CHAPTER XI.—AN UNEXPECTED MEETING.

The De Vere Arms at Pebworth, fourth-rate hotel though it necessarily was in a place where any hotel of the first or even of the second magnitude would have been as an oak in a flower-pot, was well and neatly kept. There was the commercial connection, and there was the county connection, both dear to the landlord, but on grounds wholly dissimilar. Biggles had been butler to the present, under-butler and knife-boy to the late Earl of Wolverhampton; and had he but had his own way, the De Vere Arms would have been strictly the family hotel which its address-cards proclaimed it, and the obnoxious word ‘commercial’ would have found no place there.

Mr Biggles, however, was in the position of one of those unfortunate managers of English country theatres who tell their friends, perhaps truly, that they would play nothing, save the legitimate drama, if they could help it. They cannot help it, and scared by the dismal spectre of Insolvency, they shelve Shakspeare in favour of newer idols of the public. So did Biggles and worthy Mrs B. to boot lay themselves out in practice to secure the lucrative custom of the ready-money, constantly moving, commercial gentlemen, while in theory devoting all their loyalty to those of their patrons who came in their own carriages, with armorial bearings on their panels and liveried servants on the driving-seat.

To this hostelry was borne, in Sir Gruntley Pigbury’s carriage, the insensible form of Jasper Denzil, supported by the sturdy arm of Captain Prodgers, while little Dr Aulfus, on the opposite seat, kept the patient’s nerveless wrist between his own thin fingers all the way from the race-course to the inn. Then Jasper, amidst spasmodic gaspings from the landlady and sympathetic exclamations from the chambermaids, was carried into the De Vere Arms and established in one of the best rooms, whence were summarily dislodged the effects of some well-to-do customer who had had a horse in the race, but who was unlikely under the circumstances to resent the invasion of his apartment. Jack Prodgers and the doctor seemed to have taken joint possession of the invalid; the former as prochain ami (and it is to the credit of such ne’er-do-wells as Captain Prodgers that the very wildest of them never do leave a friend untended in a scrape), and the other professionally.

Other friends came not. Lord Harrogate did indeed tap at the door, and so did four or five officers of the Lancer regiment, but contented themselves with an assurance that Jasper was in no immediate danger. And when Blanche Denzil’s tearful entreaties induced the Earl to solicit admittance to the sick-room for her at least, the surgeon went out and politely deprecated her entrance. Anything which might excite the patient should, he truly said, be as far as possible avoided. It was not exactly possible just yet to ascertain the amount of damage done; but he, the doctor, anticipated no serious consequences. And with this assurance the poor sister was compelled to be content. They say that every educated man of fifty is a fool or a physician. Jack Prodgers had seen the light some half-century since, and his worst enemies—the men whose cash he pouched at play—would not have taxed him with folly.

‘Now, doctor,’ he said quietly, ‘don’t you think the best we can do for the poor fellow is to get his left shoulder into the socket again before the muscles stiffen?’

The surgeon winced. He knew by the cursory examination he had made that no bones—unless it might be the collar-bone, an injury to which is not always promptly ascertained—were broken; but here, annoying circumstance! was a dislocation which he had left to be discovered by an outsider to the profession.

‘Bless my soul!’ he exclaimed, adjusting his spectacles, ‘so it is. We have no time to lose.’

As it was, time enough had been lost to bring about a contraction of the muscles, that rendered it necessary to call in the aid of James the waiter and Joe the boots, before the hurt shoulder could be reinstated in its normal position.

The pain of the operation roused Jasper from his stupor. He moaned several times and stirred feebly to and fro, and when the wrench was over, opened his eyes and gazed with a bewildered stare about him. Very pale and ghastly he looked, lying thus, with the blood slowly oozing from a cut on his right temple, and his hair stained and matted. They sprinkled water on his face and put brandy to his lips; but he merely groaned again, and his eyes closed.

‘That’s a very ugly knock on the temple; I hope there’s no more mischief,’ said the doctor in a whisper, but speaking more openly than medicine-men, beside a patient’s bed, often speak to the laity.

Jack Prodgers shook his head. He was a man of experience, and had in his time seen some prompt and easy recoveries, and other cases in which there was no recovery at all. It was with some remorse that he looked down at the bruised and helpless form lying on the bed. His heart had been case-hardened by the rubs of a worldly career, but there was a soft spot in it after all, and it was with sincere joy that he saw at length the sick man’s eyes open with a glance of evident recognition, while a wan smile played about his lips.

‘I say, Jack,’ said Jasper feebly, ‘we’re in a hole, old man, after all’—— Then he fainted.

‘Nothing the matter with his reason, thank goodness! It was the shock to the brain I feared the most for him,’ said the doctor, as again brandy was administered.

The regular clock-work routine of social machinery must go on in despite of accidents, and accordingly the down-train reached Pebworth at 3.40 (or, to tell the truth, a few minutes behind time) with its usual punctuality. There was no omnibus, whether from the De Vere Arms or from the opposition or White Hart hotel, in waiting at the station, wherefore the few arrivals had to consign their bales and bags and boxes of samples to the wheelbarrows of porters, for conveyance to whichever house of entertainment they designed to patronise. Amongst these was a thickset middle-aged man, with trim whiskers, a dust-coloured overcoat, a slim umbrella, and a plump black bag, which he preferred to carry as he trudged from the station to the hotel.

There was nothing very noteworthy about the new-comer, who was neatly dressed in black, and wore a hat that was just old enough to have lost its first tell-tale gloss, except that he had evidently striven to look some years younger than the parish register would have proclaimed him. Thus the purplish tint of his thick whiskers and thinned hair, heedfully brushed and parted so as to make the most of it, savoured of art rather than nature. His cravat too, instead of being black, was what haberdashers call a scarf of blue silk, of a dark shade certainly, but still blue, and was secured by a massive golden horse-shoe. Glittering trinkets rattled at his watch-chain, and his boots were tighter and brighter than the boots of men of business usually are. There is or ought to be a sort of fitness between clothes and their wearer, but in the case of this traveller, obviously bound for the De Vere Arms, no such fitness existed. That cold gray eye, those deeply marked crow’s-feet, the coarse mouth, and mottled complexion, consorted ill with the pretensions to dandyism indicated by a portion of their owner’s attire. Altogether, the man might have been set down as a corn-doctor, a quack, a projector of bubble companies, or possibly an auctioneer whose hammer seldom fell to a purely legitimate bid in a fair market.

As the stranger drew near to the hotel, having inquired his way once or twice from such of the natives as the great attraction of the day had not allured to the race-course, a carriage dashed past him at a very fast pace indeed, and drew up with a jerk in front of the De Vere Arms. The gentleman who alighted from it, tall, and of a goodly presence, lingered for an instant in the doorway to give some order to his servants. As he did so, his eyes encountered those of the traveller freshly arrived by the train, and who by this time was beneath the pillars of the porch. Sir Sykes Denzil, for it was he whose carriage had just brought him in hot haste to the place where his son lay ill, started perceptibly and hesitated, then turned abruptly on his heel and disappeared within the hotel, greeted by the obsequious Mr and Mrs Biggles.

Recognition, as we can all avouch, is in the immense majority of cases simultaneous, one memory seeming as it were to take fire at the spark of recollection kindled in the other. In this instance such was not exactly what occurred. Yet the traveller with the bag was perfectly certain that he had seen before the tall gentleman who had started at the sight of him, and that a diligent searching of the mental archives would elicit the answer to the riddle.

‘Have I written or telegraphed to order rooms here?’ repeated the new arrival testily, after the flippant waiter who came, flourishing his napkin, to see what the stranger wanted. ‘No, I have not. And to judge by the size of your town, my friend, and the general look of affairs, I should say that on any other day of the year but this such a precaution would be wholly superfluous.’

The waiter, who had been slightly puffed up by the ephemeral vogue of Pebworth and its chief hotel, took the rebuke meekly. ‘Would you step into the coffee-room, sir?’ he said. ‘I’ll ask Mrs Biggles about accommodation likely to be vacant. Any name I could mention, sir?’

‘Name—yes, Wilkins,’ returned the traveller, pushing open the door of the coffee-room, in which, at various tables, some dozen of sporting-men were making a scrambling meal. One or two of these looking up from their plates, nodded a greeting, with a ‘How d’ ye do, Wilkins?’ or ‘How goes it, old fellow?’ salutations which the recipient of them returned in kind. Then the waiter bustled in to say, more respectfully than before, that so soon as No. 28 should be vacated by a gentleman leaving by the 6.25 train, it would be at the disposal of Mr Wilkins. Further, here was a note for Mr Wilkins; into whose hand he proceeded to thrust a half-sheet of letter-paper, roughly folded in four, and containing but some two or three lines of blotted handwriting. ‘If you will so far oblige me’—thus ran the words, shaky and blurred as to their caligraphy, but tolerably legible—‘I shall be glad of a few moments’ interview with you, at once if not inconvenient, in No. 11. I will not detain you.’

There was no signature, but no reasonable doubt could exist in the mind of Mr Wilkins as to the note having been penned by the owner of the carriage that had so lately driven up to the door of the De Vere Arms.

‘Why, this is taking the bull by the horns,’ said Mr Wilkins, as he rose to obey the summons.

CHAPTER XII.—IN NO. XI.

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.’

Again the baronet bent his head, and his eyes moved towards the door. Mr Wilkins noted their movement.

‘You hardly derived a fair judgment of my capabilities,’ he said, ‘by the little I had to do in that Sandston business’——

‘Again I ask you, sir, to make no mention of that subject. It—it is naturally painful to me—and—and’—— Sir Sykes here fairly broke down.

The lawyer’s eyes twinkled as he saw his advantage. ‘So long as you remember it, Sir Sykes,’ he made haste to say, ‘I shall be only too happy to forget the whole concern. What was that story about the organ-blower and Handel? “Shan’t it be ‘we,’ then?” said the fellow, when the great organist couldn’t get a note out of his instrument for want of the necessary but humble bellows. And the musician was compelled to acknowledge that there was a sort of partnership between the man who fingered the stops and the man who raised the wind. I’m in no hurry. Think it over. I have a client to see here to-day; but perhaps you will let me have a word with you before you drive back to Carbery Chase.’

A long deep line, which might have been mistaken for the furrow of some old sword-cut, running from the angle of the mouth obliquely upwards, became visible in the baronet’s comely face as he listened. He was one of those men who can better endure misfortune than disrespect, and to whom the bitterest sting of ruin is the withdrawal of the deference and lip-service which environ them. But it was in an amicable tone that he made answer: ‘I shall be happy to pursue our conversation, Mr Wilkins, to-day or at any time which you may deem suitable. At present, however, you will excuse me if I leave you. My son, Captain Denzil, has been hurt—badly hurt, I fear, in the steeplechase to-day, and I have been called here to see him, where he lies, in this very hotel.’ And the baronet moved towards the door.

‘Hurt, is he?’ exclaimed Mr Wilkins, with inconsiderate roughness. ‘Ah, then, I shall look to you, Sir Sykes, to indemnify me in case’——

Then came an awkward pause. The solicitor was a remarkably plain-spoken man, but he did not quite like to say, ‘in case your son’s accident prove fatal,’ and so stopped, and left his eloquent silence to complete his words. Sir Sykes, with his hand on the door, turned, astonished, upon the attorney.

‘What, pray, have you to do with the illness or the recovery of Captain Denzil?’ he asked in evident ill-humour. He had borne up to this with Mr Wilkins, but the lawyer’s interference with regard to his son appeared to him in the light of a gratuitous piece of insolence.

‘Simply,’ returned Mr Wilkins, thrusting his hand into an inner pocket of his coat, ‘because I am the holder of certain acceptances, renewed, renewed afresh, and finally dishonoured; acceptances amounting, with expenses, to a gross amount of—shall we say some eleven or twelve thousand, Sir Sykes? Nearer the twelve than the eleven, I suspect. A flea-bite of course to a gentleman of your fortune, but a very important sum to a plain man like yours truly.’

‘I have been put to heavy expense, very heavy, for my son’s debts,’ said Sir Sykes, almost piteously. ‘I have paid every’——

‘Now, my very good sir,’ interrupted the attorney, ‘don’t, I beg you, don’t fall into the common error of fathers, and imagine that your own particular son is either a miracle of ingenuous candour or a prodigal worse than his neighbours. You think that you’ve paid all his liabilities, Sir Sykes, and no doubt you have paid all you knew of. But as a man of the world, if not as a parent, you ought to be aware that nobody ever did tell all that he owed—excess of modesty, perhaps! They always leave a margin, these interesting penitents; and in this case, as you will see by these documents’ (and Mr Wilkins produced several pieces of stamped paper), ‘the margin is tolerably ample.’

The baronet was now thoroughly roused to wrath. He strode to and fro with frowning brow and hands that were fast clenched together, then walked to the window and stood still, idly tapping the panes with one white finger, on which there glistened a great diamond that had been an heirloom at Carbery Chase before ever a Denzil crossed its threshold.

‘I’ll not give him a shilling or leave him a shilling!’ he said in a voice that quivered with anger. ‘Carbery Chase is my very own, and I can deal with it as I please. My daughters at anyrate have deserved better of me than that thankless graceless boy.’

Sir Sykes, under the influence of this new emotion, seemed to have forgotten the lawyer’s presence, or merely to regard Mr Wilkins in the light of the impartial Chorus in a Greek tragedy; but the attorney, who was by no means pleased by the turn which the affair seemed to be taking, intervened.

‘Come, come, Sir Sykes. It’s natural that you should be annoyed at having such a heavy bill presented, when you thought it settled. But between ourselves, boys will be boys. The captain has turned over a new leaf, and rely on it he will be a credit to you yet. I’ve a pretty wide acquaintance amongst wild young gentlemen of his kind, and I give you my word I don’t know one who is more wide-awake. He had paid his ’prentice fees, and that smartly; but I expect before I die to hear of him as an ornament to the bench of magistrates and perhaps a county member. As for these bills and notes of hand’——

‘I’m not liable for a sixpence!’ exclaimed Sir Sykes petulantly. ‘My son may go through the Court if he chooses, and perhaps will learn a wholesome lesson from the exposure, which’——

‘Fie, fie, Sir Sykes!’ broke in the lawyer. ‘A coat of whitewash, believe me, sticks to a youngster’s back to that extent that no amount of scrubbing can get rid of it. Fume and fret as you please, you know, and I know, that you mean Captain Jasper to have Carbery after you, and to keep the place in the Denzil line. Better so, than to have so fine an estate sold or cut in two for division between your daughters’ husbands. And the captain won’t bear the ‘bloody hand’ in his escutcheon the better because he has been made an insolvent in his youth. As for these claims, I don’t press for an immediate settlement; not I; I don’t exact my pound of flesh down on the nail, Sir Sykes.’

There was a hard struggle in the baronet’s breast. Time had been given him for reflection, and he had used it. To hear of his son’s extravagance, of his son’s deceit, and from such lips, was bad enough. To be compelled to endure the familiarity of the lawyer’s manner was to have to swallow a still more bitter pill. He could remember Mr Wilkins of old, blunt and jocose certainly, but by no means so jaunty in his bearing as he now was, although Sir Sykes had not then been the rich county magnate he had blossomed. He felt, and writhed as he felt, that it was the attorney’s sense of his hold upon him by reason of his knowledge of his past life, which had emboldened Mr Wilkins to deal with him as he had done. But the most provoking feature of the affair was that Sir Sykes felt that this man’s advice, coarsely and offensively administered as it was, yet contained a solid kernel of truth. Jasper was by no means a model son. He had committed fearful follies, and incurred debts which even the Master of Carbery had thought twice before discharging. His profligacy was redeemed by no brilliant talents, softened by no affectionate qualities. There are spendthrifts who remain lovable to the last, as there are others who dazzle the world by the glitter of their wit or valour. To neither category did the graceless offspring of Sir Sykes belong. And yet, in spite of his occasional menaces on the subject of his will, the baronet felt that national manners and family pride combined to constitute a sort of moral entail, of which Jasper was to reap the benefit.

‘I must see my son,’ said Sir Sykes smoothly, after a pause; ‘and when I have time to think over the matter, Mr Wilkins, I will write to you appointing as early an interview as possible. In the meantime I feel assured that you will see the propriety of not urging personally your claims on Captain Denzil in his present condition.’

Mr Wilkins was amenity itself. He would but eat a morsel in the coffee-room, he said, and would then go back to London by the next train, confident that he could not leave his interests in better hands than those of Sir Sykes.

‘The old address, sir! You used to know it well enough!’ said the lawyer with a leer, as he took the hand which the baronet did not dare to refuse in sign of friendship; and so they parted.