His tone was so unmistakably sincere, that the obese gentleman descended, figuratively, from the stilts on which he was mounted and involuntarily returned the pressure of his fingers, only gasping a little in a slow and cod-like manner.
“The sarcasm, the innuendo,” said Gilead, “of which I cannot pretend to hold myself guiltless, must have appeared to you as pointless as they were impertinent. My sole excuse is that I took you for someone else.”
“O, indeed!” said Mr Bundy, heavily perplexed.
“Yes,” said Gilead—“I cannot, I must not say for whom, lest I further endanger a confidence which my rashness has already sufficiently imperilled. But when I tell you, sir, in the sole attempt at self-justification which exists to me, and in response to the noble candour which has made me acquainted with your real name, that mine is Gilead Balm—”
“What! Of Lamb’s Agency?” exclaimed the stranger.
“I entreat you, sir,” continued Gilead, “to believe that I am actuated by no spirit of empty vaunting, but, on the contrary, by one of humiliation that the business of my office should have been committed to so unintelligent a representative as myself. I can plead, sir, nothing but the excuse of good intentions. I believed you, as I say, to be someone else, and, acting upon that assumption, I answered, under a fictitious name, your advertisement, and was so happy, or so unfortunate, as to find myself engaged. My explanation can go no farther, nor be offered less lamely. Will you be generously content with it, with my reiterated apologies, and with the assurance that whatever confidences I may have surprised will remain absolutely sacred to me?”
His candour, his winning manner, not to speak of his self-revelation, won him at once and as always complete absolution. Mr Bundy, with a supreme effort to throw off the lowness of spirit into which he had again sunk, responded, as heartily as possible, in kind.
“Say no more, sir,” he said; “say no more. I congratulate myself, I positively do, on this accident.”
“We have been talking at cross-purposes,” said Gilead.
“We will do so no longer,” cried the other. “I should know, sir, of the lofty motives which actuate your Agency; and, more, of the personal reputation of its founder. I should take it as an honour, sir, if you would permit me to make bare to Mr Balm the bosom which has already, perchance unwittingly, half revealed itself to a stranger.”