The master-mariner shook his head sullenly. ‘You titled swells back one another, right or wrong,’ he muttered querulously. ‘A plain man like me might have known it.’
‘I back nobody in wrong, for my poor part,’ replied Lord Harrogate, as he made his hasty preparations for a start. His soldier-servant was already aiding a couple of privates to strike the tent.
‘I don’t believe you do, my lord!’ exclaimed Hold irresolutely; ‘you don’t fly false colours at the main, whoever does. If you knew that a girl, as noble in blood as yourself, was robbed of her rights, and made to pass for a mere nobody’s child, in the very place that’——
‘Harrogate, the colonel only waits for you!’ cried the breathless adjutant, as he stood panting at the door. Without, was heard the steady tramp of marching feet and the rattle of arms.
‘One moment, Vicars!’ said Lord Harrogate.—‘You see, Mr Hold, go I must. Will you give me some address, at which this conversation can be renewed?’
Almost mechanically, Dick drew out one of the cards of Old Plugger’s.
‘I’ll look you up there,’ cried Lord Harrogate, as he darted out into the night. Then came the smothered sound of voices, as the words of command were given, and then the regular hurried tramp of many feet. The brigade had marched, leaving Mr Richard Hold to regain his gig, his railway station, and ultimately London, as best he might.
CHAPTER XXXIV.—AT BUNDELCUND MANSIONS.
‘I will take your card in to Mr Sturgis, sir. I don’t know, I’m sure, about his being well enough to see you; but perhaps you’ll please to wait,’ said the tall, prim, grim parlour-maid who acted as janitress of the front-door of a slack-baked villa at Putney, one of twin villas, which were called—at the express desire of the inhabitant of the other one, old Colonel Chutnee, H.E.I.C.S.—Bundelcund Mansions. They were capacious villas these, as might be augured from the grandiloquent name that had been fathered upon them; and they had pleasant gardens, with shaven turf, weeping-willows, and azalea beds in the first style of suburban gardening, sloping down to the river at the gentle curve of Putney Reach.
No. 1 Bundelcund Mansions belonged, so far as lease and furniture went, to Colonel Chutnee; No. 2 Bundelcund Mansions, to Ebenezer Sturgis, Esq., retired from the practice of law. Lord Harrogate, who was the visitor-expectant at the ex-lawyer’s outer portals, had often heard of Mr Sturgis, as having been formerly solicitor to that young Baroness Harrogate who had been so unfortunate as wife and mother, and to his own father the Earl; but he had never seen Mr Sturgis.