It was a good riddance for Lord Henry Moorpark when Elbraham went, which he did at last, after stubbornly refusing either to take or to allow any steps to be taken in pursuit of Clotilde.
“No,” he said, after his sixth glass of port. “I won’t spend the price of a Parl’y ticket on her; and I don’t know as I shall bother myself about divorce proceedings. What’s the good? Malpas hasn’t a penny in the world, so there’d be no costs; and as to being free, that’s what her ladyship would like. But, I say, Moorpark.”
“Yes?”
“What a sell about those jewels!”
He said it again as Lord Henry saw him into his carriage, and the next day he settled himself down in his sanctum with a very big cigar stuck between his lips, giving him the aspect of a very podgy swordfish that had burnt the tip of its weapon. Before him was a huge leather bill-case gorged with slips of bluish paper, every one of which, as he took it carefully out, bore a stamp in one corner, a reference to so many months after date, and was written across and signed. Many of them were endorsed with sign-manuals as well; and these slips of paper he quietly examined as he took them out of one pocket of the great case and then thrust them into another.
By degrees an observer, had he been present, would have noticed that the pockets in which these slips were placed varied according to their dates, and that for the most part they were examined and replaced in the most unemotional manner; but every now and then as Elbraham took one out he laid it on the table, drew violently at his cigar, emitted a tremendous cloud of smoke, and burst into a hoarse series of chuckles. Then he rubbed his hands and laughed again in an unpleasant, silent manner, twisting about in his pivoted library chair.
As he spun round, which, evidently being the result of practice, he did very cleverly, he wrinkled his face up in a way that with him indicated pleasure, the whole performance giving him the aspect of some gigantic grotesque Japanese top.
Then he would stop short, puff at the great cigar, and stare with his prominent lobster eyes at the slip of paper, examining the date and turning it over and over.
“Old cat!” he ejaculated; and the slip of paper was laid aside, and a heavy paperweight banged down upon it.
There were half a dozen of these heavy paperweights, and every now and then one was lifted and a fresh slip of paper placed beneath it.