"Come in!" said I, mechanically.
My visitor was the sergeant-major of the dépôt battalion, a tall thin old fellow who had burned powder at Burmah and Cabul, and who instantly raised his hand to his forage-cap, saying,
"Beg pardon, sir; the adjutant's compliments--the route has just come for your draft of the Royal Welsh, and all the others, for the East."
"Is this certain!" asked Sir Madoc, hurriedly.
"Quite, sir; it will be in orders this evening. They all embark to-morrow at midday."
"Where?" asked I.
"At Southampton, as usual. The first bugle will sound after _réveil_ to-morrow."
The door closed on my formal visitor, who left me a little bewildered by this sudden sequel to the visit of Sir Madoc, who wrung my hand warmly and said,
"Heaven bless and protect you, Harry! I feel for you like a son of my own going forth in this most useless war. And so we are actually to lose you, and so soon, too!"
"But only for a little time, I hope, Sir Madoc," said I, cheerfully, thinking more of my early meeting with Estelle than the long separation the morrow must inevitably bring about. I ordered Evans to pack up and prepare everything, to leave my P.P.C. cards with a few persons I named; and avoiding Price, Clavell, Mostyn, and others, rode with Sir Madoc towards Walcot Park, as my mind somehow foreboded, amid all my joy and excitement, for what I feared would be the _last_ time.
CHAPTER XXVI.--WITHOUT PURCHASE.
Close to, and yet quietly secluded from, the mighty tide of busy humanity that daily surges to and fro between the Bank and the Mansion House, all up Cheapside and Cornhill, in a small dark court off the latter, was the office of Messrs. Sharpus and Juggles, solicitors. The brick edifice towered to the height of many stories; a score of names appeared on each side of the doorway in large letters; and many long dark passages and intricate stairs led to the two dingy rooms where those human spiders sat and spun the webs and meshes of the law. Their dens had a damp and mouldy odour; no ray from heaven ever fell into them, but a cold gray reflected light came from the white encaustic tiles, with which the opposite wall of the court was faced for that purpose; and of that borrowed light even the lower room, where their half-starved clerks worked into the still hours of the night--a veritable cave of Trophonius, if one might judge by their sad, seedy, and dejected appearance--was deprived from its situation; and in all these courts and chambers gas was burned daily in those terrible seasons when the London fogs assume somewhat the solidity and hue of pea-soup. Mr. Sharpus sat in his private room, surrounded by boxes of wood or japanned tin and ticketed dockets of papers, that were mouldy and dirty--as their contents too probably were--while fly-blown prospectuses, plans, and advertisements of lands, houses, and messuages for sale, and so forth, covered the discoloured walls.
Juggles, his partner, was a suave, slimy, and meekly-mannered man, "with the eye of a serpent and the voice of a dove;" but our present business is with the former, who was a thin round-shouldered individual, with a cold keen face, an impending forehead, sunken dark gray eyes, the expression of which varied between cunning and solemnity, pride, vulgar assurance, and occasionally restlessness. Shrewd of head and stony of heart, he was not quite the kind of man at whose mercy one would wish to be. He had a hard-worked and sometimes worried aspect; but now an abject white fear, with an unmistakably hunted expression, came over his face, when one of the clerks from the lower den ushered in, without much ceremony, Mr. Guilfoyle, who had in his hand a sporting paper, which he was reading as he entered.
"_You_ here again?" exclaimed Sharpus, laying down his pen, and carefully closing the door.
"Yes, by Jove, again!" replied Guilfoyle, with barely a nod, and seating himself with his hat on.
"So soon!" groaned Sharpus; and reseating himself, he eyed, with an expression of haggard hate, Guilfoyle, who continued to read from the paper hurriedly, excitedly, and half aloud, some report of a steeplechase.
"The Devil--threw his rider--remounted; at the next fence Raglan took the lead, followed by Fairy and Beauty, and Beau, the Devil lying next; last fence but one taken by the quintette almost simultaneously, when Raglan, Beauty, and Beau came away together, the first-named winning a very fine race by half a length--Beauty being third, and close upon Beau, but Fairy was nowhere. D--nation! there is a pot of money gone, or not won, which amounts to the same thing in the end!" and crushing up the paper, he threw it on the writing-table of Sharpus.
"Wanting more money?" said the latter, in a hollow voice.
"Precisely so; out at the elbows--in low water--phrase it as you will. I have sold even my horse at last," replied the other, folding his arms, and regarding the lawyer mockingly.
"And the ring given you by--by the King of Bavaria?" said Sharpus, with a sickly smile.
"I retain but a paste imitation of that remarkable brilliant; and that I may present you as a mark of my regard and esteem."
"I thought you had made something by a mercantile transaction, as you phrased it, when last on the Continent?"
"So I did; 'the mercantile transaction' being nothing less than breaking the bank at Homburg, by steadily and successfully backing the red, and sending home all those who came for wool most decidedly _shorn_."
"You should have saved some of those ill-gotten gains for future contingencies," said Sharpus.
"How much easier it is to advise and to speculate than to act with care and decision!" sneered Guilfoyle.
"I pity your poor wife," said the lawyer, sincerely enough.
"She has no documentary proof that she is such," replied Guilfoyle, angrily. "Pshaw! what is pity? an emotion that is often at war with reason and with sense, too; for a handsome face or a well-turned ankle may make us pity the most undeserving object."
The lawyer sighed, and at that moment sincerely pitied himself; for it had chanced that, in earlier years, an intimacy with Guilfoyle led to the latter discovering that which gave him such absolute power as to reduce him--Sharpus--to be his very slave. This was nothing less than the _forgery_ of a bill in the name of Guilfoyle; who, before relinquishing the privilege of prosecution, on retiring the document, had obtained a complete holograph confession of the act, which he now retained as a wrench for money, and held over the head of Sharpus, thereby compelling him to act as he pleased. After a minute's silence, during which the two men had been surveying each other, the one with hate and fear, the other with malignant triumph, Guilfoyle said, "I did Lady Naseby, as you know, a service at Berlin, when at very low water; being seen with her won me credit, which I failed not to turn to advantage. I followed her and her daughter through all Germany--at Ems, Gerolstein, Baden, and then to Wales, where I was in clover at Craigaderyn. I was a fool to fly my hawks at game so high as the peerage; and I feel sure it was that beast of a fellow Hardinge, of the Royal Welsh, who blew the gaff upon me, and prevented me from entering stakes, as I intended to do, for one of the daughters of that horse-and-cow-breeding old Welsh baronet; and they are, bar one, the handsomest girls in England."
"And that one?"
"Is Lady Estelle Cressingham."
Even the ghastly lawyer smiled at his profound assurance.
"Have you no remorse when you think of Miss Franklin?"
"No more than you have, when you have sucked a client dry, and leave him to die in the streets," replied Guilfoyle, with his strange dry mocking laugh; "remorse is the word for a fool--the unpunished crime, I have read somewhere, is never regretted. Men mourn the consequences, but never the sin or a crime itself. As for Hardinge, d--n him!" he added, grinding his teeth; "I thought to put a spoke in his wheel, by passing off Georgette as his wife, but Taffy came to his aid, and the true story was told; and yet, do you know, there were times when I played my cards exceedingly well with the Cressinghams. Besides, you always represented me to be a man of fortune."
"I have invariably done so," groaned Sharpus.
"And have stumped out pretty well to maintain the story, while hinting of--"
"Coal-mines in Labuan, shares in others in Mexico, and all manner of things, to account for the sums wrung from me--from my wife and children. But, God help me, I can do no more!"
"Bah! what do they or you want with that villa at Hampstead? But you are a good fellow, Sharpus; and, thanks to your assistance, I worked the oracle pretty well at Walcot Park for Mr. Henry Hardinge."
"Against him, you mean?"
"Of course; but, unluckily, our story wouldn't stand testing."
"Could you expect it to do so?"
"But I put a hitch in his gallop there, anyhow. By Jove, I was a great fool not to make love to the old woman, instead of her daughter."
"Meaning Lady Naseby?" said Sharpus, with surprise.
"So Burke and Debrett name her. She is just at that age--twice her daughter's--when the soft sex become remarkably soft indeed, and apt to make fools of themselves."