“Excuse me, Sir Duncan, but you seem to be wonderfully apt with the terms of our profession.”
“I could scarcely be otherwise, after all that I have had to do with law, in India. Our first object is to apply our own laws, and our second to spread our religion. But no more of that. Do you admit the truth of a matter so stated that you can not fail to grasp it?”
Sir Duncan Yordas, as he put this question, fixed large, unwavering, and piercing eyes (against which no spectacles were any shelter) upon the mild, amiable, and, generally speaking, very honest orbs of sight which had lighted the path of the elder gentleman to good repute and competence. But who may turn a lawyer's hand from the Heaven-sped legal plough?
“Am I to understand, Sir Duncan Yordas, that your visit to me is of an amicable nature, and intended (without prejudice to other interests) to ascertain, so far as may be compatible with professional rules, how far my clients are acquainted with documents alleged or imagined to be in existence, and how far their conduct might be guided by desire to afford every reasonable facility?”
“You are to understand simply this, that as the proper owner of Scargate Hall, and the main part of the estates held with it, I require you to sign a memorandum that you hold all the title-deeds on my behalf, and to deliver at once to me that entailing instrument of 1751, under which I make my claim.”
“You speak, sir, as if you had already brought your action, and entered verdict. Legal process may be dispensed with in barbarous countries, but not here. The title-deeds and other papers of Scargate Hall were placed in my custody neither by you nor on your behalf, sir. I hold them on behalf of those at present in possession; and until I receive due instructions from them, or a final order from a court of law, I should be guilty of a breach of trust if I parted with a dog's-ear of them.”
“You distinctly refuse my requirements, and defy me to enforce them?”
“Not so, Sir Duncan. I do nothing more than declare what my view of my duty is, and decline in any way to depart from it.”
“Upon that score I have nothing more to say. I did not expect you to give up the deeds, though in 'barbarous countries,' as you call them, we have peremptory ways. I will say more than that, Mr. Jellicorse—I will say that I respect you for clinging to what you must know better than anybody else to be the weaker side.”
The lawyer bowed his very best bow, but was bound to enter protest against the calm assumption of the claimant.