“The mines nearly ruined him, then, in the first place?” said Brace.
“Very nearly; but he had such faith in them that for five years we lived almost in poverty that we might pay off debts; when, as his last creditor was satisfied, your father’s faith met with its reward, and ever since the mines have gone on increasing their returns year by year. But let us go to him now. You will be careful, though, Brace; you see now how necessary it is that not even a reference should be made to the bygone?”
“Yes—yes, mother—yes!” said Brace, with a troubled sigh; and they rose to leave the room, when, with the traces of his former emotion quite passed away, Captain Norton entered, looking inquiringly at mother and son, and then entering into conversation upon indifferent topics, as if nothing had happened.
Right Honourable.
“Now look here, Josh: it’s of no use for you to come bothering me like this. Here have I been back from Italy only a few days, and you’re down upon me like a leech—I mean like a hawk!”
“If your lordship had condescended to tell me that you were going abroad, and consulted me about the meeting of those little bills when they fell due, it would have been a different thing.”
The scene was a heavily-furnished room in a fashionable London hotel, and the speakers were George Viscount Maudlaine, son and heir to the hampered estates and somewhat tarnished title of the Right Honourable Valentine, twentieth Earl of Chiltern; and Joshua Braham, Esq., solicitor, of Drury Chambers, St Alban’s Place, Regent Street. The former, as he lounged back in his purple dressing-gown, appeared to be a tall, well-made young man, with a somewhat dreamy or tobacco-contemplative cast of countenance, more remarkable for bone, and the prominence of the well-known Chiltern features, than anything particularly definite; the latter was a gentleman, very smooth, very swarthy, possessing a ruddy and Eastern development of lip, aquiline of—nose, hair short—black—spiky—of a texture, in short, that threatened, should a lock be sent for, to fly off in dangerous blinding showers of capillary stubble.
“You see, I don’t recollect these sort of things,” said his lordship.
“Only when your lordship requires a fresh supply of money,” said Mr Braham, smiling like a shark, and rubbing his hands together so that his rings rattled.