“It’s Ripton, about that committal judgment. Will you see him, sir?”
”—To the devil, willingly,” replied Warren sharply. “Tell him to go there.”
The clerk went out, tittering, to inform the individual in question that Warren was very busy, and couldn’t possibly find time to attend to him to-day, an intimation which had the effect of sending that much harassed and debt-hung waggon-maker slouching down the street, gurgling forth strange profanities, and consigning lawyers in general, and Warren in particular, to the care of precisely the same potentate to whom Warren had just consigned him; only in far more sultry, and utterly unprintable, terms.
“Yes, I’ll take it over,” the attorney’s thoughts ran on, as he scanned the papers. “I can afford a loss on it—rather—and then the stake! Good God! I’d cheerfully plank down all I’ve made, and start life again, kaal, (lit: naked) for that. Out he’ll have to walk—and not much to take along with him either. He won’t show his nose around that neighbourhood again. Le Sage will take care of the rest.”
Warren was the leading attorney in Gydisdorp. The district was large, well-to-do, and litigious, wherefore over and above will-drawing and conveyancing, and so forth, he had as much practice as he could take care of. There were other matters he undertook, but on the quiet, which were even more paying. Shafto, who came next to him, used to declare that Warren ought to be struck off the rolls; but as the two were great friends and invariably took a couple of “splits” together per diem, in the bar of the Masonic Hotel, nobody believed Shafto—only laughed. Besides, Warren was popular. He was genial and gifted, could tell a good story and sing a good song; moreover, he was a keen sportsman. So life, on the whole, was a rosy thing for him, and more so that Warren’s creed could be summed up in a word and a figure. This was it: Number 1.
Pushing the deeds aside, Warren unlocked a drawer, and produced another enclosure. This he handled carefully, tenderly one might have said. Undoing the soft paper wrappings, he extracted a—photograph. Propping it up on his writing-table, he began to study it, and as he did so his face softened unconsciously. Then he took up a large magnifying glass. The powerful lens threw into relief the seductive lines of the splendid figure, the curve of the smiling mouth, the glad, luminous dilation of the eyes—and—it was identical with the portrait hanging on Wyvern’s wall—the one that was dusted and cared for.
This had not been given to Warren by its original. Only one had been given by her to anybody, and it we have seen before. Neither had he stolen it. But a considerable bribe to the photographer’s assistant, himself in difficulties—Warren was nowhere if he failed to take advantage of other people’s difficulties—had procured him this, and another copy, which, he kept at his own house. And as the photographer drove his trade at Cape Town, some hundreds of miles distant from Gydisdorp, why that rendered the transaction all the safer.
“Out he goes,” he murmured mechanically, his glance riveted on the portrait. “Out he goes—and then—I come in. Only—do I?”
The crack of a waggon whip and the harsh yell of the driver, from the street outside; the clear, deep-toned voices of a group of Kafirs passing along the footway, rising and falling in cadenced modulation, the barking of a cur, these were the sounds—everyday sounds—that smote upon his ear in the drowsy afternoon heat. Then rose another, and hearing it he quickly put the photograph face downwards, drawing over it a litter of papers. The sound was that of steps, ascending the wooden staircase—for Warren chose to have his own office off the ground floor, contrary to usual custom in Gydisdorp, so as to ensure greater privacy.
“Come in.”