Chancey looked at him for a moment to ascertain by his visible aspect whether he had actually uttered the audacious suggestion, and reading in the red face of the little gentleman nothing but the most refractory dispositions, he said with a low, dogged emphasis which experience had long taught Mr. M'Quirk to respect,—
"Are you at your tricks again? D—— you, you blackguard, if you stand prating there another minute, I'll open your head with this pot—be off, you scoundrel."
The learned counsel enforced his eloquence by knocking the pewter pot with an emphatic clang upon the table.
All the aristocratic blood of the M'Quirks mounted to the face of the gentleman thus addressed; he suffered the noble inundation, however, to subside, and after some hesitation, and one long look of unutterable contempt, which Chancey bore with wonderful stoicism, he yielded to prudential considerations, as he had often done before, and proceeded to execute his orders.
The effect was instantaneous—Pottles himself appeared. A short, stout, asthmatic man was Pottles, bearing in his thoughtful countenance an ennobling consciousness that human society would feel it hard to go on without him, and carrying in his hand a soiled napkin, or rather clout, with which he wiped everything that came in his way, his own forehead and nose included.
With pompous step and wheezy respiration did Pottles conduct his honoured guests up the creaking stairs and into the "Royal Ram." He raked the embers in the fire-place, threw on a piece of turf, and planting the candle which he carried upon a table covered with slop and pipe ashes, he wiped the candlestick, and then his own mouth carefully with his dingy napkin, and asked the gentlemen whether they desired anything for supper.
"No, no, we want nothing but to be left to ourselves for ten or fifteen minutes," said Ashwoode, placing a piece of money upon the table. "Take this for the use of the room, and leave us."
The landlord bowed and pocketed the coin, wheezed and bowed again, and then waddled magnificently out of the room. Ashwoode got up and closed the door after him, and then returning, drew his chair opposite to Chancey's, and in a low tone asked,—
"Well, what is all this about?"
"All about them notes, nothing else," replied Chancey, calmly.