The eyes of Sharkley flashed, dilated, shrunk, and dilated again, when he heard the sum mentioned; and rubbing his gorilla-like hands together, he said, with a chuckle peculiarly his own,—
"Never fear for me, my lord; I'll work a hole for him—this Derrick Braddon. He spoke insultingly of the profession last night—but I'll work a hole for him."
With an emotion of angry contempt, which he strove in vain to conceal, Downie gave him a cheque for the first instalment of his bribe, taking care that it was a crossed one, payable only at his own bankers, so that if there was any trickery in this matter, he might be able to recall or trace it.
Sharkley carefully placed it in the recesses of a greasy-looking black pocket-book, tied with red tape, and saying something, with a cringing smile, to the effect that he had "in his time, paid many a fee to counsel, but never before received one in return," bowed himself out, with slavish and reiterated promises of fealty, discretion, and fulfilment of the task in hand; but he quitted the stately porte-cochère, and long shady avenue of Rhoscadzhel, with very vague ideas, as yet, of how he was to win the additional fifteen hundred pounds.
So parted those brothers learned in the law.
CHAPTER II.
DOWNIE'S REFLECTIONS.
His odious visitor and tempter gone, Downie sat long, sunk in reverie. He lay back in the softly-cushioned chair, with his eyes vacantly and dreamily gazing through the lozenged panes, between the moulded mullions of the oriel windows, to where the sunlight fell in bright patches between the spreading oaks and elms, on the green sward of the chace, to where the brown deer nestled cosily among the tender ferns of spring, and to the distant isles of Scilly, afar in the deep blue sea; but he saw nothing of all these. His mind was completely inverted, and his thoughts were turned inward. "The wildest novel," says Ouida, "was never half so wild as the real state of many a human life, that to superficial eyes looks serene and placid and uneventful enough; but life is just the same as in the ages of Oedipus' agony and the Orestes' crime."
Doubtless, the reader thought it very barbarous in the fierce Mohammedan Amen Oollah Khan to twist off his elder brother's head, and so secure his inheritance; but had the civilised Christian, Downie, been in the Khan's place, he would have acted precisely in the same way. The men's instincts were the same; the modes of achievement only different.
But a month before this, and Downie, at his club in Pall Mall, had read with exultation, that, of all General Elphinstone's army, his own son, Audley, and Doctor Brydone, of the Shah's 6th Regiment, had alone reached Jellalabad. Little cared he who perished on that disastrous retreat, so that his son was safe, for, selfish though he was, he loved well and dearly that son, his successor—the holder of a young life that was to stretch, perhaps, for half a century beyond his own shorter span. Now it had chanced that on the very morning of this remarkable visit, he had seen, with disgust, in the Times, that, among those alleged to be safe in the hands of an Afghan chief "was Ensign Denzil Devereaux, of the Cornish Light Infantry, an officer, who, according to a letter received from Taj Mohammed Khan the Wuzeer, had succeeded in saving a colour of Her Majesty's 44th Regiment."