CHAPTER XXVI.—THE NEW BROOM.
‘Clever enough, and too clever! It’s your look-out, sir, of course, and not mine; but I can’t help thinking that to give my friend Mr Wilkins an estate to manage is uncommonly like turning a fox into a poultry-yard to take care of the chickens.’
Such was Jasper Denzil’s remonstrance with his father, on hearing the baronet’s announcement of his intention to transfer the reins of local government to the willing hands of the City solicitor, vice Pounce and Pontifex superseded. Privately, Sir Sykes was of much the same opinion as his son; but as he was merely seeking to put a good face on what he felt to be really a surrender to a demand imperiously urged, he shook his head, saying: ‘You are prejudiced against this person, Jasper, and perhaps not unnaturally so. His manners, I admit, are not prepossessing, and his moral code has probably been shaped in a rough school of ethics; but I consider him to be one of those men whom it is pleasanter to have for a friend than for an enemy.’
Jasper’s expressive upper lip wore a curl of disgust. It was to him very disagreeable that Mr Wilkins, who had got the better of him, as he resentfully felt, in many an encounter of wits, should be often at Carbery, and right-hand man to its owner. He resolved on one more attempt to dislodge the intruder.
‘I would not, were I you, sir,’ said he, ‘either trust Wilkins a yard farther than I could see him, or be guided by his advice as to the management of the estate. You yourself heard the fellow say, at luncheon to-day, that he should not know turnips when he saw them unless there were boiled mutton in the middle of them. Wilkins only meant to raise a laugh when he hashed up that old joke against the Cockney sportsmen who ride to hounds, but he was nearer the truth than he was aware of.’
‘Ah, well,’ returned the baronet blandly, ‘I daresay his agricultural knowledge is after all pretty much on a par with that of Messrs Pounce and Pontifex.’
And then Jasper shrugged up his shoulders and was silent, for he perceived that it was hopeless to deprecate a foregone conclusion. For good or for ill, Sir Sykes had made up his mind to convert Mr Wilkins into a grand-vizier over the broad acres that lay within the circuit of his wide-stretching ring-fence.
Enoch Wilkins, gentleman, had on that morning reached Carbery Chase, and was in a fair way of earning for himself any rather than golden opinions from its inmates. Mr Wilkins, as he often and not untruly boasted, knew the world, that is to say he had a minute and almost microscopic acquaintance with one or two sections of the shady side of it. He understood turf-men, as a smart prison-governor understands convicts, and knew the natural history of the fast-living and embarrassed young officer as well as some lecturer on entomology knows the ways of beetle and butterfly. In a lower social grade, he was deeply versed in the arcana of Loan Societies, and could apply the thumbscrew of the County Court in nicely calculated proportions to a struggling debtor. Of what he called swell society Mr Wilkins had but a limited experience. He had shared, as the purveyors of welcome cash often do share, in the costly banquets given at Greenwich or Richmond hotels by wild young gentlemen of blood and fashion. He had even, at the instance of some needy man about town who curried favour with any dispenser of ready-money, received a card which entitled him, now and again, to be crushed and jostled and trodden upon by distinguished company at the maddening ‘At Home’ of some berouged and bewigged old peeress.
There was, as Mr Wilkins felt with some inward misgivings, a difference between forming part of a mob at Macbeth House or at the Baratarian Embassy, and mixing on intimate terms with such a family as were the Denzils. Yet, as the French idiomatically twist the phrase, he paid it off with audacity, being greasily familiar with Sir Sykes; on terms of brotherly frankness where Jasper was concerned; and for the benefit of the young ladies, assuming the character of the facetious and agreeable rattle, as he conceived incumbent on a regular Londoner and a bachelor to boot, when on a visit in the country.
Blanche and Lucy Denzil scarcely knew whether to let amusement or dislike predominate in their minds as Mr Wilkins rattled on, pouring out miscellaneous anecdotes and jokes that, if worn threadbare in the metropolis, would, he was convinced, retain enough of their original gloss and sparkle to pass muster in the country. That the man was coarse, pushing, and unscrupulous, was evident even to critics so lenient as the baronet’s daughters; while Sir Sykes, behind his urbane smile, suffered martyrdom from his new agent’s deportment.
There was one member of the family circle at Carbery whom Mr Wilkins eyed with quite an exceptional interest. He rarely addressed himself in conversation to the Indian orphan, Sir Sykes’s ward, but he watched her narrowly, and the more he saw of her the harder he found it to adhere to his original hypothesis as regarded the young lady whom Richard Hold, master mariner, had recommended to his good offices.
‘If that demure manner and those downcast eyes do not belong to as sly a puss as ever lived, write me down a greenhorn!’ was the mental reflection of Enoch Wilkins, of St Nicholas Poultney, in the City of London, gentleman. ‘That she sets her cap at the captain, Sir Sykes Denzil’s hopeful heir, I take for granted. Her communicative friend, the pirate fellow, implied as much. The Lancer does not seem, however, disposed to come forward in a satisfactory style, and play Philemon to her Baucis.’
And it was a fact that since the morning which had witnessed the drive to High Tor and the visit to the pheasantry, the snares of Miss Ruth Willis had been vainly set for the capture of that bird of dubious feather, Jasper Denzil.
Why Jasper, who had so much to gain by the match on which his father’s mind was inexplicably bent, should hang back and prove recalcitrant, it was hard to say. His was not an independent soul. He was free from any trammels of a too scrupulous delicacy, and would have fingered any money got through the grimiest channels, without fear of soiling those white useless hands of his, the manliest work of which had hitherto been to grasp a bridle-rein. Yet Jasper had been very remiss of late in his attentions towards Ruth Willis, and apparently indifferent to the bribe of an income and establishment to be earned by marrying her.
‘Now look here, Sir Sykes!’ said the lawyer after dinner, as he edged his chair nearer to that of his host, refilled his glass, and assumed a tone of waggish confidence—‘look here, Sir Sykes! You want brushing up down here at Carbery, you do indeed; ay and a little fresh air let in upon you. In an old estate like this, and under such management as those of Pounce and Proser—beg his pardon; I mean Pontifex; ha, ha, ha!’—pursued Mr Wilkins, having his laugh out, without so much as a sympathetic titter from Jasper or a smile from Sir Sykes—‘in an estate of this kind matters are apt to stagnate, and all sorts of abuses and jobs to grow up, like the green duckweed on the surface of a pool. Your head-gamekeeper now, Sir Sykes, I never saw him, but I’m sure that he’s a rogue.’
‘Leathers is an old servant,’ answered Sir Sykes coldly; ‘I have had no reason to think ill of him.’
‘I’ll go bail that he’s a rogue, for all that,’ returned the unabashed lawyer, holding up his glass to the light, to admire the ruby claret before he swallowed it. ‘The head-keeper of an easy-going, moneyed gent of your standing—excuse me, Sir Sykes—must be a saint, if he’s not a sinner. Think of the temptations! Why, the rabbits alone must be a cool two hundred a year to the man; and then the pheasants, and the black-mail from the tenants for keeping the ground-game within reasonable numbers, and the percentage on watchers’ wages. I’ll get you a contract with a London poulterer, Sir Sykes, that shall stand you in something handsome, provide you with a keeper twice as useful as Leathers, and insure your having a hot corner for your friends at battue-time. I’m a new broom, and sweep clean.’
‘You promise well, at anyrate!’ said Jasper with a languid sneer.
‘And did you ever know me not ready to implement when I had once promised?’ briskly retorted the solicitor. ‘I merely mention the gamekeeper to shew that all’s fish that comes to my net, and that I am not above attending to such minor fry as a fellow in velveteen with a dog-whistle at his button-hole. We must go on commercial principles, Sir Sykes, if we want to manage an estate so as to make it pay, nowadays. All that feudal nonsense of an affectionate tenantry and a liberal lord of the manor is about as dead as Queen Anne. You should get a new steward as well as a new gamekeeper, Sir Sykes.’
The baronet stirred restlessly in his chair. He did not at all like this. Carbery, and the fair estate that went with it, had never yet been administered on commercial principles, especially when applied by so sweeping a reformer as Mr Wilkins of St Nicholas Poultney. ‘Mr Cornish keeps his accounts very correctly,’ he said in a hesitating tone. ‘Old Lord Harrogate gave him the stewardship, which his father had had before him, and his tenure of it has satisfied me.’
‘Because you can afford, or fancy you can, to be robbed right and left,’ said the lawyer, gulping down his wine. ‘It is your plausible hereditary steward, that has fattened and battened on the plunder of successive generations, who sucks the very marrow out of the land. Don’t tell me! I’ll overhaul Mr Cornish’s accounts in a way he’s little used to. But first you must introduce me to the farmers, Sir Sykes, and give me time to worm out of them what they pay, in kind or money, by way of fines, good-will, premium, and so forth, for the honour of tilling your under-rented acres. I’ll raise your rent-roll, never fear me, but not with a native chawbacon for prime-minister.’
‘So the steward must be flung overboard, it seems, as well as poor old Leathers the keeper,’ observed Jasper, half amused, but half annoyed.
‘And I’ve got another peg to fit into the vacant hole,’ said the lawyer, again addressing himself to the claret. ‘With your permission, Sir Sykes, to-morrow we’ll wire for him to run down from London for your approval. A sharp fellow is Abrahams. You won’t mind his persuasion? Jew as he is, he’s thoroughly at home in a farmhouse, counts every sheaf of wheat in the barn, and every house-lamb in the kitchen on frosty days, and wheedles out of the women what the husbands are too dogged to tell.—This is delicious claret, but no one except myself seems to drink it. Suppose we join the ladies?’
‘What has the governor done,’ groaned Jasper, as he lit his cigar, ‘to be under the thumb of such a man as this?’