Tyrrel rose abruptly. The chance words had put an idea into his head.
“What’s Walker’s address?” he asked, in a very curt tone.
Sir Edward gave it him.
“You’ll find him a tough nut, though,” he added, with a smile, as he followed the enthusiastic young Cornishman to the door. “But I see you’re in earnest. Good luck go with you!”
CHAPTER XII. — A HARD BARGAIN.
Tyrrel took a hansom, and tore round in hot haste to Erasmus Walker’s house. He sent in his card. The famous engineer was happily at home. Tyrrel, all on fire, found himself ushered into the great man’s study. Mr. Walker sat writing at a luxurious desk in a most luxurious room—writing, as if for dear life, in breathless haste and eagerness. He simply paused for a second in the midst of a sentence, and looked up impatiently at the intruder on his desperate hurry. Then he motioned Tyrrel into a chair with an imperious wave of his ivory penholder. After that, he went on writing for some moments in solemn silence. Only the sound of his steel nib, traveling fast as it could go over the foolscap sheet, broke for several seconds the embarrassing stillness.
Walter Tyrrel, therefore, had ample time meanwhile to consider his host and to take in his peculiarities before Walker had come to the end of his paragraph. The great engineer was a big-built, bull-necked, bullet-headed sort of person, with the self-satisfied air of monetary success, but with that ominous hardness about the corners of the mouth which constantly betrays the lucky man of business. His abundant long hair was iron-gray and wiry—Erasmus Walker had seldom time to waste in getting it cut—his eyes were small and shrewd; his hand was firm, and gripped the pen in its grasp like a ponderous crowbar. His writing, Tyrrel could see, was thick, black, and decisive. Altogether the kind of man on whose brow it was written in legible characters that it’s dogged as does it. The delicately organized Cornishman felt an instinctive dislike at once for this great coarse mountain of a bullying Teuton. Yet for Cleer’s sake he knew he mustn’t rub him the wrong way. He must put up with Erasmus Walker and all his faults, and try to approach him by the most accessible side—if indeed any side were accessible at all, save the waistcoat pocket.
At last, however, the engineer paused a moment in his headlong course through sentence after sentence, held his pen half irresolute over a new blank sheet, and turning round to Tyrrel, without one word of apology, said, in a quick, decisive voice, “This is business, I suppose, business? for if not, I’ve no time. I’m very pressed this morning. Very pressed, indeed. Very pressed and occupied.”