Bridgewater would have delighted the heart of John Leech. He had a red and almost perfectly round face; his spectacles were round, his body was round, his eyes were round, and the expression of his countenance, if I may be allowed the figure, was round. It was also slightly mazed; he seemed forever lost in a mild astonishment, the slightest thing out of the common, heightened this expression of chronic astonishment into one of acute amazement. A rat in the office, a fall in the funds, a clerk giving notice to leave, any of these little incidents was sufficient to wreathe the countenance of Mr Bridgewater with an expression that would not have been out of place had he been gazing upon the ruins of Pompeii, or the eruption of Mont Pelée. He had scanty white hair and enormous feet, and was, despite his bemazed look, a very acute old gentleman in business hours. The inside of his head was stuffed with facts like a Whitaker's almanac, and people turned to him for reference as they would turn to "Pratt's Law of Highways" or "Archbold's Lunacy."
Bridgewater seeing Miss Hancock enter, released somewhat his tight hold on the books and papers, and they all slithered pell mell on to the floor. She nodded to him, and, stepping over the papers, tapped with the handle of her parasol at the door of the inner office. Mr Hancock was disengaged, and she went in, closing the door behind her carefully as though fearful of some secret escaping.
She had no secret to communicate, however, and no business to transact, she only wanted a loan of Bridgewater for an hour to consult him about the lease of a house at Peckham. (Miss Hancock had money in her own right.) Having obtained the loan and stropped her brother's temper to a fine edge, so that he was sharp with the clerks and irritable with the clients till luncheon time, Miss Hancock took herself off, saying to the head clerk as she passed out, "I want you to come round to luncheon, Bridgewater, to consult you about a lease; my brother says he can spare you. Come at half-past one sharp; Good-day."
"Well to be sure!" said Bridgewater scratching his encyclopædic head, and gazing in the direction of the doorway through which the lady had vanished.
CHAPTER VI LAMBERT V. BEVAN
Now the germinal spot of this veracious history consists in the fact that numbered amongst Mr James Hancock's most prized clients was a young gentleman of the name of Bevan; the gentleman, in short, whom Miss Fanny Lambert described as "frightfully rich and a beast."
Mr Charles Maximilian Bevan, to give him his full title, inhabited a set of chambers in the "Albany," midway between the Piccadilly end and the end opening upon Vigo Street.
He was a young man of about twenty-three years of age, of a not unpleasing but rather heavy appearance, absolutely unconscious of the humour that lay in himself or in the world around him, and possessed of a fine, furious, old-fashioned temper; a temper that would burst out over an ill-cooked beef steak or a missing stud, and which vented itself chiefly upon his valet Strutt. In most of us the port of our ancestors runs to gout; in Mr Bevan it ran to temper.