There is a candour and unpretentiousness about the very best sort of solicitors that is sometimes almost startling to their clients. If you speak of investments, a really good solicitor will say at once that he is not a business man; if you speak of an attack on your character or a possible career for your children, he will say he is not a man of the world; if you are involved in a wrangle and fancy you have publicly libelled your adversary, he will say that he is not a lawyer. He doesn’t in the least mean that he will not carry through to a triumphant conclusion the affair, whatever it is, that you are bringing to him; he only means that he lays no claim to keeping a mass of encyclopædic knowledge on the tip of his tongue, to giving oracular decisions at a moment’s notice, or seeing through a brick wall without the aid of a periscope. He will take a little time going into the matter thoroughly, obtaining counsel’s opinion, doing everything necessary. Meanwhile and at once, in your presence, he often consults his books of reference; and it must be confessed that this reliance on books and the guileless manner of speaking about them does often disconcert, if it does not shake a client. “You doubt if your bargain is clinched?” says the really eminent solicitor; and he rings the bell for his clerk. “Bring me that book on Contracts, latest edition. And see if we have a directory of county court judges downstairs. I want to ascertain if there is any county court south of the Thames. And, look here, go upstairs and give my compliments to Mr. Cyril and ask him if he knows whether the Stock Exchange is open on Bank Holidays.”
Mr. Williams, of Spring Gardens, or his firm, had long conducted the affairs of the Verinder family in a most efficient style. He himself relied greatly on his books, which he kept in handsome book-cases in his own room. This solid old-world room was lighted by narrow windows with reflecting mirrors above them, and had no encumbrances of deed boxes and that sort of thing; a large beautifully neat table for Mr. Williams, a fine comfortable leather-seated chair for visitors, the picture of a marine battle over the chimneypiece, and one or two marble busts on top of the book-cases—that was all; and with these simple surroundings the owner of the room worked in it very happily and contentedly; looking up with a friendly smile as you came in at the door, and showing himself as a shortish, stoutish, fresh-complexioned person of sixty-five or a little more. As his intimates knew, he had only one sorrow in life—the certainty that sooner or later this room, the whole Queen Anne house, and the rest of Spring Gardens, would be swept away by London’s unbridled rage for street improvements. But he hoped they would last his time.
He begged Mr. Verinder and Mr. Eustace Verinder to sit down, and with an air of innocent triumph said that he had found out a great deal about Anthony Dyke.
“I may say that directly you mentioned the name, it seemed familiar to me.”
“It is familiar to everyone,” said old Mr. Verinder rather irritably, and his son sneered. Eustace had a trick of sneering and saying pointed things, in a polite Oxford manner on which he had superimposed a slight veneer of officialness.
“To begin with,” said Mr. Williams, “he is a married man.”
“Yes, I knew that,” said Mr. Verinder.
“Oh, you did? But he is not living with his wife.”
“So I understood.”