"I feel deeply sensible of your very great—your unexpected kindness, Mr. Gammon; but still, the arrangement suggested is one which occasions me dreadful anxiety as to my being ever able to carry out my part of it."
"Never, never despair, Mr. Aubrey! Heaven helps those who help themselves; and I really imagine I see your powerful energies already beginning to surmount your prodigious difficulties! When you shall have slept over the matter, you will feel the full relief which this proposed arrangement is so calculated to afford your spirits. Of course, too, you will lose no time in communicating to Messrs. Runnington the nature of the proposal. I can predict that they will be not a little disposed to urge upon you its completion. I cannot, however, help once more reminding you, in justice to myself, Mr. Aubrey, that it is but a proposition, in making which, I hope it will not prove that I have been carried away by my feelings much further than my duty to my client or his interests "——
Mr. Aubrey was afraid to hear him finish the sentence, lest the faint dawn of hope should disappear from the dark and rough surface of the sea of trouble upon which he was being tossed. "I will consult, as you suggest, sir, my experienced and honorable professional advisers; and am strongly inclined to believe that they will feel as you predict. I am of course bound to defer to them,"——
"Oh, certainly! certainly! I am very strict in the observance of professional etiquette, Mr. Aubrey, I assure you; and should not think of going on with this arrangement, except with their concurrence, acting on your behalf. One thing I have to beg, Mr. Aubrey, that either you or they will communicate the result of your deliberations to me, personally. I am very desirous that the suggested compromise should be broken to my partners and our client by me.—By the way, if you will favor me with your address, I will make a point of calling at your house, either late in the evening or early in the morning."
[As if Messrs. Quirk, Gammon, and Snap had not kept eagle eyes upon his every movement since quitting Yatton, with a view to any sudden application for a writ of Ne Exeas, which a suspicious approach of his towards the sea-coast might render necessary!]
"I am infinitely obliged to you, sir—but it would be far more convenient for both of us, if you could drop me a line, or favor me with a call at Mr. Weasel's, in Pomegranate Court in the Temple."
Gammon blushed scarlet: but for this accidental mention of the name of Mr. Weasel, who was one of the pleaders occasionally employed by Messrs. Quirk, Gammon, and Snap in heavy matters—in all probability Mr. Aubrey might, within a day or two's time, have had to exercise his faculties, if so disposed, upon a declaration of Trespass for Mesne Profits, in a cause of "Titmouse v. Aubrey!"
"As you choose, Mr. Aubrey," replied Gammon, with difficulty concealing his feelings of pique and disappointment at losing the opportunity of a personal introduction by Mr. Aubrey to his family. After a few words of general conversation, Gammon inquiring how Mr. Aubrey liked his new profession, and assuring him, in an emphatic manner, that he might rely upon being supported, from the moment of his being called to the bar, by almost all the common-law business of the firm of "Quirk, Gammon, and Snap"—they parted. It had been to Mr. Aubrey a memorable interview—and to Gammon a somewhat arduous affair, taxing to an unusual extent his great powers of self-command, and of dissimulation. As soon as he was left alone, his thoughts instantly recurred to Aubrey's singular burst of hauteur and indignation. Gammon had a stinging sense of submission to superior energy—and felt indignant with himself for not having at the moment resented it. Setting aside this source of exquisite irritation to the feelings of a proud man, he felt a depressing consciousness that he had not met with his usual success in his recent encounter with Mr. Aubrey; who had been throughout cautious, watchful, and courteously distrustful. He had afforded occasional glimpses of the unapproachable pride of his nature—and Gammon had crouched! Was there anything in their interview—thought he, walking thoughtfully to and fro in his room—which, when Aubrey came to reflect upon—for instance—had Gammon disclosed too much concerning the extent of his influence over Titmouse? His cheek slightly flushed; a sigh of fatigue and excitement escaped him; and gathering together his papers, he began to prepare for quitting the office for the day.
Mr. Aubrey left Messrs. Quirk, Gammon, and Snap's office with feelings of mingled exhaustion and despondency. As he walked down Saffron Hill—a dismal neighborhood!—what scenes did he witness! Poverty and profligacy revelling, in all their wild and revolting excesses! Here, was an Irishman, half-stupefied with liquor and bathed in blood, having just been rescued from a savage fight in a low underground public-house cellar, by his squalid wife, with dishevelled hair and a filthy infant in her arms—who walked beside him cursing, pinching, and striking him—reproaching him with the knowledge that she and her seven children were lying starving at home. Presently he stumbled; she with her wretched infant falling down with him; and she lay striking, and scratching, and abusing him till some one interfered.
There, was a woman—as it were a bloated mass of filth steeped in gin—standing with a drunken smile at an old-clothes stall, pawning a dirty little shirt, which she had a few minutes before stripped from the back of one of her four half-naked children!