“I! Mr. Basil Pennibacker!” exclaimed Candituft, his thoughts wandering and wounded.
“Understand,” said Basil, very calmly: “pray, understand. I have no objection whatever to the sale on Mr. Jericho’s personal account; only the world may think that the sulphur runs through the whole family.”
“Surely, sir”—said Candituft—“surely you are in jest?”
“If my words were engrossed on parchment, with a fifty pound stamp to ’em, they couldn’t be more serious. Last night, Mr. Jericho fought a duel? Battersea fields? You were his second? So far, I find I’m right. Well, sir, it is said that Colonel Bones fired a ball through the heart—how the ball found it out, I can’t say—through the heart of Mr. Jericho.”
Candituft dropped his eyelids—smiled—and shook his head.
“Is this true?” asked Basil. “Doctor Dodo swears it’s true; but Dodo—some folks say—is a lunatic. Is it true that Jericho, with a hole through his heart, like a hole through a tailor’s thimble, laughed at the thing as a good joke, and walked like a postman from the ground?”
“Mr. Pennibacker, in this world we light upon strange people”—
“What the monkey said”—cried Basil—“when he met his sweetheart in the Ark. Go on.”
“Do you not perceive, Mr. Basil—is it not very strange—that a man of your extraordinary acumen does not discover this bullet to be—a—a metaphor?”
“I don’t know,” said Basil. “To be sure I have known metaphors of the like metal. But what do you mean? Where’s the metaphor, when the world calls Mr. Jericho, the Man with a Hole in his Heart!”