“Mr. Stenhouse,” said Horace, “I was, as it happens, at Tinwood this morning—perhaps you know Tinwood?”
“A little,” said the other, with his most engaging smile.
“There I met, partly by chance,” said Horace, feeling himself provoked into excitement by the perfect coolness of his antagonist, “an old man, who gave me an entire history of the first finding of the coal.”
“Ah, it was a very simple business. I was there myself, with a scientific friend of mine; a blind fellow, blind as a mole to everything that concerns himself—feeling about the world in spectacles, and as useless for ordinary purposes as if he had moved in a glass case,” said Mr. Stenhouse; “extraordinary, is it not? It was he who found the first traces of that coal.”
“And found them,” said Horace, pointedly, “before the land was purchased by Mr. Pouncet and yourself from Squire Musgrave of the Grange.”
“Ah, we had better say as little as possible about that in the present company. Pouncet mightn’t like it—it might look ugly enough for Pouncet if there was much talk on the subject,” said Mr. Stenhouse, sympathetically glancing towards his old partner, and subduing his own smile in friendly deprecation of a danger in which he seemed to feel no share.
“And how might it look for you?” said Horace, with his rough and coarse boldness.
Mr. Stenhouse laughed, and turned round upon him with the most candid face in the world.
“My dear fellow, Squire Musgrave was no client of mine!” said the good-humoured lawyer. “The utmost punctilio of professional honour could not bind me to take care of his interests. I was a young fellow like yourself, with my fortune to make. You put it very cleverly, I confess, and it might look ugly enough for Pouncet; but, my excellent young friend, it is nothing in the world to me.”
“Yet you were Mr. Pouncet’s partner,” said Horace, with a certain sulky virulence, annoyed at the small success of his grand coup.