“Nay, Miss Tinker, you have not permitted me to say my say. I am well aware that Mr. Pinder is a poor man. I am also a poor man. I had not intended to trouble my client in the event of defeat for more than the actual costs out of pocket. Those I couldn’t afford to advance. If you give me your simple word that these shall be paid sooner or later by someone, no matter who,” and here there was the barest suspicion of a twinkle in the young man’s eyes as he added, “or for whose sake, rest assured I shall not allow Mr. Pinder’s cause to fail for want of professional assistance. More I cannot promise.”
Dorothy extended her hand. “And you have my word that if I live you shall not suffer. I do so want Tom, I mean Mr. Pinder, to win if he’s in the right. I’ll do almost anything rather than he should be borne down simply by his poverty. I say almost anything. I draw the line at marrying, you know; besides,” and a look of sudden remembrance sprung to Dorothy’s eyes.
“Yes, besides?”
“Oh, it’s something you wouldn’t understand, about a horrid girl with green gloves,” and Dorothy tripped away with a smile and a nod.
“This case fairly bristles with women,” mused Edwin Sykes. Quintilian was right: Nulla causa sine femina.
And the months went by and the trial of the great cause of “Pinder at the suit of Tinker” seemed as far off as ever. First blood had been drawn by the defendant: the motion for an interim injunction and an account of profits had been refused by the Court, and the judge had made certain observation as to the precipitancy with which the action had been commenced that made that respectable practitioner, Mr. Nehemiah Wimpenny, who was present at the hearing of the motion, long that the floor of the Court would gape and swallow him to the bowels of the earth,—anywhere out of hearing of that calm, gentle voice dropping vitriol in honeyed accents. In proportion as Tom and Ben and the friends of Co-op Mill rejoiced, so did Mr. Tinker rage and storm. From the very filing of the Bill he had regretted that in his anger he had instituted proceedings that none knew better than himself were purely vexatious and vindictive. The monitor of the night watches had left him little peace. In vain he had tried to silence the still small voice by arguing to himself that to stop Co-op Mill would be to stop the irreligious services which more and more abundantly attracted men from the orthodox ministrations of Mr. Jones and the other chapels of the district. Mr. Tinker was no Jesuit. Again and again he more than half-resolved to bid Mr. Wimpenny stay his hand he would have been glad to be quit of the lawsuit, even if he had to pay the defendant’s costs as well as his own. But now that he was smarting under a rebuff, and his enemy was exulting in a momentary triumph,—give way now! No! That was not the stuff Jabez Tinker was made of. To be bested by a boy, a nobody that owed all he was and all he had to him, a serpent whom he had warmed in his breast,—it could not, it should not be.
And Nehemiah Wimpenny artfully fanned the flames of Mr. Tinker’s wrath. He pooh-poohed the temporary check.
“It wasn’t an engagement, my dear sir; an interlocutory motion is a mere skirmish, a sort of reconnoitering expedition, a simple device to draw the enemy’s fire. Now we know where they are. They have had to show their hand, sir. We know where their weak spots are.”
“That’s all very fine,” grumbled Tinker, gloomily. “We may have found their weak spot; but it seems to me they’ve found one or two of ours—and one sore one, too, judging by the way you squirmed when my Lord rubbed it into you.”
“Oh! That’s nothing,” laughed Wimpenny. “I took his salt cum grano, and I don’t doubt you’ll attach the same importance to this little contretemps. The trial’s the thing.’’