‘Not prepared,’ interrupted Hold coolly, ‘to find a rough diamond like yours to command, so deep in the Bart.’s little secrets. Perhaps not. Mind ye, I don’t want to quarrel. Live and let live. But it’s good sometimes to fire a shotted gun athwart a stranger’s bows, d’ ye see?’
‘You and Sir Sykes are old acquaintances?’ said the lawyer, feeling his way.
‘Pretty well for that. Years too have gone by a few since you and he first came within hailing distance,’ replied Hold with assumed carelessness.
‘We were younger men, that’s certain,’ returned the lawyer with a jolly laugh and a twinkling eye. That anybody should try to extract from him—from him, Enoch Wilkins, information that he desired to keep to himself—to pump him, in homely phraseology, seemed to the attorney of St Nicholas Poultney, in the light of an exquisitely subtle joke. Hold, in spite of his confidence in his own shrewdness, began to entertain vague doubts as to whether in a fair field he was quite a match for the London solicitor. Fortune, however, had dealt him a handful of court-cards, and he proceeded to improve the occasion.
‘Now, squire,’ said Hold impressively, and laying one brawny hand, as if to enforce the argument, on the table as he spoke, ‘I could, if I chose, clap a match to the powder-magazine and blow the whole concern sky-high. Suppose I weren’t well used among ye? Suppose I began to meet cold looks and buttoned-up pockets? What easier than to make a clean breast of what it no longer pays to keep secret, stand the consequences—I’ve stood worse on the Antipodes side of the world—and get another sniff of blue water. That would spoil your market, squire!’
Mr Wilkins muttered something about edge-tools; but his seafaring guest answered the remark by a short laugh of scorn. ‘You know a thing or two,’ he said incisively; ‘so do I. Are we or are we not to act in concert? If not, up with your colours and fire a broadside. Anyhow, friend or enemy, I’ll thank you to speak out.’
All Mr Wilkins’s liveliness vanished in an instant, and he seemed strongly and soberly in earnest as he said: ‘I will speak out, as you call it. I should very much prefer to be on good terms with you. I should like us, as far as we prudently can, to co-operate. But you have not as yet told me what you would have me do.’
‘I’ll tell you,’ said Hold confidentially, edging his chair nearer to the lawyer’s. ‘When you go down to Carbery——You mean to go, don’t you?’ he added abruptly.
‘Certainly,’ said the lawyer, touching a spring in the table by which he sat, and producing from a concealed drawer, that flew open at his touch, a letter, which he unfolded and handed to his visitor. ‘You know so much, captain, that I need not keep back this from you. It is from Sir Sykes, as you see. The contents are probably not strange to you.’
‘Not likely,’ returned the seaman, throwing his eyes, with ill-dissembled eagerness, on the letter. ‘He asks you to come down then, and names an early day. The rents will be passing through your hands before long, Mister. ’Tain’t that, though, I want to speak of. You’ll find when you get to the Chase, a young lady there.’