"I thank you, Mr., Mr., what did you say your name was?I beg you a thousand pardons."
"No offaunce in the least, sir; no ceremony with methis is perticler good madeira!"
"May I ask how I can serve you?" said Mr. Beaufort, struggling between the sense of annoyance and the fear to be uncivil. "And pray, had I the honour of your vote in the last election!"
"No, sir, no! It's mauny years since I have been in your part of the world, though I was born there."
"Then I don't exactly see" began Mr. Beaufort, and stopped with dignity.
"Why I call on you," put in the stranger, tapping his boots with his cane; and then recognising the rents, he thrust both feet under the table.
"I don't say that; but at this hour I am seldom at leisurenot but what I am always at the service of a constituent, that is, a voter! Mr., I beg your pardon, I did not catch your name."
"Sir," said the stranger, helping himself to a third glass of wine; "here's a health to your young folk! And now to business." Here the visitor, drawing his chair nearer to his host, assuming a more grave aspect, and dropping something of his stilted pronunciation, continued, "You had a brother?"
"Well, sir," said Mr. Beaufort, with a very changed countenance.
"And that brother had a wife!"
Had a cannon gone off in the ear of Mr. Robert Beaufort, it could not have shocked or stunned him more than that simple word with which his companion closed his sentence. He fell back in his chairhis lips apart, his eyes fixed on the stranger. He sought to speak, but his tongue clove to his mouth.
"That wife had two sons, born in wedlock!"
"It is false!" cried Mr. Beaufort, finding a voice at length, and springing to his feet. "And who are you, sir? and what do you mean by"
"Hush!" said the stranger, perfectly unconcerned, and regaining the dignity of his haw-haw enunciation, "better not let the servants hear aunything. For my pawt, I think servants hauve the longest pair of ears of auny persons, not excepting jauckasses; their ears stretch from the pauntry to the parlour. Hush, sir!perticler good madeira, this!"
"Sir!" said Mr. Beaufort, struggling to preserve, or rather recover, his temper, "your conduct is exceedingly strange; but allow me to say that you are wholly misinformed. My brother never did marry; and if you have anything to say on behalf of those young menhis natural sonsI refer you to my solicitor, Mr. Blackwell, of Lincoln's Inn. I wish you a good evening."
"Sir!the same to youI won't trouble you auny farther; it was only out of koindness I calledI am not used to be treated sosir, I am in his maujesty's servicesir, you will foind that the witness of the marriage is forthcoming; you will think of me then, and, perhaps, be sorry. But I've done, 'Your most obedient humble, sir!'" And the stranger, with a flourish of his hand, turned to the door. At the sight of this determination on the part of his strange guest, a cold, uneasy, vague presentiment seized Mr. Beaufort. There, not flashed, but rather froze, across him the recollection of his brother's emphatic but disbelieved assurancesof Catherine's obstinate assertion of her son's alleged rightsrights which her lawsuit, undertaken on her own behalf, had not compromised;a fresh lawsuit might be instituted by the son, and the evidence which had been wanting in the former suit might be found at last. With this remembrance and these reflections came a horrible train of shadowy fears,witnesses, verdict, surrender, spoliationarrears ruin!
The man, who had gained the door, turned back and looked at him with a complacent, half-triumphant leer upon his impudent, reckless face.
"Sir," then said Mr. Beaufort, mildly, "I repeat that you had better see Mr. Blackwell."
The tempter saw his triumph. "I have a secret to communicate which it is best for you to keep snug. How mauny people do you wish me to see about it? Come, sir, there is no need of a lawyer; or, if you think so, tell him yourself. Now or never, Mr. Beaufort."
"I can have no objection to hear anything you have to say, sir," said the rich man, yet more mildly than before; and then added, with a forced smile, "though my rights are already too confirmed to admit of a doubt."
Without heeding the last assertion, the stranger coolly walked back, resumed his seat, and, placing both arms on the table and looking Mr. Beaufort full in the face, thus proceeded,
"Sir, of the marriage between Philip Beaufort and Catherine Morton there were two witnesses: the one is dead, the other went abroadthe last is alive still!"
"If so," said Mr. Beaufort, who, not naturally deficient in cunning and sense, felt every faculty now prodigiously sharpened, and was resolved to know the precise grounds for alarm,"if so, why did not the manit was a servant, sir, a man-servant, whom Mrs. Morton pretended to rely on appear on the trial?"
"Because, I say, he was abroad and could not be found; or, the search after him miscaurried, from clumsy management and a lack of the rhino."
"Hum!" said Mr. Beaufort"one witnessone witness, observe, there is only one!does not alarm me much. It is not what a man deposes, it is what a jury believe, sir! Moreover, what has become of the young men? They have never been heard of for years. They are probably dead; if so, I am heir-at-law!"
"I know where one of them is to be found at all events."
"The elder?Philip?" asked Mr. Beaufort anxiously, and with a fearful remembrance of the energetic and vehement character prematurely exhibited by his nephew.
"Pawdon me! I need not aunswer that question."
"Sir! a lawsuit of this nature, against one in possession, is very doubtful, and," added the rich man, drawing himself up"and, perhaps very expensive!"
"The young man I speak of does not want friends, who will not grudge the money."
"Sir!" said Mr. Beaufort, rising and placing his back to the fire"sir! what is your object in this communication? Do you come, on the part of the young man, to propose a compromise? If so, be plain!"
"I come on my own pawt. It rests with you to say if the young men shall never know it!"
"And what do you want?"
"Five hundred a year as long as the secret is kept."
"And how can you prove that there is a secret, after all?"
"By producing the witness if you wish."
"Will he go halves in the L500. a year?" asked Mr. Beaufort artfully.
"That is moy affair, sir," replied the stranger.
"What you say," resumed Mr. Beaufort, "is so extraordinaryso unexpected, and still, to me, seems so improbable, that I must have time to consider. If you will call on me in a week, and produce your facts, I will give you my answer. I am not the man, sir, to wish to keep any one out of his true rights, but I will not yield, on the other hand, to imposture."
"If you don't want to keep them out of their rights, I'd best go and tell my young gentlemen," said the stranger, with cool impudence.
"I tell you I must have time," repeated Beaufort, disconcerted. "Besides, I have not myself alone to look to, sir," he added, with dignified emphasis"I am a father!"
"This day week I will call on you again. Good evening, Mr. Beaufort!"
And the man stretched out his hand with an air of amicable condescension. The respectable Mr. Beaufort changed colour, hesitated, and finally suffered two fingers to be enticed into the grasp of the visitor, whom he ardently wished at that bourne whence no visitor returns.
The stranger smiled, stalked to the door, laid his finger on his lip, winked knowingly, and vanished, leaving Mr. Beaufort a prey to such feelings of uneasiness, dread, and terror, as may be experienced by a man whom, on some inch or two of slippery rock, the tides have suddenly surrounded.
He remained perfectly still for some moments, and then glancing round the dim and spacious room, his eyes took in all the evidences of luxury and wealth which it betrayed. Above the huge sideboard, that on festive days groaned beneath the hoarded weight of the silver heirlooms of the Beauforts, hung, in its gilded frame, a large picture of the family seat, with the stately porticoesthe noble parkthe groups of deer; and around the wall, interspersed here and there with ancestral portraits of knight and dame, long since gathered to their rest, were placed masterpieces of the Italian and Flemish art, which generation after generation had slowly accumulated, till the Beaufort Collection had become the theme of connoisseurs and the study of young genius.