HORACE laughed at the condescension of his hosts, but not with the laugh of sweet temper or brisk momentary youthful indignation. There was revenge in his disdain. It fired his inclination to exhibit the power he had acquired, and make the most of it. The party was few in number, and not of very elevated pretensions; a few ladies of the county town, in sober but bright-coloured silk and satin, such as was thought becoming to their matronly years, who had plenty of talk among themselves, but were shy of interfering with the conversation of “the gentlemen”; and a few gentlemen, the best of their class in Kenlisle, but still only Kenlisle townsmen, and not county magnates. Even the vicar was not asked to Mr. Pouncet’s on this occasion; the show was very inconsiderable—a fact which Horace made out with little difficulty, and which Mr. Stenhouse’s sharp eyes were not likely to be slow of perceiving. Nothing, however, affected the unchangeable blandness of that wide-smiling mouth. Before the dinner was over, Horace, by dint of close observation, became aware that there was a little bye-play going on between the hosts and their principal guest, and that Mr. Stenhouse’s inquiries about one after another of the more important people of the neighbourhood, and his smiling amazement to hear that so many of them were absent, and so many had previous engagements, had an extremely confusing effect upon poor Mrs. Pouncet, who did not know how to shape her answers, and looked at her husband again and again, with an appeal for assistance, which he was very slow to respond to. Horace, however, permitted Mrs. Pouncet and her accompanying train to leave the room before he began his sport; and it was only when the gentlemen had closed round the table, and when, after the first brisk hum of talk, a little lull ensued, that the young man, who had hitherto been very modest, and behaved himself, as Mr. Pouncet said, with great propriety, suffered the first puff of smoke to disclose itself from his masked battery, and opened his siege.
“Did you see in yesterday’s Times a lawcase of a very interesting kind, sir?” said this ingenuous neophyte, addressing Mr. Pouncet—“Mountjoy versus Mortlock, tried in the Nisi Prius. Did it happen to strike you? I should like extremely to know what your opinion was.”
“I was very busy last night. I am ashamed to say I get most of my public news at second hand. What was it, Scarsdale? Speak out, my good fellow; I daresay your own opinion on the subject would be as shrewd, if not as experienced, as mine; a very clever young man—rising lad!” said Mr. Pouncet, with an aside to his next neighbour, by way of explaining his own graciousness. “Let us hear what it was.”
Mr. Stenhouse said nothing, but Horace saw that he paused in the act of peeling an orange, and fixed upon himself a broad, full smiling stare; a look in which the entire eyes, mouth, face of the gazer seemed to take part—a look which anybody would have said conveyed the very soul of openness and candour, but which Horace somehow did not much care to encounter. Mr. Stenhouse looked at him steadily, as if with a smiling consideration of what he might happen to mean, glanced aside with a slight malicious air of humour at Mr. Pouncet, gave a slight laugh, and went on peeling his orange. The whole pantomime tended somehow to diminish the young schemer’s confidence in his own power, which naturally led him to proceed rather more vehemently and significantly than he had intended with what he had to say.
“The case was this,” said Horace, with somewhat too marked a tone—“Mortlock was a solicitor and agent among others to a Sir Roger Mountjoy, a country baronet. Sir Roger was very careless about his affairs, and left them very much in his agent’s hands; and, besides, was embarrassed in his circumstances, and in great need of ready money. Mortlock somehow obtained private information concerning a portion of his client’s land which more than tripled its value. After which he persuaded the baronet to sell it to him at a very low price, on pretence that it was comparatively worthless, and that he made the purchase out of complacency to meet the pressing needs of his patron. Immediately after the sale a public discovery was made of a valuable vein of lead, which Mortlock immediately set about working, and made a fortune out of. A dozen years after, when the baronet was dead, his heirs brought an action against the solicitor, maintaining that the sale was null and void, and demanding compensation. Only the counsel for the plaintiff has been heard as yet. What do you think they will make of such a plea?”
Mr. Pouncet set down upon the table the glass he was about raising to his lips, and spilt a few drops of his wine. He was taken by surprise; but the momentary shock of such an appeal, made to him in the presence of Stenhouse, and under his eye as it was, did not overwhelm the old lawyer as Horace, in the self-importance of his youth, imagined it would. His complexion was too gray and unvarying to show much change of colour for anything, and the only real evidence of his emotion were these two or three drops of spilt wine. But he cleared his throat before he answered, and spoke after a pause in a very much less condescending and encouraging tone.
“It depends altogether on what the plea is,” said Mr. Pouncet; “the story looks vastly well, but what is the plea? Can you make it out, Stenhouse? Of course, when a man acquires a property fairly at its fair value, no matter what is found out afterwards, an honest bargain cannot be invalidated by our laws. I suppose it must be a breach of trust, or something of the sort. You are very young in our profession, my friend Scarsdale, or you would have known that you have stated no plea.”
“The plea is, of course, that the solicitor was bound to his client’s interest, and had no right to make use of private information for his own advantage—and they’ll win it. There, my young friend, I give you my opinion without asking,” said Stenhouse; “purchases made by an agent for his needy client are always suspicious, sure to create a prejudice to start with, and against the honour of the profession, Mr. Pouncet? Attorneys can’t afford to risk a great deal—we don’t stand too high in the public estimation as it is. It’s a very interesting case, I do not wonder it attracted your attention. The baronet was a gouty, old spendthrift, perfectly careless of money matters—the solicitor, a sharp fellow, with an eye to his own interests; which,” continued Mr. Stenhouse, with his frank laugh, and a humorous roll of his eye towards his former partner, “is a thing permissible, and to be commended in every profession but our own.”
A general laugh followed this proposition. “You manage to feather your nests pretty well, notwithstanding; better than most of those other people who are encouraged to look after their own interests, and do not pretend to nurse their neighbour’s,” said one of the guests.
“Accident, my dear sir, accident!” said Stenhouse, laughing; “to be truly and sublimely disinterested, a man must be an attorney. It is the model profession of Christianity. Here you must see innumerable personal chances slip past you, at all times, without a sigh. Why?—because you are the guardian of other men’s chances, perpetually on the watch to assist your client, and forgetting that such a person as yourself is in the world, save for that purpose. That is our code of morals, eh, Pouncet? But it is high, certainly—a severe strain for ordinary minds; and as every man may follow the common laws of nature, save an attorney, it follows that an attorney, when he is caught tripping, has more odium and more punishment than any other man. Mr. Pouncet, you agree, don’t you, with all I say.”
And Mr. Stenhouse, once more with his broad laugh of self-mockery and extreme frankness, directed everybody’s attention to his old partner, who by no means relished the conversation. Mr. Pouncet’s glass remained still untasted before him on the table—he himself was fidgety and uneasy—the only answer he made was a spasmodic attention to his guests, to encourage the passing of the bottle, and a sudden proposition immediately after to join the ladies. Not one individual at his table had the slightest sympathy with the old lawyer—every man chuckled aside at the idea that all these arrows were “in to old Pouncet;” not that he was generally disliked or unpopular, but sublime disinterestedness was so oddly uncharacteristic of the man, and unlike the ordinary idea of his profession, that everybody was tickled with the thought. Next to Mr. Pouncet, however, the person most disconcerted of the party was Horace, whose “power” and menace were entirely thrust aside by the jokes of the stranger. The young man went in sulkily, last of the party, to Mrs. Pouncet’s drawing-room, dimly and angrily suspecting some wheel within wheel in the crafty machinery which he had supposed his own rash hand sufficient to stop. Perhaps Mr. Pouncet, after all, was the principal criminal, and Stenhouse only an accomplice—certainly appearances were stronger against the serious and cautious man, evidently annoyed and put out by this conversation, as he was, than against the bold and outspoken one, who showed no timidity upon the subject. But Horace’s ideas were disturbed, and his calculations put out. He had no knowledge of the character of Stenhouse, when he exulted in the vain idea of having him “in his power.” If things were really as he suspected, this was not an easy man to get into anybody’s power; and Horace began to inquire within himself whether it would not be better to have a solemn statement made by the old pitman, to send for authority from Roger Musgrave, the old Squire’s heir-at-law, and to come out on his own account in the grand character of redresser of injuries and defender of rights. That at least, stimulated by the influence of Mountjoy versus Mortlock, was in Horace’s power.
While the young man hung about the corners of the drawing-room, turning over Mrs. Pouncet’s stock of meagre Albums and superannuated Annuals, and pondering over his future proceedings, Mr. Stenhouse came up to him with his usual frankness. He was ready to talk on any subject, this open-minded and candid lawyer, and spoke upon all with the tone of a man who is afraid of none.
“Well, Mr. Scarsdale! so you are interested in this Mountjoy and Mortlock business,” said his new acquaintance—“a curious case in every way, if they can prove it. Want of legal wisdom, however, plays the very devil with these odd cases—it may be perfectly clear to all rational belief, and yet almost impossible to prove it. Perhaps something of the kind has fallen under your own observation—eh?”
“I have,” said Horace, a little stiffly, “become suddenly acquainted with a case of a very similar kind.”
“Aha, I thought so—I daresay there’s plenty,” said Stenhouse. “Capital cases for rising young barristers that want to show in the papers and get themselves known. Famous things for young fellows, indeed, in general—that is to say,” he added, more slowly, “if the heir happens to be anybody, or to have friends or money sufficient to see the thing out. In that case it does not matter much whether he loses or wins. Thinking perhaps of striking off from my friend Pouncet and establishing yourself, eh? Could not do better than start with such an affair in hand.”
“I should be glad of more experience first,” said Horace; “and, to tell the truth, I don’t care for beginning by betraying old friends. Mr. Pouncet has behaved very liberally by me, receiving me when I had very little qualification.”
“Pouncet!” cried Mr. Stenhouse—“you don’t mean to say that Pouncet has been burning his fingers in any such equivocal concerns. Come, come, my young friend, we must be cautious about this. Mr. Pouncet is a most respectable man.”
“Mr. Stenhouse,” said Horace, “I was, as it happens, at Tinwood this morning—perhaps you know Tinwood?”
“A little,” said the other, with his most engaging smile.
“There I met, partly by chance,” said Horace, feeling himself provoked into excitement by the perfect coolness of his antagonist, “an old man, who gave me an entire history of the first finding of the coal.”
“Ah, it was a very simple business. I was there myself, with a scientific friend of mine; a blind fellow, blind as a mole to everything that concerns himself—feeling about the world in spectacles, and as useless for ordinary purposes as if he had moved in a glass case,” said Mr. Stenhouse; “extraordinary, is it not? It was he who found the first traces of that coal.”
“And found them,” said Horace, pointedly, “before the land was purchased by Mr. Pouncet and yourself from Squire Musgrave of the Grange.”
“Ah, we had better say as little as possible about that in the present company. Pouncet mightn’t like it—it might look ugly enough for Pouncet if there was much talk on the subject,” said Mr. Stenhouse, sympathetically glancing towards his old partner, and subduing his own smile in friendly deprecation of a danger in which he seemed to feel no share.
“And how might it look for you?” said Horace, with his rough and coarse boldness.
Mr. Stenhouse laughed, and turned round upon him with the most candid face in the world.
“My dear fellow, Squire Musgrave was no client of mine!” said the good-humoured lawyer. “The utmost punctilio of professional honour could not bind me to take care of his interests. I was a young fellow like yourself, with my fortune to make. You put it very cleverly, I confess, and it might look ugly enough for Pouncet; but, my excellent young friend, it is nothing in the world to me.”
“Yet you were Mr. Pouncet’s partner,” said Horace, with a certain sulky virulence, annoyed at the small success of his grand coup.
“After, my dear sir, after!” cried Mr. Stenhouse, with another of his éclats de rire.
Horace made a pause, but returned to the charge with dogged obstinacy.
“I know Roger Musgrave,” he said, “and I know friends who will stand by him as long as there is the slightest hope——”
“Ah, very well, as you please, it is not my concern; and it is quite likely you might make a good thing out of Pouncet,” said Mr. Stenhouse. “By-the-bye, now I think of it, come and breakfast with me to-morrow, when we can speak freely. I have no particular reason to be grateful to him, but Pouncet and I are very old friends. Come to the ‘George’ at eight o’clock, will you? I’d like to inquire into this a little more, for old Pouncet’s sake.”
So they parted, with some hope on Horace’s side, but no very great gratification in respect to his hoped-for “power.”