No. 11 was a sitting-room of a class peculiar to those old-fashioned inns which are rapidly being improved off the length and breadth of Britain, large, low-ceiled, with a sloping floor that attained its highest elevation beside the broad bay-window. A dark room, it must be confessed, and an airless, but snug and warm on winter-nights, when the glow of the firelight combined with the lustre of many wax-candles to defy the storm and blackness without. There had been jovial dinners in that room, and drawing together of arm-chairs around the huge fireplace, and tapping of dusty magnums of rare old port, and calling for more punch as the night waned, in those hard-living days of which so many of us innocent, pay the penalty in neuralgia and dyspepsia.
In No. 11 stood Sir Sykes, pale but resolute. The traveller with the black bag came in, and for the second time their eyes met. ‘You wished to see me, sir,’ began Mr Wilkins, with a slight bow. ‘Ah! I remember you now, sir, as it happens,’ he added in a different tone; ‘remember you very distinctly indeed, Mr’——
‘Hush!’ interrupted Sir Sykes, with uplifted fore-finger. ‘A place like this is the very last in which to mention anything best left unspoken—the very walls, I believe, have ears to hear and tongues to tattle. I am Sir Sykes Denzil, of Carbery Chase, within a very few miles of this, at your service, Mr Wilkins.’
‘Sir Sykes Denzil! Well, this is a surprise,’ exclaimed the owner of the name of Wilkins wonderingly, and yet with a sort of dry humour mingling with his evidently genuine astonishment. ‘Dear me, dear me! They say the world is very little, and people constantly meeting and jostling in it; but I never so thoroughly realised the truth of the saying as I do now. So I’ve the honour of talking to Sir Sykes Denzil, when I thought I was addressing’——
‘Be cautious, sir,’ interposed the baronet, with an energy that impressed the other in spite of himself. ‘Let us have no reference, if you please, to a past that is dead and buried. I sent for you, certain as I was that sooner or later your memory must recall me to your remembrance, and well aware too how easily you could learn who I was here.’
‘No great trouble about that, Mr—I mean Sir Sykes,’ rejoined the traveller smirkingly. ‘The people seem to know you well enough, and any fellow in the stable-yard would have told me whose was the carriage with the brown liveries.’
‘And having met and recognised one another,’ said Sir Sykes, ‘on what footing is our future intercourse to be conducted? We are not as we once were, lawyer and client, and’——
‘No, Sir Sykes, I grant you that; but we might be,’ returned Mr Wilkins, rubbing his fleshy hands together, as though they had been two millstones between which the bones of suitors might be ground to make his bread. ‘You can’t, a man of your landed property—I’ve heard something as to your acreage, and could give a shrewd guess as to your rent-roll—be without law business. Devonshire isn’t Arcadia, I suppose. Are there not leases to draw, inclosure bills to promote, poachers to prosecute, paths to stop up, bills to file, actions to bring, defend, compromise? Ten to one, some of your best farms are let on leases of lives, and—— But no matter! You’ve your own legal advisers; hey, Sir Sykes?’
The baronet bowed coldly by way of assent.
‘Pounce and Pontifex, of Lincoln’s Inn—I know,’ pursued the unabashed lawyer. ‘A brace of respectable twaddling old stagers. There was a saying, soon after I got my articles, as to that firm, to the effect that Pounce and Pontifex were fit for a marriage settlement, a will, and a Chancery suit, and that was about all. If you care about raising your rents, crushing an enemy, or gratifying a whim—and most rich men have a hankering after one or other of these fancies—why, you’ll need a brisker counsellor at your elbow than the jog-trots of Lincoln’s Inn.’