, you are too wide awake to believe me.’
‘Right you are!’ responded Richard with a mollified grin and an amicable snap of the ends of his hard fingers. ‘I never cruised in company with a philanderer’ (meaning probably a philanthropist) ‘but once, and he made off with my kit and gold-dust while I was taking my turn down shaft at Flathead Creek, in California there. My notion is that there are pickings for both. Why should we two fall out so long as Sir Sykes Denzil, Baronet, is good for this kind of thing?’ And the ruffian imitated, in expressive pantomime, the action of squeezing a sponge.
Again the lawyer laughed. ‘No need,’ he said with well-feigned admiration for the other’s astuteness, ‘to send your wits to the whetstone, Mr—or perhaps I should say Captain—Hold.’
‘Well, I don’t dislike the handle to my name; and I’ve a fairish right to it, since I’ve had my own cuddy and my own quarter-deck,’ rejoined Hold boastfully. ‘And now, squire, I’d like to hear your views a little more explicit out than I have had the pleasure.’
It was the attorney’s turn to cough now, as he replied, still swaying his watch-guard to and fro: ‘There you push me, my good sir, into a corner. Every profession has its point of honour, you know; and we lawyers are shy of talking over the affairs of an absent client unless’——
‘Client, you call him, do you?’ broke in Hold. ‘Maybe you’re correct there, since you’ve brought the Bart. to throw Pounce and Pontifex overboard, and make you first-officer over his tenants; but he warn’t a client before yesterday.’
The astonishment written in Mr Wilkins’s face was very genuine. Of all the extraordinary confidants whom Sir Sykes could have selected, surely this coarse fierce adventurer was the most unlikely. And yet how, save from Sir Sykes himself, could the fellow have acquired his knowledge of the truth?
‘I was not prepared’—— stammered out the lawyer.
‘Not prepared,’ interrupted Hold coolly, ‘to find a rough diamond like yours to command, so deep in the Bart.’s little secrets. Perhaps not. Mind ye, I don’t want to quarrel. Live and let live. But it’s good sometimes to fire a shotted gun athwart a stranger’s bows, d’ ye see?’
‘You and Sir Sykes are old acquaintances?’ said the lawyer, feeling his way.
‘Pretty well for that. Years too have gone by a few since you and he first came within hailing distance,’ replied Hold with assumed carelessness.
‘We were younger men, that’s certain,’ returned the lawyer with a jolly laugh and a twinkling eye. That anybody should try to extract from him—from him, Enoch Wilkins, information that he desired to keep to himself—to pump him, in homely phraseology, seemed to the attorney of St Nicholas Poultney, in the light of an exquisitely subtle joke. Hold, in spite of his confidence in his own shrewdness, began to entertain vague doubts as to whether in a fair field he was quite a match for the London solicitor. Fortune, however, had dealt him a handful of court-cards, and he proceeded to improve the occasion.
‘Now, squire,’ said Hold impressively, and laying one brawny hand, as if to enforce the argument, on the table as he spoke, ‘I could, if I chose, clap a match to the powder-magazine and blow the whole concern sky-high. Suppose I weren’t well used among ye? Suppose I began to meet cold looks and buttoned-up pockets? What easier than to make a clean breast of what it no longer pays to keep secret, stand the consequences—I’ve stood worse on the Antipodes side of the world—and get another sniff of blue water. That would spoil your market, squire!’
Mr Wilkins muttered something about edge-tools; but his seafaring guest answered the remark by a short laugh of scorn. ‘You know a thing or two,’ he said incisively; ‘so do I. Are we or are we not to act in concert? If not, up with your colours and fire a broadside. Anyhow, friend or enemy, I’ll thank you to speak out.’
All Mr Wilkins’s liveliness vanished in an instant, and he seemed strongly and soberly in earnest as he said: ‘I will speak out, as you call it. I should very much prefer to be on good terms with you. I should like us, as far as we prudently can, to co-operate. But you have not as yet told me what you would have me do.’
‘I’ll tell you,’ said Hold confidentially, edging his chair nearer to the lawyer’s. ‘When you go down to Carbery——You mean to go, don’t you?’ he added abruptly.
‘Certainly,’ said the lawyer, touching a spring in the table by which he sat, and producing from a concealed drawer, that flew open at his touch, a letter, which he unfolded and handed to his visitor. ‘You know so much, captain, that I need not keep back this from you. It is from Sir Sykes, as you see. The contents are probably not strange to you.’
‘Not likely,’ returned the seaman, throwing his eyes, with ill-dissembled eagerness, on the letter. ‘He asks you to come down then, and names an early day. The rents will be passing through your hands before long, Mister. ’Tain’t that, though, I want to speak of. You’ll find when you get to the Chase, a young lady there.’
‘I understood that Sir Sykes had two daughters,’ said the attorney innocently.
‘He had three, if you come to that,’ was Hold’s rough answer. ‘But this is no daughter. Maybe she’ll be a daughter-in-law, some fine day.’
‘Oho!’ said Mr Wilkins, arching his eyebrows. ‘Young lady on a visit, I presume?’
‘On a very long visit,’ answered Hold. ‘A ward she is of the Bart., orphan daughter of an old Indian brother-officer. Name of Willis; Christian name Ruth.’
‘Ruth!’ Trained and practised as the sharp London man of business was in the incessant struggle of wits and jarring interests, he could not repress the exclamation. ‘Bless me—Ruth!’ he added breathlessly, and grew red and pale by turns. There seemed to be some magic in the sound of that apparently simple name which affected those who heard it.
‘Name of Willis; Christian name Ruth,’ repeated Hold. ‘Like one of themselves she is now. Shouldn’t wonder if she were to change her name, first to Mrs Captain Denzil, afterwards to Lady Denzil when Sir Jasper that will be comes into title and property. You’ve known Sir Jasper that will be, squire; you’ve had dealings with him. Now, mark me! The sooner that young dandy makes up his mind to place a gold ring on Miss Ruth’s pretty finger, the better for him and for the Bart. and for you too Mr Wilkins. “A nod’s as good as a wink”—you know the rest of the proverb.’ And throwing on the table a card, on which were legibly pencilled the words ‘Captain Hold. Inquire at Plugger’s Boarding-house;’ and promising, ominously, to see Mr Wilkins again, in London or at Carbery, the seaman took his leave.
Left alone, the lawyer’s features relaxed into a smile of satisfaction. ‘A cleverish fellow and vain of his cleverness, this Hold, but very communicative. It would surprise you, my good captain, if you knew how very much you have been kind enough to tell me, during our late interview.’