The Cock and Anchor. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
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my not rising to receive you, Mr. Audley," said the baronet, "when I inform you that I am tied here by the gout; pray, sir, take a chair. Mary, remove your work to the room underneath, and lay the ebony wand within my reach; I will tap upon the floor when I want you."
The girl accordingly glided from the room.
"We are now alone, sir," continued Sir Richard, after a short pause. "I fear, sir—I know not why—that your business has relation to my brother; is he—is he ill?"
"Faith, sir," replied the little man bluntly, "I never heard of the gentleman before in my life."
"I breathe again, sir; you have relieved me extremely," said the baronet, swallowing his disappointment with a ghastly smile; "and now, sir, that you have thus considerately and expeditiously dispelled what were, thank heaven! my groundless alarms, may I ask you to what accident I am indebted for the singular good fortune of making your acquaintance—in short, sir, I would fain learn the object of your visit."
"That you shall, sir—that you shall, in a trice," replied the little gentleman in green. "I'm a plain man, my dear Sir Richard, and love to come to the point at once—ahem! The story, to be sure, is a long one, but don't be afraid, I'll abridge it—I'll abridge it." He drew his watch from his fob, and laying it upon the table before him, he continued—"It now wants, my dear sir, precisely seven minutes of eleven, by London time; I shall limit myself to half-an-hour."
"I fear, Mr. Audley, you should find me a very unsatisfactory listener to a narrative of half-an-hour's length," observed Sir Richard, drily; "in fact, I am not in a condition to make any such exertion; if you will obligingly condense what you have to say into a few minutes, you will confer a favour upon me, and lighten your own task considerably." Sir Richard then indignantly took a pinch of snuff, and muttered, almost audibly—"A vulgar, audacious, old boor."
"Well, then, we must try—we must try, my dear sir," replied the little gentleman, wiping his face with his handkerchief, by way of preparation—"I'll just sum up the leading points, and leave particulars for a more favourable opportunity; in fact, I'll hold over all details to our next merry meeting—our next tête-à-tête—when I hope we shall meet upon a pleasanter footing—your gouty toes, you know—d'ye take me? Ha! ha! excuse the joke—ha! ha! ha!"
Sir Richard elevated his eyebrows, and looked upon the little gentleman with a gaze of stern and petrifying severity during this burst of merriment.
"Well, my dear sir," continued Mr. Audley, again wiping his face, "to proceed to business. You have learned my name from my card, but beyond my name you know nothing about me."
"Nothing whatever, sir," replied Sir Richard, with profound emphasis.
"Just so; well, then, you shall," rejoined the little gentleman. "I have been a long time settled in France—I brought over every penny I had in the world there—in short, sir, something more than twelve thousand pounds. Well, sir, what did I do with it? There's the question. Your gay young fellows would have thrown it away at the gaming table, or squandered it on gold lace and velvets—or again, your prudent, plodding fellow would have lived quietly on the interest and left the principal to vegetate; but what did I do? Why, sir, not caring for idleness or show, I threw some of it into the wine trade, and with the rest I kept hammering at the funds, winning twice for every once I lost. In fact, sir, I prospered—the money rolled in, sir, and in due course I became rich, sir—rich—warm, as the phrase goes."
"Very warm, indeed, sir," replied Sir Richard, observing that his visitor again wiped his face—"but allow me to ask, beyond the general interest which I may be presumed to feel in the prosperity of the whole human race, how on earth does all this concern me?"
"Ay, ay, there's the question," replied the stranger, looking unutterably knowing—"that's the puzzle. But all in good time; you shall hear it in a twinkling. Now, being well to do in the world, you may ask me, why do not I look out for a wife? I answer you simply, that having escaped matrimony hitherto, I have no wish to be taken in the noose at these years; and now, before I go further, what do you take my age to be—how old do I look?"
The little man squared himself, cocked his head on one side, and looked inquisitively at Sir Richard from the corner of his eye. The patience of the baronet was nigh giving way outright.
"Sir," replied he, in no very gracious tones, "you may be the 'Wandering Jew,' for anything I either know or see to the contrary."
"Ha! good," rejoined the little man, with imperturbable good humour, "I see, Sir Richard, you are a wag—the Wandering Jew—ha, ha! no—not that quite. The fact is, sir, I am in my sixty-seventh year—you would not have thought that—eh?"
Sir Richard made no reply whatever.
"You'll acknowledge, sir, that that is not exactly the age at which to talk of hearts and darts, and gay gold rings," continued the communicative gentleman in the bottle-green. "I know very well that no young woman, of her own free choice, could take a liking to me."
"Quite impossible," with desperate emphasis, rejoined Sir Richard, upon whose ear the sentence grated unpleasantly; for Lord Aspenly's letter (in which "hearts and darts" were profusely noticed) lay before him on the table; "but once more, sir, may I implore of you to tell me the drift of all this?"
"The drift of it—to be sure I will—in due time," replied Mr. Audley. "You see, then, sir, that having no family of my own, and not having any intention of taking a wife, I have resolved to leave my money to a fine young fellow, the son of an old friend; his name is O'Connor—Edmond O'Connor—a fine, handsome, young dog, and worthy to fill any place in all the world—a high-spirited, good-hearted, dashing young rascal—you know something of him, Sir Richard?"
The baronet nodded a supercilious assent; his attention was now really enlisted.
"Well, Sir Richard," continued the visitor, "I have wormed out of him—for I have a knack of my own of getting at people's secrets, no matter how close they keep them, d'ye see—that he is over head and ears in love with your daughter—I believe the young lady who just left the room on my arrival; and indeed, if such is the case, I commend the young scoundrel's taste; the lady is truly worthy of all admiration—and—mdash;"
"Pray, sir, proceed as briefly as may be to the object of your conversation with me," interrupted Sir Richard, drily.
"Well, then, to return—I understand, sir," continued Audley, "that you, suspecting something of the kind, and believing the young fellow to be penniless, very naturally, and, indeed, I may say, very prudently, and very sensibly, opposed yourself to the thing from the commencement, and obliged the sly young dog to discontinue his visits;—well, sir, matters stood so, until I—cunning little I—step in, and change the whole posture of affairs—and how? Marry, thus, I come hither and ask your daughter's hand for him, upon these terms following—that I undertake to convey to him, at once, lands to the value of one thousand pounds a year, and that at my death I will leave him, with the exception of a few small legacies, sole heir to all I have; and on his wedding-day give him and his lady their choice of either of two chateaux, the worst of them a worthy residence for a nobleman."
"Are these chateaux in Spain?" inquired Sir Richard, sneeringly.
"No, no, sir," replied the little man, with perfect guilelessness; "both in Flanders."
"Well, sir," said Sir Richard Ashwoode, raising himself almost to a sitting posture, and preluding his observations with two unusually large pinches of snuff, "I have heard you very patiently throughout a statement, all of which was fatiguing, and much of which was positively disagreeable to me: and I trust that what I have now to say will render it wholly unnecessary for you and me ever again to converse upon the same topic. Of Mr. O'Connor, whom, in spite of this strange repetition of an already rejected application, I believe to be a spirited young man, I shall say nothing more than that, from the bottom of my heart I wish him every success of every kind, so long as he confines his aspirations to what is suitable to his own position in society; and, consequently, conducive to his own comfort and respectability.