Again the baronet bent his head, and his eyes moved towards the door. Mr Wilkins noted their movement.
‘You hardly derived a fair judgment of my capabilities,’ he said, ‘by the little I had to do in that Sandston business’——
‘Again I ask you, sir, to make no mention of that subject. It—it is naturally painful to me—and—and’—— Sir Sykes here fairly broke down.
The lawyer’s eyes twinkled as he saw his advantage. ‘So long as you remember it, Sir Sykes,’ he made haste to say, ‘I shall be only too happy to forget the whole concern. What was that story about the organ-blower and Handel? “Shan’t it be ‘we,’ then?” said the fellow, when the great organist couldn’t get a note out of his instrument for want of the necessary but humble bellows. And the musician was compelled to acknowledge that there was a sort of partnership between the man who fingered the stops and the man who raised the wind. I’m in no hurry. Think it over. I have a client to see here to-day; but perhaps you will let me have a word with you before you drive back to Carbery Chase.’
A long deep line, which might have been mistaken for the furrow of some old sword-cut, running from the angle of the mouth obliquely upwards, became visible in the baronet’s comely face as he listened. He was one of those men who can better endure misfortune than disrespect, and to whom the bitterest sting of ruin is the withdrawal of the deference and lip-service which environ them. But it was in an amicable tone that he made answer: ‘I shall be happy to pursue our conversation, Mr Wilkins, to-day or at any time which you may deem suitable. At present, however, you will excuse me if I leave you. My son, Captain Denzil, has been hurt—badly hurt, I fear, in the steeplechase to-day, and I have been called here to see him, where he lies, in this very hotel.’ And the baronet moved towards the door.
‘Hurt, is he?’ exclaimed Mr Wilkins, with inconsiderate roughness. ‘Ah, then, I shall look to you, Sir Sykes, to indemnify me in case’——
Then came an awkward pause. The solicitor was a remarkably plain-spoken man, but he did not quite like to say, ‘in case your son’s accident prove fatal,’ and so stopped, and left his eloquent silence to complete his words. Sir Sykes, with his hand on the door, turned, astonished, upon the attorney.
‘What, pray, have you to do with the illness or the recovery of Captain Denzil?’ he asked in evident ill-humour. He had borne up to this with Mr Wilkins, but the lawyer’s interference with regard to his son appeared to him in the light of a gratuitous piece of insolence.
‘Simply,’ returned Mr Wilkins, thrusting his hand into an inner pocket of his coat, ‘because I am the holder of certain acceptances, renewed, renewed afresh, and finally dishonoured; acceptances amounting, with expenses, to a gross amount of—shall we say some eleven or twelve thousand, Sir Sykes? Nearer the twelve than the eleven, I suspect. A flea-bite of course to a gentleman of your fortune, but a very important sum to a plain man like yours truly.’
‘I have been put to heavy expense, very heavy, for my son’s debts,’ said Sir Sykes, almost piteously. ‘I have paid every’——