"Yes, yes," he replied impatiently. "Patton & Co.: the people for whom I am manager. You were in their place to-day. He has a country house—down there—and I go down when I like. We'll go on Tuesday; pack your things; I want you to make a bit of a splash down there—play the gentleman. Do you understand?"
"Not quite," I said.
"I want to take the wind out of this fellow's sails—this beast Hockley," he said. "I'd grind him to powder, if I had the chance—crush him to nothing. You and I will play our own game, Charlie"—(it was the first time he had called me by that name, and I was a little surprised)—"and make him put his tail between his legs. There—we won't talk any more about it; good-night!"
I walked home to the rooms Mr. Jervis Fanshawe had taken for me with my head in a whirl. I know that I fell asleep that night, with a vague idea that in some extraordinary fashion my guardian was in the power of Gavin Hockley, and was obliged, in a sense, to do what that young man suggested. Perhaps the mere act of thinking about that drove me into the dream I presently had; for I remember that I thought presently I was standing in a room, and that Hockley was before me, with that grin upon his face; in that dream I felt that some one put a weapon into my hand. Dreams are but intangible things, and this was a confused one, with only the face of Hockley grinning at me from out of it, and the knowledge in my own mind that I held a weapon of some sort gripped in my right hand. And then the face was gone, and I seemed to wake up, to see him at my feet, with blood upon him. I woke, trembling and shuddering, and glad to see the calm moon staring in at me from the little street outside. It took me a little time to shake off the horror of the thing. But I was young, and youth needs sleep; so that I presently slept until morning.
Strangely enough, that dream haunted me—sprang up before me even in the sunlight of the streets, and would not be shaken off. Seeing that I had no earthly concern with Hockley, it was at least curious that I should so persistently think of him; now as I had seen him swaggering on the steps of the house, and staring insolently over my head; now as I remembered him lounging at the table, and apparently overawing my guardian; and now again, as in my dream, with his grinning face watching me—and then lying at my feet, with blood upon him. I was too young for such horrors, and yet I could not clear my brain of them.
That Tuesday arrived on which I was to travel down to Hammerstone Market with Mr. Jervis Fanshawe. I had had a note from him the night before, appointing the time of the train, and requesting me to meet him at the railway station; and I was eager enough for the expedition. Although I did not like Fanshawe, and felt that I never could, there was yet in my heart a natural feeling of regard for him, as being the one person intimately connected with me, and, above all, the man who had looked after my interests during the years that I had been growing up. I set it down deliberately here that I wanted to please him, and that, above all things, I was anxious to win his approval. In a sense I was glad to think that he wanted my company, although I wondered a little what was going to happen at this place to which we were going.
In the train he set the matter fairly and clearly before me. "I am going to this place, Charlie, on a matter of business," he said in a low tone, and without looking at me. "Old Patton, as we call him in the business, likes to make a friend of me as much as possible; I have been down here frequently. It gives me a certain position with him—smooths business generally. I can't say exactly how long I shall stop at his house; he does not come up to the office as frequently as he used to do, and there are certain matters he wants to discuss with me."
"It is very kind of you to take me with you," I said; but with a grim smile he broke in on my enthusiasm.
"Oh, I'm not taking you to the house," he said, "I shall have to leave you at the George. I intend, if possible, to get an invitation for you to dinner one night—or perhaps to a luncheon; but at the moment I merely want Patton to know that you are there, and who you are. He will probably like to know that I am your guardian, and"—he hesitated for a moment as though casting about in his mind for the right word—"and responsible for you."
I have since come to think that whatever scheme was in the mind of the man then, and whatever he meant to do, his real object in taking me there, to begin with, was no deeper than that. I think he felt that it would look well that he should have the responsibility of me upon his shoulders—that it would give him an air of stability, and would cause people to think well of him—much as though he held before himself the record of a good deed as a species of shield, and cried—"This have I done—and that; judge me in the light of it."