Mildred Arkell Volume Ii Part 20

"I know," ungraciously returned Valentine. "I believe you think I'm a child still. I can't ride off to market without you, but you go on at me in this fashion: and it's nigh upon thirty years now since I went first."

"I know my own business better than anybody, and I can't afford to let things go below their value," rejoined the squire. "A halfpenny a bushel would make a difference to me now, and I should feel it. I'm shorter of money than I ought to be."

"Money goes in many ways that it ought not to go in," said Valentine, gathering up his bridle with a sniff. And the squire knew that it was a side-thrust at Ben. "Anything more?"

"You had better call on Emma, and ask whether she has made a list of the plate and pictures. If she has not, you may tell her that I shall come over next week and go over the things for myself. She might have sent it to me days ago. I'll not have so much as a plated spoon omitted, and so I told her. That's all."

Valentine Carr touched his horse and rode at a quick trot down the avenue. When the squire looked round, he found Benjamin--who had just got down to breakfast--at his side.

"We shall have a nasty, hot, muggy day, Ben!"

"Yes," said Ben, "we get these days sometimes in September. Father, if you won't let me have the two hundred, will you let me have one? I don't want to lose this chance, and my friends will have sailed. They are putting in three hundred each, but----"

"How many times are you going to tell me that?" interrupted the squire.

"I don't believe it; no, I don't believe you have any friends who are possessed of three hundred to put. It is of no use your bothering, Ben; I haven't got the money to spare."

"Not got it to spare, when you have just come in to twenty thousand pounds!" returned Ben, not, however, venturing to speak in any tone but a conciliating one. "I only wish I had come in to a t.i.the of it! It was a slice of good luck that you never expected, squire, and you might be generous enough to help me once again."

In truth, the good luck had been so entirely unlooked for, that Squire Carr could not find in his heart to snub Ben for saying so, quite as fiercely as he might otherwise have done. "It was just a chance, Ben, Robert Carr's dying as he did."

"A very good chance for us. Look here, father: I can't stop on here, nagged at by Valentine, out of purse, out of _your_ favour----"

"Whose fault is it that you are out of my favour?" interrupted the squire, taking off his old drab wide-awake to straighten a dent in the brim.

"Well, I suppose it's mine," acknowledged Ben. "What is a hundred pounds to the twenty thousand you have come into? A drop of water in the ocean."

"And if you got the hundred pounds and started with it, you'd be writing home in three months for another hundred! It has always been the case, Ben."

The words seemed to imply symptoms of so great a concession, compared to the positive refusal hitherto accorded him, that Ben Carr's hopes went up like a sky-rocket. He saw the hundred pounds in his possession and himself ploughing the deep waters, as vividly as though the picture had been presented to him in a magic mirror.

"It is a chance that I have never had, squire. These men are steady, industrious, practical fellows, who will keep me to my work, whether I will or not. They go out to make money, and I shall make some. Who knows but I may return home with a fortune to match this, just come to you?"

"Ben, you harp upon this money of Marmaduke's; but let me tell you that I don't know what I should have done without it. I have had nothing but drains upon me for years: you've been one of them."

"The old hypocrite!" thought Ben, "he's rolling in money, besides this new windfall. Well, sir," he said aloud, "I shall write----"

"Who's this?" interrupted the squire, who did not see so well as he once did.

It was the postman. Letters were not frequent at the squire's, as they are at many houses. The man was coming up the avenue, in the distance as yet. Squire Carr walked towards him and stretched out his hand for the letters.

The postman gave him two. One was a large, blue, formidable-looking packet, addressed to himself; the other was a perfumed, mignonne, three-cornered sort of missive, for Benjamin Carr, Esq.

"Here, Ben, I don't know who your correspondent may be," said the squire, tossing him the note. "She's an idiot, that's certain; n.o.body, above one, would think of sending a doll's thing like that through the post. It's a wonder it wasn't lost."

Benjamin Carr glanced at the handwriting and slipped the note into the pocket of his shooting coat. Sauntering to a little distance, while the squire was busy with his own letter, he there took it out, opened, and began to read it: a closely-written epistle, on thin foreign paper.

He was startled by something very like the bellow of a bull. Turning round, he saw the squire in a fine commotion, and the noise had come from him.

"Why, what is the matter?" exclaimed Ben, advancing.

"Matter!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Squire Carr--"_matter!_ They are mad; or else I am dreaming."

He held the formidable doc.u.ment before his eyes. He turned it, he gazed at it, he shook it, he pinched himself to see whether he _was_ dreaming.

If any man ever believed that his eyes played him false, Squire Carr believed his did then.

"What is it?" repeated the astonished Ben.

It was a notice from Mr. Fauntleroy that an action was entered upon--to eject him from the possession of that bijou of a house; to wrest from him the fortune; to give Marmaduke's money to Robert Carr; to forbid him to touch or remove so much (his own words just before to his son) as a plated spoon of the effects; to reduce him, in short, to a poor wretched non-inheriting beggar again. Not that all this, or the half of it, was stated; it was implied, and that was enough for the squire's vivid imagination.

"Ben, my boy, what does it mean?" he gasped.

"I'm sure I don't know," said Ben, considerably crestfallen.

"I'm not dreaming, am I?" asked the squire. "Mercy be good to us! What can they have found? Perhaps old Marmaduke made a will after all! They'd never enter an action without being justified. Get the horse into the dog-cart and drive me to the station, Ben. I must go over to see Fauntleroy. Hang him! the sly old villain! I should like to twist his neck."

"But you will promise me the hundred pounds, father?"

"Hundred pounds be shot!" shrieked the squire in a fury. "I've just got notice that I'm ruined, and he asks me for a hundred pounds! No, sir!

nor a hundred pence. How can I afford money, now this inheritance is threatened?"

Benjamin Carr had a great mind to tell his father, that even if it were threatened and taken, he was as well off now as he had been a short while before. But it was not a time to press matters, and he drove the squire to the station in silence.

On that busy Sat.u.r.day morning--and Sat.u.r.days were always busy days at the office of Mr. Fauntleroy--the clerks were amazed by the disturbed entrance of Squire Carr, pushing, agitated, restless; far more amazed than was perhaps their master, Mr. Fauntleroy. He had half expected it.

There ensued a hasty explanation; but the squire scarcely allowed himself to listen to it. Of all the blows that could have come upon him, this was the worst.

"And what do you think of yourself, pray, to be taking up a cause against the Carr family, when you have stuck by it for half a century, or it by you?"

"By old Marmaduke; by no others of it," returned Mr. Fauntleroy, who was secretly enjoying the squire's perplexity beyond everything.

"Why do you turn round against him now? I did not expect it of you, Fauntleroy."

"I don't understand you, squire."

"You are turning against the money he left, which is the same thing, wanting to make ducks and drakes of it."

"Marmaduke Curr's grandson came here and asked me if I would act for him as his solicitor, and I a.s.sented," said Mr. Fauntleroy. "In entering this action against you, I am but obeying his instructions."

"Marmaduke Carr's grandson!" scoffed the squire. "Who is he, the ill-born cur"--not but that the squire's words were somewhat plainer--"that he should presume to set himself up in his false pretences?"

"Ill-born or well-born, my clients are the same to me, provided their cause is good, and they pay me," coolly rejoined Mr. Fauntleroy.

"Well, is it a hoax?" asked the squire, coming nearer to the point, for Mr. Fauntleroy was taking a stealthy glance at his watch.

"If you mean is the action a hoax, most certainly it is not. Robert Carr looks upon it that he has the best right to his grandfather's money, and----"

"Why do you call him Robert _Carr_?" interposed the squire, in a flash of anger.

"What else can I call him? I wish you'd be a little cooler, and let me finish. And he has given me instructions to spare no pains, no expense, in maintaining this action against you."