I joined him in the laugh, well knowing that his sardonism was but slightly felt.
“But to be serious,” he continued; “you can do me this service, better than any scamp of a lawyer! Go to Mr Lawson, of Lincoln’s Inn Fields—I know something of the old fellow, and his son, too. They are not a bad sort—that is, for solicitors. If there be money left for me, in their hands, I shall likely get it. Let me give you a letter to receive it, and you can send it to some bank in Buenos Ayres. Then it may reach me through the bank agency at Rosario. You can do this for me, and will?”
“With pleasure.”
“Enough! The ladies are longing for us to rejoin them. You are fond of the guitar, I believe. I hear Lucetta tuning the strings. Luigi can sing like a second Mario; and the señorita, as he calls his South American wife, is a perfect nightingale. Hear! They are calling for us! Come!”
It needed no pressing on his part. I was but too eager to respond to the silvery voices commanding our presence in the adjoining apartment.
Chapter Sixty Four.
A Hundred Thousand Pounds.
Two months later, and I was under a sky unlike to that which canopies the region of Parana as lead to shining sapphires—in a room as different from that pleasant quarto in the South American estancia, as a Newgate cell to an apartment in Aladdin’s palace. I stood in the dingy office of a Lincoln’s Inn lawyer, by name Lawson, the firm Lawson and Son. It was the senior partner who received me; a gentleman with all the appearance, and, as I afterwards discovered, all the claims to respectability in his profession.