“No,” he ejaculated. “That’s wrong. Should be, ‘I wonder whether he’s in court.’”
The old man stopped short in the entry, with the door leading to Mr Sergeant Towle’s chambers before, and that leading to the chambers of Mr Barnard, Q.C., behind, and drew forth his washed-out and faded red cotton handkerchief.
“I wonder whether he’ll be glad to see me,” he said. “I’m only a shabby-looking old fellow, and I dare say I’ve brought the smell of the tan-pits with me; and they tell me my son is getting to be quite a famous lawyer—quite the gentleman, too. Ah, it’s a great change—a great change. And I didn’t tell him I was coming; and p’raps it isn’t right to take him so by surprise. He mightn’t like it.”
The old man rubbed his damp fingers on his handkerchief, and looked about him in a troubled, helpless way.
“I feel always so mazed-like in this noisy London,” he said, weakly; “and if he was hurt about my coming it would about break my heart, that it would.”
The handkerchief was on its way up to his eyes, where the weak tears were gathering, when there was the sound of voices in the chambers of Mr Sergeant Towle, and, snatching up his bag, the old man trotted, pretty nimbly, up the stone stairs to the first floor, where, upon the pale drab door, there was the legend, “Mr Ross.”
“Mr Ross,” said the old man, chuckling to himself. “Mr Ross. That’s my son. God bless him! My son; and I’d have given a hundred golden pounds if my dear old wife had been alive, and could have stood here and seen his name writ large and famous on a door in London town like that.”
He stood admiring it for some minutes, and then hesitated, as if overcome by the importance of his son; but at last he raised the big umbrella, and tapped gently with the staghorn beak.
It was a very modest knock, and it was not answered, so at the end of five minutes he knocked again.
This time Mr Richard Dixie—Dicky Dix, as he was familiarly called—verified the words of Mr Swift, the solicitor (Cripple and Swift, of Gresham-street), by staring hard at the shabby-looking little old man and his bag, and then coming a little way out to stare at the doorpost, to the surprise of old Ross.