After perusing this venerable document attentively, Mr. Roundhand shut himself up in his private room to study it yet more carefully, and then to forward a copy of it to his counsel learned in law. There is no need, however, to go further into the pros and cons which were subsequently discussed, except to say that these discussions pointed to the finding out, if possible, whether those attesting witnesses, or one of them, were still living, which was perhaps unlikely; but if not, whether their handwriting could be proved by any other witnesses. The next question was, who should hunt up these witnesses; and John Tincroft was fixed upon as the proper person to go upon this mission, accompanied, however, by Mr. Roundhand's clerk. Therefore it was that John had been hastily summoned to Oxford.
"I don't understand it all, Mr. Roundhand," said Tincroft.
John had not been many hours in Oxford. He had arrived by the Tally-ho late on the preceding evening, had slept at the Mitre, and now, at eleven in the morning, he was seated in the lawyer's private office, listening, with a bewildered air, to that gentleman's explanations. The certificate was in his hand, and he looked at it dubiously as he spoke.
"It all lies in a nutshell," replied the other; "you see, your grandfather chose to—to go out of the ordinary course; in short, he left the Church and joined the Baptists. You knew nothing of this, I daresay?"
"Nothing, sir, nothing," protested John, whose notions of the Baptist denomination of Christians, if he had any at all, were jumbled up with some old stories of Munster ¹ riots, and he was evidently anxious to wash his hands of all connection with any more modern professor of what he perhaps supposed to be the same revolutionary principles.
¹ Munster in Germany, not in Ireland.
"Just so, Tincroft; of course you know nothing of your grandfather, who died before you were born; and you could have heard nothing about him, to your knowledge, from your father, who died when you were a mere child. However, it pleased your grandfather to turn Baptist, and so, in consequence, your own father didn't undergo the ceremony or rite, whichever you please to call it—in his infancy, at any rate."
"Dear me! But my father was a good Christian, and Churchman too; so I have always understood," cried John, in some alarm.
"Oh yes, no doubt. Your grandfather, Makepeace, turned away from, and your father returned to, the mother Church, as it is called—the real old orthodox, and so forth. But for all that, somehow or other—mind, I don't understand these things, for I am a lawyer, and not a divine—but somehow or other, I fancy, as his name is nowhere in the baptismal register—I fancy that, somehow or other, the rite of Christian baptism was passed over."
"Dear me!" ejaculated John Tincroft, in pious horror.