One day as he was entering the house by a side door, Darvell the gardener told him that there was a gentleman waiting to see him. The gentleman was very anxious to see him, and had begged to be allowed to sit down. Darvell, when asked whether the gentleman was a gentleman, expressed an affirmative opinion. He had been driven over from Cambridge in a hired gig, which was now standing in the yard, and was dressed, as Darvell expressed it, 'quite accordingly and genteel.' So Caldigate passed into the house and found the man seated in the dining-room.
'Perhaps you will step into my study?' said Caldigate. Thus the two men were seated together in the little room which Caldigate used for his own purposes.
Caldigate, as he looked at the man, distrusted his gardener's judgment. The coat and hat and gloves, even the whiskers and head of hair, might have belonged to a gentleman; but not, as he thought, the mouth or the eyes or the hands. And when the man began to speak there was a mixture of assurance and intended complaisance, an effected familiarity and an attempt at ease, which made the master of the house quite sure that his guest was not all that Darvell had represented. The man soon told his story. His name was Bollum, Richard Bollum, and he had connections with Australia;—was largely concerned in Australian gold-mines. When Caldigate heard this, he looked round involuntarily to see whether the door was closed. 'We're tiled, of course,' said Bollum. Caldigate with a frown nodded his head, and Bollum went on. He hadn't come there, he said, to speak of some recent troubles of which he had heard. He wasn't the man to shove his nose into other people's matters. It was nothing to him who was married to whom. Caldigate shivered, but sat and listened in silence. But Mr. Bollum had had dealings,—many dealings,—with Timothy Crinkett. Indeed he was ready to say that Timothy Crinkett was his uncle. He was not particularly proud of his uncle, but nevertheless Timothy Crinkett was his uncle. Didn't Mr. Caldigate think that something ought to be done for Timothy Crinkett?
'Yes, I do,' said Caldigate, finding himself compelled to say something at the moment, and feeling that he could say so much with positive truth.
Then Bollum continued his story, showing that he knew all the circumstances of Polyeuka. 'It was hard on them, wasn't it, Mr. Caldigate?'
'I think it was.'
'Every rap they had among them, Mr. Caldigate! You left them as bare as the palm of my hand!'
'It was not my doing. I simply made him an offer, which every one at the time believed to be liberal.'
'Just so. We grants all that. But still you got all their money;—old pals of yours too, as they say out there.'
'It is a matter of most intense regret to me. As soon as I knew the circumstances, Mr. Bollum, I should have been most happy to have divided the loss with them—'