“Bought what?” I ventured.
“My name, sir,” he said. “She come in here, as excited as Punch; and we got talking together. ‘Mr Gaskett,’ she says, ‘I want a name.’ ‘Well,’ I answers, ‘there’s plenty agoing for choice. What do you want it for?’ ‘For a babby,’ she says, ‘as hasn’t got one of his own.’ ‘O-ho!’ I says: ‘that’s the game is it? Well, shall I sell you mine for a pint?’ ‘Done,’ she says; and done it was. She’d a superstition, she said, about giving him one that wasn’t his by right of birth or purchase, and that settled the matter. I don’t know if he was christened that way. If he was, you’re the third; and that makes it funny.”
Not so odd, nevertheless, I thought, by two-thirds of its oddity, if the tremendous suspicion sprung suddenly into my mind were justified. But anyhow it was a certain relief to find that this beery Amphitryon was not my grandfather.
“And you—you never saw your godson, so to call him?” I asked.
“Not I,” said Mr Gaskett stoutly. “But, whoever he was, he might ha’ been worse called—that I will say. I never see the old lady again neither, and that fixes it in me. Now you yourself, sir. I suppose you was called after your father?”
I detected a sudden insolent curiosity in his eye. To be sure, what with my age and inquisitiveness, there seemed a certain coincidence here. But I kept my nerve, and put his question aside with another.
“Where is this White Square?”
“Down yonder,” he said coolly—“off the High Street. But she won’t be living there now.”
“Won’t she?” I answered, as coolly for my part. “But I don’t know that it matters to me whether she is or isn’t.”
“Nor to me,” said the landlord, moving away with a sudden repudiation of me and all my concerns. I had offended him, and was not sorry to have done so. He scowled at me balefully as I finished my beer and left the bar.