"I'll be getting the port," said he, casting a wistful look at me in the hope, perhaps, that I should decline his invitation to a glass, "you'll not mind refreshment after your drive?"
"Thanks; you may be sure I won't," said I; and while he was gone fumbling down the passage, I saw that his dining-room had once been a fine apartment, oak-panelled and spacious; and that ancestors, whose rubicund jowls spoke of "two-bottle" men, now seemed to survey the economy below with agony unspeakable. For the rest, there was little in the room but depressing Victorian chairs in mahogany, and a piano with a high back, such as our grandmothers played upon.
When Ladd came back, he had a bottle in his hand. I smiled openly when I saw that it was a pint; but he decanted it with a fine show of generosity, and pushing a glass to me, took up the matter which interested him at once.
"Where did ye see my nephew?" he asked, while I sipped the wine with satisfaction; "it'll have been in London, perhaps?"
"I saw him—if he was your nephew—at Pangbourne last night," said I; "he had a pretty woman with him, and wanted to sell me two emeralds."
"That must have been the wife he married in San Francisco," cried he, "but she has no sinecure; you didn't hear that I paid his passage abroad last spring after he'd robbed me of a thousand——Well and it was emeralds he wanted to sell you?"
"Two of the finest I have ever seen," said I, "and matching perfectly."
The import of the emeralds had evidently been lost upon him until this time; but now of a sudden he realized that he might be concerned in the business, and his agitation was renewed. "I wonder what emeralds they were?" he asked as if of himself; then turning to me, he exclaimed, "Will you come upstairs with me a minute?"
He did not wait for me to answer, but led the way up bare stone steps to a landing off which there led two long passages; and in a big and not uncomfortable bedroom he showed me three safes, one a little one, which he opened, and took therefrom a case containing seven emeralds of a size and quality apparently similar to the two I had seen at Pangbourne. But when he gave them to me to examine I saw at once that five of them were genuine and two were false.
"Well," said he, after I had looked at them long and closely, "how do you like them?"