Mr. Dalton smiled benignly. "The most winning personality—yet with a quiet inherent dignity all his own, the most disarming amiability—and a face that you might wander through a hundred exhibitions of painting and never see equalled for a certain sort of charm. I don't wonder at the award for the fifteen thousand dollar prize—ha, ha, ha!"
"What is it that the court says when counsel becomes prolix—Be brief, sir—be brief," suggested Mrs. Laniston, laughing nervously. She was surprised to find herself eager, expectant. "Your story is too interesting to bear digressions, Mr. Dalton."
"Thanks—thanks greatly," Mr. Dalton beamed.
"Well, the circus roaming around the country gave an exhibition in the neighbourhood of Charles Jennico's summer residence near Glaston, where Judge Lloyd was visiting. He and Jennico were first cousins, and after his financial reverses the judge, who was as proud as Lucifer, scarcely went anywhere else. And this youngster, a man grown he was then, had the hardihood, or the good feeling, or the curiosity—or nobody knows what actuated him—to deliberately call on the old man. 'I don't want a thing in the world of you,' he said. 'But I know that my father owed you much, and I owe you much for what my father was to me. I came to pay my respects—to get the glad hand, that's all.' Judge Lloyd never opened his lips to me on the subject of this visit, but he was taken by surprise, the young man being ushered into the library, and Charles Jennico was sitting in the bay-window—he used to laugh and cry together when he rehearsed the scene. The judge, he said, was like a man in a dream at first. Then he began to beseech this stranger to come and live with him like a son without conditions and without restraint. 'But I could not become a dependent on you,' the boy said. 'It would be like a robbery of your old age. I have heard of your financial reverses or I would not have come. I know that you are broke.' And though he put it thus bluntly the judge did not wither him with a look. He said that he had influence—without depriving himself he could provide the youngster with respectable employment. 'You have no idea of my ignorance, grandfather. What you call respectable employment for me would have either to be a farce or a gratuity. I can do real work, such as it is, where I am and eat my own bread.' Judge Lloyd argued that he could secure money for his education. He had friends who would be glad to oblige him. 'It would go hard with you to ask a favour for yourself, sir—you shall not sue for me.' The old gentleman then urged him to consider what he would lose—he should have every advantage, he should travel. 'Grandfather,' he said, 'I have stood on my head in every capital of Europe—what I should be tempted to do would be to stay with you, quiet, resting, for I am fed up with stir and racket.' The whole thing captured Charles Jennico's fancy. He said that he had never expected to hear Judge Lloyd come so near a confession of arbitrary injustice, as when he said how cruel had been the past, and how he feared that he had allowed a subservience to artificial standards to embitter and impoverish and shorten the lives of the youth's parents. 'You were just and true from your standpoint,' the boy sought to comfort him. 'A father has a right to his son's obedience'—the old judge used to repeat this phrase; it justified his course to himself. 'And yet my father was right, too, from his standpoint—I can't judge between you. I don't blame either for what is gone. I would willingly live with you in my father's place, but I must make and eat my own bread and play the man. You made a great mistake about my mother, though—you never knew my mother. She was It! She was the whole team! She was the Pearl you threw away, worth all your tribe!' And Judge Lloyd said that he believed it now that he had seen her son—he wished he had seen her first. And then the two, as competent fools as ever lived, fell on each other's necks and wept and parted."
"Tut, tut, tut—what a pity," said the bald-headed bridge player, oblivious of the words of his partner until she twice repeated, "Shall I lead, partner," when he caught himself with a galvanic start and responded, "Pray do."
There was a pause while Mr. Dalton eyed the fire reflectively, puffing at his cigar, which had gone out while he talked, requiring to be rekindled.
"What so won upon me this afternoon was the manner in which young Lloyd received the intelligence. He did not seem to remember or care at first that his financial miseries were now at an end—although he has been at his wit's end for money as he told me afterward; in fact, that he had not enough to pay for his transportation with the rest of the troupe or show or carnival or whatever the organisation is called, and had even tried to pawn his mother's engagement ring which had been indeed his grandmother's engagement ring—an heirloom in Judge Lloyd's family, a thing with a legend, more or less mythical, I suppose."
Jardine thought of the gems he had seen in the safe of the hotel in Colbury, but he kept his own counsel.
"Of course the detail of the circumstances brought back to him that day of parting, and he told me that when he had first heard of his grandfather's death without another word between them he had deeply regretted his refusal to live with him in his father's place. He thought he had been too sensitive as to his independence—too afraid of grafting. It would not have been for long. He could have been the solace of the old gentleman's reverses and his age. He was wild that he had denied him aught—the only time that they had ever seen each other! His grandfather had been good to him that day, he said. And there," said Mr. Dalton with a whimsical wave of his cigar, "I had to wait and postpone the details of business communications while he leaned up against a tree in the woods and sobbed like a child because his grandfather had been good to him that day when he had offered him—so late—the boon of a life of precarious dependence in lieu of his free agency and a certain means of livelihood. I was touched, I must confess, I was very much touched. He has a rare nature, this-ground-and-lofty tumbler."
Mr. Dalton had not observed the usual legal reticence concerning a client's affairs. The nature of the case, the will and other matters of record, would give publicity to the mere facts, but he was solicitous, since the details had of necessity been elicited here, that the personal character of the harlequin legatee should be put into evidence, and receive from all the respect which he felt to be its due. No better method could he have found to disseminate the impression he wished to create than these reminiscences addressed to a symposium of idle gossips. Their craftily titillated interest kept them still loitering around the fire after the card and chess tables had been abandoned as the hour wore late, and when Mrs. Laniston began to ascend the stairs to her apartment she noted, glancing back from the landing, that a group of gentlemen with freshly lighted cigars were drawing closer round the hearth continuing the subject with its cognate themes.