CHAPTER XXXI.—TO REMIND.
‘Gentleman—that is, person—wanted most particularly to know—please to see him, Sir Sykes!’ deferentially hinted the under-butler, sliding on noiseless feet up to the angle of his master’s library table. ‘He was very pressing—send in card,’ continued the man, slurring over the words he uttered with that inimitable slipperiness of diction of which the English, and indeed Cockney man-servant possesses the monopoly, and which seems obsequiously to suggest rather than boldly to announce. Sir Sykes looked up in some surprise.
‘Did he mention what he wanted?’ he asked.
‘No, Sir Sykes,’ replied the under-butler, edging the emblazoned tray on which lay the card, a little nearer, as an experienced angler might bring his bait within striking distance of the pike that lay among the weeds.
‘You may shew him in—here,’ said Sir Sykes, as, without taking the card, he read the name upon it, and which was legibly inscribed in a big, bold, black handwriting. With a bow the under-butler withdrew to execute his master’s orders.
Great people—and a baronet of Sir Sykes Denzil’s wealth and position may for all practical purposes be classed among the great of the earth—are proverbially difficult of access. It is the business of those about them to hedge them comfortably in from flippant or interested intrusions which might ruffle the golden calm of their existence; and suspicious-looking strangers by no means find the door of such a mansion as Carbery, as a rule, fly open at their summons.
The man who had on this occasion effected an entry was not one of those whose faces are their best letters of recommendation. The card he had given bore the name of Richard Hold, and under ordinary circumstances, such a caller as the mariner would never have succeeded in being put into communication with a higher dignitary than the house-steward or the groom of the chambers. However, by a judicious mixture of bribing and bullying, the visitor had induced the under-butler to do his errand. Under certain circumstances, half a sovereign is a sorry douceur, even to an under-butler, but when tendered in company with enigmatical threats of ‘starting with a rope’s end,’ by a seafaring personage of stalwart build and resolute air, such a coin becomes doubly efficacious as a persuader.
Richard Hold, master mariner, came in with a curious gait and mien, half-slinking, half-swaggering, like a wolf that daylight has found far from the forests and among the haunts of men. He was dressed in very new black garments, ‘shore-going clothes,’ as he would himself have described them; and the hat that he carried in his hand was new and tall and hard. He had even provided himself with a pair of gloves, so desirous was he to omit no item of the customary garb of gentlemen; but these he carried loose, instead of subjecting his strong brown fingers to such unwonted confinement.
‘I cannot say that I expected this honour, Mr Hold,’ said the baronet, stiffly motioning his unwelcome visitor to a seat.
‘’Tis likely not,’ coolly returned the adventurer, as he took a survey of the apartment. ‘This sort of place, I don’t mind admitting, is a cut, or even two cuts above me. Still, business is business, Sir Sykes Denzil, Baronet, and has got to be attended to, I reckon, even in such a gen-teel spot as this is, mister!’
There must be something in the American twang and the American forms of speech which all the world over hits the fancy of British-born rovers of Hold’s caste, for in every quarter of the globe our home-reared rovers affect the idiom, and sometimes the accent, of Sam Slick’s countrymen.
‘I am scarcely aware, Mr Hold,’ said the baronet with cold politeness, ‘what business it can be to which I am indebted for the favour of your company, to-day.’
‘Aren’t you, though, skipper?’ echoed Hold, whose natural audacity, for a moment repressed by the weight as it were of the grandeur around him, began to assert itself afresh. ‘Well, let every fellow paddle his own canoe and shoe his own mustangs. The question is, Are you dealing fairly by me or are you not, Sir Sykes Denzil, Baronet?’
‘I assure you that you are talking Greek to me,’ said the master of Carbery Chase, with a tinge of colour rising to his pale face.
‘A nod,’ persisted Hold, ‘is as good every bit as a wink—you know the rest of it, mister. But since you want plain speaking, you shall have it. You can’t have forgot, no more than I can, that our bargain was just this: A certain young lady was to be married to a certain young gentleman.’
‘I apprehend that you allude to—to my ward—Miss Ruth Willis,’ said the baronet hesitatingly.
‘You’ve hit it exactly,’ exclaimed Hold, with a slap of his hard hand upon the crown of his hard hat, which sounded like a muffled drum, somewhat to the discomfiture of its proprietor, who eyed its ruffled surface ruefully. ‘When is the wedding to come off?’
Sir Sykes contemplated his ruffianly visitor with a disgust which it required all his prudence to dissemble.
‘In civilised society,’ he said coldly, ‘events of that sort do not take place with quite so expeditious a disregard of difficulties as your very apposite question suggests. In the backwoods it is perhaps otherwise.’
‘In the backwoods,’ roughly retorted Hold, ‘we don’t shilly-shally about righting a wrong, no more than about the marrying of a young couple that hev made up their minds to it. And let me tell you, Sir Sykes Denzil, Baronet, the superfine Saxony you fine gentlemen wear covers bigger rogues, often, than ever did the deerskin hunting-shirt with its Indian embroidery of wampum and coloured quills. Backwoodsmen! I’ve been in white-fisted company less to be trusted than theirs.’
Sir Sykes had imbibed too much of the spirit of that modern civilised society of which he spoke, to be readily nettled into a burst of anger by such taunts as these. Cool, save for one moment, from the first, the temperature of his calmly flowing blood seemed to grow more frigid as Hold’s warmed.
‘You have, I assure you, Mr Hold, no cause whatever for irritation,’ he said smoothly: ‘I mean—to use your own expression, which I willingly adopt—fairly by you. I neither repudiate nor ignore our tacit compact. It is my dearest wish that my son should become the husband of the exemplary young lady in whose prosperity you interest yourself.’
Hold gave a growl such as a bear, suddenly mollified by the gift of a glittering slice of toothsome honeycomb, might be expected to emit. His distrustful eye ranged over the baronet’s plausible face, as though to test the sincerity of the assurance which had just been given.
‘We’re in the same boat,’ he said, in a tone that, if dogged, was less surly than before. ‘Our pumpkins, I guess, ought to go to the same market, they ought. But fair words don’t put fresh butter into a dish of boiled batatas. I’m a British bull-dog of the game old breed,’ he added gruffly; ‘and I keep the grip, however I’m handled. Is there a likelihood of the marriage coming off soonish?’
‘I hope so,’ returned Sir Sykes. He would have given much to have avoided the slight embarrassment which he was conscious that his manner indicated, and which was not lost upon Hold’s watchful eye.
‘No day fixed? No banns put up—stop! I forgot—you swells marry by special license of the Archbishop of Canterbury—no cake ordered; no fal-lals bespoken from the milliner; no breakfast; no orange-flowers, eh? Well, I wish to be reasonable about it, Sir Sykes, but there must be an end of this. Do the young people understand one another, or do they not?’
‘It does not answer to brusquer these things,’ returned Sir Sykes apologetically.
‘It does not answer to what?’ interrupted Richard, to whose nautical ears the French word sounded odder than would have done a fragment of linguafranca or a scrap of Eboe or Mandingo.
‘To be too precipitate,’ explained the baronet. ‘I have spoken to my son. He sees, I hope, the affair in a proper light. He is often in the society of Miss Willis, but—but’——
Sir Sykes wavered miserably here. All his deportment seemed to fail him before Hold’s merciless eye, the very gaze of which probed him to the quick.
‘Aren’t you captain in your own ship?’ asked the adventurer curtly.
The baronet winced at the question. Captain in his own ship, in the sense that some men are commanders at home, he had never been. His own house, his own estate, had not from the first been managed in precise accordance with the views of him who owned them. But he had been a decorous captain, a captain who walked quarter-deck as solemnly as the greatest Tartar afloat, and who got lip-service and eye-service as a salve to his vanity, until quite recently.
Now there was a strong and not altogether an obedient hand on the helm. A new broom was making, in the person of Enoch Wilkins, attorney-at-law, a clean sweep of various time-honoured abuses such as always do grow up about a great estate, and the wails of the indignant sufferers could not always be kept from reaching the reluctant ears of Sir Sykes. People who were docked of perquisites came in respectful bitterness of soul to the baronet, and humbly prayed that he would take their part as against Wilkins the lawyer and Abrahams the steward.
Captain in his own ship! The word was a telling one, and it hit him hard. He was only captain in an ornamental sense, because Carbery was his freehold, and the baronetcy his, and he alone could sign receipts and draw cheques. He had loved his ease much; and now it was perpetually invaded. He was sorry for dismissed gamekeepers, and for tenants whose tenure was to expire on Lady-day. He gave them drafts on his banker as a plaster for the smart which he nevertheless felt sure was deserved. An unrespecting City solicitor, and the sharp London Jew whom Mr Wilkins had inducted into the stewardship, were swelling the rent-roll in despite of the feeble protests of the nominal lord of all.
‘I can’t compel Captain Denzil to take a wife of my choosing; that is beyond the power of a modern English father, at least where sons are concerned,’ said Sir Sykes with a sickly smile.
‘No; you can’t do that, skipper. To knot the ninetailed cat and give the young fellow six dozen for mutiny,’ said Hold, chuckling over the imaginary scene, ‘would be too strict discipline for mealy-mouthed days like these. But you might let him have it, Sir Sykes, though not quite so downright. Make him understand that his allowances and his liberty all depend on good behaviour, and then see what comes of it.’
What Sir Sykes suffered during the delivery of this speech, could only be inferred from the fact that his lips became of a bluish white and that he drew his breath gaspingly.
‘Believe me, Mr Hold,’ he said in a thin broken voice, which gained strength somewhat as he proceeded, ‘you may intrust the care of carrying out your wishes—that is, our wishes—to me. I understand my son best, and I’——
He stopped again, gasping for breath, and the lines about his mouth, traced by pain, were visible enough to attract the notice of his unscrupulous guest.
‘You shall have time, Sir Sykes Denzil, Baronet,’ he said apologetically; ‘take a fortnight if you like. I’m to be heard of meanwhile at old Plugger’s;’ and he threw the card of that establishment on the table.
Then Sir Sykes rang the bell for wine, and the wine was brought. Hold tossed off a bumper of sherry.
‘Your health, skipper,’ he said; ‘and success to the wedding.’ And so, with an impudent leer, he picked up his tall shining hat and departed.