“I’ll have a glass of wine, Burdon,” Sir John says at last; “and we’ll put it all away again. It’s very beautiful. That’s Cellini work—real,” he says, as he took up a great golden bowl, all hammered and punched and engraved. “But the whole lot of it is an incubus, for I can’t use it, and I don’t want to make a show.”
“Take a glass yourself, my man,” he said, as I got him the sherry—a fresh bottle from the outer cellar. “Ha! at a moderate computation that old gold plate is worth a hundred thousand pounds; and a hundred thousand pounds at only three per cent in the funds, Burdon, would be three thousand a year. So you see I lose that income by letting this heap of old gold plate lie locked up in those chests.—Now, what would you do with it, if it were yours?”
“Sell it, Sir John, and put it in houses,” I said sharply.
“Yes, James Burdon; and a sensible thing to do. But you are a servant, and I’m a baronet; though I don’t look one, do I?” he said, holding up his red hands and laughing.
“You always look a gentleman, Sir John,” I said; “and that’s what you are.”
“Please God, I try to be,” he said sadly. “But I don’t want the money, James; and these are all old family heirlooms that I hold in trust for my life, and have to hand over—bound in honour to do so—to my son.—Look!” he said, “at the arms and crest of the Boileaus on every piece.”
“Boileau, Sir John?”
“Well, Drinkwater, then. We translated the name when we came over to England. There; let’s put it all away. It’s a regular incubus.”
So it was all packed up again in the chests; for he wouldn’t let me finish cleaning it, saying it would take a week; and that it was more for the sake of seeing and going over it, than anything, that he had had it out. So we locked it all up again in the plate-room. And it took five waters hot as he could bear ’em to wash his hands; and even then there was some rouge left in the cracks, and in the old signet ring with the coat of arms cut in the stone—same as that on the plate.
I don’t know how it was; perhaps I was out of sorts, but from that day I got thinking about gold plate and what Sir John said about its worth. I knew what “incubus” meant, for I went up in the library and looked out the word in the big dictionary; and that plate got to be such an incubus to me that I went up to Sir John one morning and gave him warning.