Mr. Jobling rose, coughing irritably. The reek from Captain Dove's foul pipe was too much for him.
"I'll go and pack now," he announced. "I'd never have come here at all if I had thought—"
"You leave things here to me, old cock," Captain Dove encouraged him. "And go and jag your friend Spettigrew along till he gets judgment for us. That's the most important part of the game at present. Leave things here to me, and you'll find, when the time comes, that Slyne will have to take a back seat."
But the stout solicitor did not seem grateful at all for that crumb of comfort. He merely looked at Captain Dove with equal dislike and disbelief as he left the room.
He left the castle immediately after lunch, to catch the steamer south, a little less depressed, perhaps, after a few further words with Captain Dove, who thought it only politic to inspirit him in his efforts on Sallie's behalf. And he had not been gone very long before Captain Dove began to miss him—as a boon-companion, a part which Slyne refused to play any longer. So that the old man soon began to find the time hang very heavy on his hands, and his grudge against Slyne always grew.
Under any circumstances, he could not have been happy for long on land. Nor could he feel altogether safe there, even in the distasteful disguise he had adopted at Slyne's advice; and for discrediting which he had been so repeatedly called to account by Slyne. He could scarcely but repent having sacrificed his undisputed autocracy on the Olive Branch in order to figure as a mere puppet in Slyne's company, as he had undoubtedly become since he had left his ship. He grew very angry indeed with Slyne when he thought of that, as he often did during those endless days of waiting.
It was all Slyne's fault, he assured himself, that he was thus stranded there; that he had not fifty cents left to bless himself with, since one expensive evening in Paris; and that, even if he had had such a sum in his pockets, it might have worn a hole in them before he could spend it, in such a forsaken spot!
Of what use to him, he inquired of himself, going off at another tangent, could a huge, ghost-haunted pile like the Castle of Loquhariot be? Or a great empty barrack like Justicehall?—which reminded him unpleasantly of the Law Courts in London. How could he ever hope to spend such an excess of wealth as was soon to be Sallie's, and, therefore, at his disposal? A perfect nausea of money possessed Captain Dove at such moments. He would almost have preferred the prospect of poverty again, if only for the sake of the interest in life the struggle to live might restore to him.
"Enough is as good as a feast!" said he to himself every now and then while he gazed, with gloom in his soul, at the cut-crystal decanters on a salver of solid silver which was never far from his elbow; and, with that wise saw on his lips, he would continue to drown his contradictory sorrows as deeply as possible.
But there was luckily room and to spare in the castle for all its inmates. Slyne and he kept as much as possible out of each other's way, although they had resumed a spasmodic outward semblance of amity, a steadfast inward determination to get the better of one another, whether by fair means or foul. He could scarcely seek Sallie's company now that she knew his treacherous intentions toward her. The sick man, Herries, was still in bed, in a sufficiently precarious state. So that he lived very much alone with his various grievances, since his walks abroad, as far as the Jura Arms,—where he soon became almost popular among the occasional profligates of the village,—were not so frequent as they would probably have been in better weather.