He leaned over and gave the chauffeur an order. In a few minutes the taxicab drew up to the curb before Von Blon’s brownstone residence.
The doctor received us apprehensively.
“Nothing wrong, I hope?” he asked, trying to read our faces.
“Oh, no,” Vance answered easily. “We were passing and thought we’d drop in for a dish of tea and a medical chat.”
Von Blon studied him with a slight suspicion.
“Very well. You gentlemen shall have both.” He rang for his man. “But I can do even better. I’ve some old Amontillado sherry——”
“My word!” Vance bowed ceremoniously and turned to Markham. “You see how fortune favors her punctual children?”
The wine was brought and carefully decanted.
Vance took up his glass and sipped it. One would have thought, from his manner, that nothing in the world at that moment was as important as the quality of the wine.
“Ah, my dear doctor,” he remarked, with some ostentation, “the blender on the sunny Andalusian slopes unquestionably had many rare and valuable butts with which to glorify this vintage. There was little need for the addition of vino dulce that year; but then, the Spaniards always sweeten their wine, probably because the English object to the slightest dryness. And it’s the English, you know, who buy all the best sherries. They have always loved their ‘sherris-sack’; and many a British bard has immortalized it in song. Ben Jonson sang its praises, and so did Tom Moore and Byron. But it was Shakespeare—an ardent lover of sherry himself—who penned the greatest and most passionate panegyric to it. You remember Falstaff’s apostrophe?—‘It ascends me into the brain; dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapors which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery and delectable shapes. . . .’ Sherry, you probably know, doctor, was once regarded as a cure for gout and other malaises of faulty metabolism.”