Excerpt
CHAPTER I.
POOR JACK.
“As ye sweep through the deepWhile the stormy winds do blow,While the battle rages loud and long,And the stormy winds do blow.”Campbell.
UST two years this very day since poor Jack Mackenzie sailed away from England in the Ocean Pride.”
Mr. Richards, of the tough old firm of Griffin, Keane, and Co., Solicitors, London, talked more to himself than to any one within hearing.
As he spoke he straightened himself up from his desk in a weary kind of way, and began to mend his pen: they used quills in those good old times.
“Just two years! How the time flies! And we’re not getting any younger. Are we, partner?”
Whether Mr. Keane heard what he said or not, he certainly did not reply immediately. He was standing by the window, gazing out into the half-dark, fog-shaded street.
“Fog, fog, fog!” he grunted peevishly; “nothing but fog and gloom. Been nothing else all winter; and now that spring has all but come, why it’s fog, fog, fog, just the same! Tired of it—sick of it!”
Then he turned sharply round, exclaiming, “What did you say about Jack and about growing younger?”
Mr. Richards smiled a conciliatory smile. He was the junior partner though the older man—if that is not a paradox—for his share in the firm was not a quarter as large as Keane’s, who was really Keane by name and keen by nature, of small stature, with dark hair turning gray, active, business-like, and a trifle suspicious.
Mr. Richards was delightfully different in every way—a round rosy face that might have belonged to some old sea-captain, a bald and rosy forehead, hair as white as drifted snow, and a pair of blue eyes that always seemed brimming over with kindness and good-humour.
“I was talking more to my pen than to you,” he said quietly.
“But what’s given you Jack on the brain, eh?”
“Oh, nothing—nothing in particular, that is. I happened to turn to his account, that is all.”
“Bother him. Yes, and but for you, Richards, never an account should he have had with us.”
“Well, Jack gets round me somehow. He is not half a bad lad, with his dash and his fun and his jollity. Ay, and his ways are very winning sometimes. He does get round one, partner.”
“I don’t doubt it, Richards. Winning enough when he wants to get round you and wheedle cash out of you. I tell you what, partner: Jack’s got all his father’s aristocratic notions, all his father’s pride and improvidence. Ay, and he’d ruin his dad too, if—if—”
“If what, partner?”
“Why, if his dad weren’t ruined already.”
“Come, come, Keane, it isn’t quite so bad as that.”
“Pretty nigh it, I can assure you. And I can’t get the proud old Scot to retrench. Why doesn’t he let that baronial hall of his, instead of sticking to it and mortgaging it in order to keep up appearances and entertain half the gentry in the county? Why doesn’t he take a five-roomed cottage, and let his daughter teach the harp that she plays so well?”
“O partner!...