‘We’re in the same boat,’ he said, in a tone that, if dogged, was less surly than before. ‘Our pumpkins, I guess, ought to go to the same market, they ought. But fair words don’t put fresh butter into a dish of boiled batatas. I’m a British bull-dog of the game old breed,’ he added gruffly; ‘and I keep the grip, however I’m handled. Is there a likelihood of the marriage coming off soonish?’
‘I hope so,’ returned Sir Sykes. He would have given much to have avoided the slight embarrassment which he was conscious that his manner indicated, and which was not lost upon Hold’s watchful eye.
‘No day fixed? No banns put up—stop! I forgot—you swells marry by special license of the Archbishop of Canterbury—no cake ordered; no fal-lals bespoken from the milliner; no breakfast; no orange-flowers, eh? Well, I wish to be reasonable about it, Sir Sykes, but there must be an end of this. Do the young people understand one another, or do they not?’
‘It does not answer to brusquer these things,’ returned Sir Sykes apologetically.
‘It does not answer to what?’ interrupted Richard, to whose nautical ears the French word sounded odder than would have done a fragment of linguafranca or a scrap of Eboe or Mandingo.
‘To be too precipitate,’ explained the baronet. ‘I have spoken to my son. He sees, I hope, the affair in a proper light. He is often in the society of Miss Willis, but—but’——
Sir Sykes wavered miserably here. All his deportment seemed to fail him before Hold’s merciless eye, the very gaze of which probed him to the quick.
‘Aren’t you captain in your own ship?’ asked the adventurer curtly.
The baronet winced at the question. Captain in his own ship, in the sense that some men are commanders at home, he had never been. His own house, his own estate, had not from the first been managed in precise accordance with the views of him who owned them. But he had been a decorous captain, a captain who walked quarter-deck as solemnly as the greatest Tartar afloat, and who got lip-service and eye-service as a salve to his vanity, until quite recently.
Now there was a strong and not altogether an obedient hand on the helm. A new broom was making, in the person of Enoch Wilkins, attorney-at-law, a clean sweep of various time-honoured abuses such as always do grow up about a great estate, and the wails of the indignant sufferers could not always be kept from reaching the reluctant ears of Sir Sykes. People who were docked of perquisites came in respectful bitterness of soul to the baronet, and humbly prayed that he would take their part as against Wilkins the lawyer and Abrahams the steward.