“I ought to imitate you, in fact, Mr. Vholes?” says Richard, sitting down again with an impatient laugh and beating the devil’s tattoo with his boot on the patternless carpet.
“Sir,” returns Vholes, always looking at the client as if he were making a lingering meal of him with his eyes as well as with his professional appetite. “Sir,” returns Vholes with his inward manner of speech and his bloodless quietude, “I should not have had the presumption to propose myself as a model for your imitation or any man’s. Let me but leave the good name to my three daughters, and that is enough for me; I am not a self-seeker. But since you mention me so pointedly, I will acknowledge that I should like to impart to you a little of my—come, sir, you are disposed to call it insensibility, and I am sure I have no objection—say insensibility—a little of my insensibility.”
“Mr. Vholes,” explains the client, somewhat abashed, “I had no intention to accuse you of insensibility.”
“I think you had, sir, without knowing it,” returns the equable Vholes. “Very naturally. It is my duty to attend to your interests with a cool head, and I can quite understand that to your excited feelings I may appear, at such times as the present, insensible. My daughters may know me better; my aged father may know me better. But they have known me much longer than you have, and the confiding eye of affection is not the distrustful eye of business. Not that I complain, sir, of the eye of business being distrustful; quite the contrary. In attending to your interests, I wish to have all possible checks upon me; it is right that I should have them; I court inquiry. But your interests demand that I should be cool and methodical, Mr. Carstone; and I cannot be otherwise—no, sir, not even to please you.”
Mr. Vholes, after glancing at the official cat who is patiently watching a mouse’s hole, fixes his charmed gaze again on his young client and proceeds in his buttoned-up, half-audible voice as if there were an unclean spirit in him that will neither come out nor speak out, “What are you to do, sir, you inquire, during the vacation. I should hope you gentlemen of the army may find many means of amusing yourselves if you give your minds to it. If you had asked me what I was to do during the vacation, I could have answered you more readily. I am to attend to your interests. I am to be found here, day by day, attending to your interests. That is my duty, Mr. C., and term-time or vacation makes no difference to me. If you wish to consult me as to your interests, you will find me here at all times alike. Other professional men go out of town. I don’t. Not that I blame them for going; I merely say I don’t go. This desk is your rock, sir!”
Mr. Vholes gives it a rap, and it sounds as hollow as a coffin. Not to Richard, though. There is encouragement in the sound to him. Perhaps Mr. Vholes knows there is.
“I am perfectly aware, Mr. Vholes,” says Richard, more familiarly and good-humouredly, “that you are the most reliable fellow in the world and that to have to do with you is to have to do with a man of business who is not to be hoodwinked. But put yourself in my case, dragging on this dislocated life, sinking deeper and deeper into difficulty every day, continually hoping and continually disappointed, conscious of change upon change for the worse in myself, and of no change for the better in anything else, and you will find it a dark-looking case sometimes, as I do.”
“You know,” says Mr. Vholes, “that I never give hopes, sir. I told you from the first, Mr. C., that I never give hopes. Particularly in a case like this, where the greater part of the costs comes out of the estate, I should not be considerate of my good name if I gave hopes. It might seem as if costs were my object. Still, when you say there is no change for the better, I must, as a bare matter of fact, deny that.”
“Aye?” returns Richard, brightening. “But how do you make it out?”
“Mr. Carstone, you are represented by—”