XX
“Luney, my son,” said Mr. James Dodson one afternoon, “young Davis’s days are numbered. This morning Octavius found him smoking in his room.”
Notwithstanding the manner in which Mr. Dodson imparted this item of news, it failed to promote the curiosity of which it was undoubtedly worthy.
“Yes, Luney,” Mr. Dodson proceeded, “young Davis has numbered his days. He’ll come down from up-stairs. He is not geared up to a position of that kind. He hasn’t got the—the intellectual quality. You can get anything by a fluke; but you can keep nothing without you’ve got this.”
Mr. Dodson laid a finger on the centre of his forehead with a significance that was almost sinister.
“And whom do you suppose, Luney,” Mr. Dodson continued, “will succeed that young upstart when he comes down from up-stairs? Give a guess, my son.”
William Jordan, Junior, did not accept his mentor’s cordial invitation, for the sufficient reason that the point involved was too abstruse for his knowledge of the practical sciences.
“Between you and me and the paste-pot, my worthy lunatic,” said Mr. Dodson, “there is only one candidate in the running at present. And he is the deadest of dead certainties. And the name of that dead certainty, my son, is Matthew Arnold Dodson, known familiarly out of office hours as Jimmy.”
Even this announcement, although it exacted William Jordan, Junior’s courteous attention, as every announcement did, failed to stimulate his feeble faculties to divine all that it implied.
“There is also another dead certainty, my son,” said Mr. Dodson, “and that is that William Jordan, Junior, will never rise in this world, whatever he may do in the next.”