“Oho, Noll—so you are run dry at last!... Now I can get a word in edgeways; and I, too, may cackle, though it lack your literary finish.... You see, as we are in the confessional, I may say I have been a bit of a dog in my day. And, by Beelzebub! the gout hasn’t altogether driven the last spark out of me yet.... The tongues still wag about me, I have no smallest doubt.... It isn’t for me to preach you a sermon on your tom-follies, for they are infernally like my own. By God, you are no curate, there’s that much against you in heaven. Still, I will tell you bluntly, I have only had one fear for you—and that is the dandified schoolmaster that is in the heart of your father. The Ffolliotts never had any of the damned studious habits—we have always been sportsmen and gentlemen. And, by my soul, I believe you are bitten by the self-same dog.... It’s this literary business that makes me anxious about you; but a lampoon and a sharp tongue we all of us had the knack of using—that don’t go with long hair and inky fingers and spectacles nor a milkman’s seat on a horse. By God, you may lampoon the Lord Chancellor, for all I care—I never go to the House of Lords except to keep the damned idiot in his place. Lords Chancellor nowadays seem to think the Upper House is a confounded dames’ school. Damn all Lords Chancellor, say I——”
“Yes, sir—damn all Lords Chancellor!” said Noll drily.
Wyntwarde laughed:
“Yes,” said he—“we wander.... Now, look you here, Noll—this house is free to you as long as you keep your fingers from ink-stains and your lips from preaching—the stables are not empty of horses. And, what’s more, I still hold to my bond. The ’Varsity is over—down goes three hundred a year. It would be damned bad morals to give you that again. But you shall have a couple of hundred a year as long as rumour speaks well of you; but the day you throw up the society of gentlemen and mix with the inky-fingered gentry, I will not only cancel you from my will, but, by the dogs, I stop even the allowance——”
“I do not accept benefits under threat, sir,” said Noll.
Wyntwarde stopped, scowled—burst into a laugh, and passed the matter by:
“I would make it more,” he said; “but I suspect the ink-pot——”
“If I have a mind to spill ink I will spill it,” said the youth hotly.
The old lord chuckled:
“You are your father’s son, my boy, on occasion,” said he. “Well, there’s nothing to attract you here just now; but you had better come down for the hunting next winter, eh?”