Kept (10 page)

And here Mr. Crabbe’s eyes opened very wide indeed—not merely because he was shocked at hearing his noble friend, the proud bearer of sempiternal strawberry leaves, jocularly abused in this way, but because Mr. Pardew’s estimate of his foolishness was so manifestly correct.

“You must forgive my asperity,” Mr. Pardew went meekly on. “But I find that in dealing with persons such as His Grace, one is always being pressed to offer advice, whereas advice is generally the last thing that is wanted.”

“That may well be the case, Mr. Pardew. It may well be the case indeed. What is it that I can do for you this morning?”

“I shall be perfectly frank, Mr. Crabbe. I have money, rightfully mine, in the hands of others, that I need to reclaim.”

A prudent man—and Mr. Crabbe was such a man—knowing something of his visitor’s history, and hearing this pronouncement, would have taken the opportunity to bid Mr. Pardew good morning. And yet for some reason—it may have been the ghostly presence of
His Grace, or some greater fascination of which he was not perfectly aware—Mr. Crabbe did not ring the bell for his clerk or go and stand by his fire in such a way that even so thick-skinned an animal as a rhinoceros would have understood the interview to be at an end.

“Am I to understand, Mr. Pardew, that you are asking me to collect a debt?”

“In a manner of speaking. I am asking you, in the first instance, to write a letter.”

“But the retrieval of a debt is your ultimate aim?”

“Certainly.”

“But surely, Mr. Pardew—you will forgive my bluntness—any attorney of your acquaintance could write such a letter. And might indeed be better suited to its execution than such a person as I.”

Mr. Pardew bared his teeth ingratiatingly in a manner that suggested he forgave Mr. Crabbe the bluntness entirely. “If you will permit me to say so, Mr. Crabbe, there is no one better qualified to execute such a commission as yourself.”

“That is all very well.”

Mr. Crabbe was aware that all this was very mysterious, and that he did not quite like it. Most men, in visiting a lawyer’s office, are specific in their desires. They wish a document to be drawn up, or a transgression punished, or a claim pursued. Mr. Crabbe fancied—nay, Mr. Crabbe knew—that something was amiss. Still, though, he did not voice his suspicions but stood on his Turkey carpet with his thin back to the fire considering what had been placed before him. Mr. Pardew sensed something of his disquiet and turned in his chair to face him.

“Perhaps I had better explain myself, Mr. Crabbe. I am at present engaged in the trade of bill-discounting”—Mr. Crabbe nodded his head at this—“but until fairly recently I was active in a branch of commercial manufacture. At the commencement of this business, which I may say was not unsuccessful, I had several associates—men of a humbler station than my own—whose practical help I needed but whose financial means were necessarily limited. Accordingly, it was decided that though they might withdraw funds out of the business, my own capital should remain within it, with the prospect of future redress.”

“No doubt there is documentary proof of these agreements?”

“No, there is not. Such was the closeness of our association that each of us thought our word sufficient. Doubtless it was very foolish.”

Mr. Crabbe nodded his head to signify that it was very foolish.

“But I am convinced,” Mr. Pardew went on, smiling in a very suggestive manner, “of their essential good nature and their willingness to return what is rightfully mine. The business closed a year or two since, but the profits were considerable. It is my aim to retrieve a proportion of those profits.”

“Trusting to your former associates’ essential good nature?”

“And to lawyers’ letters, Mr. Crabbe. Which are sometimes more efficacious even than that.”

This was of course the moment at which Mr. Crabbe should have taken full possession of his Turkey carpet, turned his back on Mr. Pardew and wished his visitor good morning. The story about Mr. Pardew’s debtors he did not believe for a moment, for he could think of no man so situated as Mr. Pardew—and certainly not such a man as Mr. Pardew—who would not have taken better steps to protect himself. It appeared to him, insofar as he could judge from the fragmentary materials before him, that Mr. Pardew was playing some game whereby money could be covertly transferred to himself, and in which the name of a lawyer, especially such a lawyer as himself, would be useful to him, but he could not be sure. Above all, he was suspicious of Mr. Pardew’s manner, which, however deferential and respectful, seemed to him false. Still, though, he did not ring the bell, summon his clerk or intimate to Mr. Pardew that he would get better advice elsewhere. There was something about the situation, still more perhaps about the man himself, that intrigued him and that he wished in some manner to keep within his grasp. Consequently, he continued to stare at Mr. Pardew as he sat easily in his chair, wondering what could be done about him and what could profitably be said.

“Of course there is no guarantee that you would achieve your object.”

“I suppose not.”

“No guarantee at all.”

“I have no doubt it is as you say.”

“And you would wish to proceed immediately?”

“No. That is, not quite immediately.”

“Indeed! Then you have a very emollient nature, Mr. Pardew. I confess that if I were owed money over such a long period I should be pressing my debtors. I should be very pressing, indeed I should.”

Again Mr. Pardew smiled his ingratiating smile. “It is a question merely of information…. I will admit, Mr. Crabbe, that there is one gentleman of whose whereabouts I am altogether ignorant.”

Once more Mr. Crabbe hardly believed a word of what was said to him. Men, he knew, can usually be found, especially if the pursuer was such a one as Mr. Pardew. Yet he was aware that, having temporised in this way, it would be difficult for him to draw back. Without precisely acknowledging the fact, he feared that Mr. Pardew had been too much for him, and while this understanding irritated him it also served to quicken his interest. At the same time, he was determined, for these and other reasons, that the interview should cease forthwith.

Mr. Pardew, observing this, was aware of the workings of the old lawyer’s mind. He realised that if he were to play his trump card, he had better play it now. Accordingly, he reached into his breast pocket and brought forth a sheet of paper folded into two, very grimy about its extremities and bound up with a red ribbon.

“Here is a letter,” he said in the easy tones of a man who entreats his friend to examine the evening paper, “which I believe you once wrote. Perhaps you had better read it.”

Mr. Crabbe accepted the proffered piece of foolscap and sniffed at it. If the set of his eyes betrayed the fact that its contents were a source of profound disquiet to him, the tone of his voice did not confirm this impression.

“Where did you get this?”

“Dear me, I hardly recollect. Let us say that it came to me in the course of my professional dealings.”

“You are no doubt aware that it is a forgery—a most impudent forgery.”

“No doubt. And yet I believe you are acquainted with the Mr. Dixey to whom it was written?”

“That, sir, is none of your business.” And yet still, for some reason, Mr. Crabbe hesitated to ring for his clerk.

“Perhaps it is not.” Mr. Pardew’s smile was, Mr. Crabbe thought, the most infuriating thing he had ever seen. “But there is a deed box with his name on it in your strongroom, or I am the old Duke’s ghost.”

Something in Mr. Crabbe’s eye divulged that there was such a box. But Mr. Pardew was a clever man and did not on this occasion press home his advantage. “It is a small world, is it not, where a client of yours may also be a connection of mine. These things must be expected, I suppose.”

There was a silence, while Mr. Crabbe, absolutely outraged by this treatment, yet still calculating what had better be done about it, stared at his desk and at the letter, which Mr. Pardew now prudently retrieved and dangled between his fingers.

“You had better come to me again when there is anything to be done,” he said eventually.

Mr. Pardew rose to his feet and bowed. If he felt that he had achieved a great object, he did not by the manner of his voice and eye betray it. Having flourished his stick once again, he placed it under his arm.

“I am very much obliged to you, Mr. Crabbe. Very much. One does not always enjoy dealing with lawyers, but when one does it is as well to find one whom one respects.”

“No doubt.”

“And perhaps you would do me the honour of conveying my compliments to His Grace?”

Now Mr. Crabbe did not like this at all. Mr. Pardew’s observations about lawyers were, to one who had been in the profession for a half century, disagreeable to him. He was aware, too, that by dwelling once more on those ducal strawberry leaves, Mr. Pardew intended to signify that they had some bearing on what had passed between them. And invisible above their heads, yet burning all the while in the pale air, lay the outrage of the letter. Accordingly, he neither agreed nor disagreed with this request, merely nodding his head as he waved Mr. Pardew towards his staircase and the escort of his old clerk. Still, though, hearing the noise of Mr. Pardew’s departing footsteps on the stair—jaunty feet, as they seemed to him, belonging to one who has attained some private goal—he thought that the matter was unsatis
factory to him, and rather than seat himself once more at his desk he remained on the Turkey carpet thinking hard and wretchedly on what he had done. There were various books lying to hand, thick tomes of the kind that decorate lawyers’ offices, and he delved within them for a while, hoping that they might provide the reassurance he sought. Finding that they did not, he did take finally to his desk, but the letter he began to write seemed equally unsatisfactory and at length he flung its torn fragments into his wastepaper basket.

It was by now about half past one in the afternoon, the time at which most legal gentlemen are at their clubs or at legal eating houses near the Inns of Court or anywhere save inside their chambers. But Mr. Crabbe was not deterred by the obscurity of the hour. He had an inkling that the person he thought he wished to consult would be at home, indeed never was anywhere but at home, and that he could safely go and seek him out. Thus, having spoken a word or two to the clerk, he put his hat on his head, left his premises and walked along the gravel paths at right angles to each other until he came to a somewhat shabby building in the very far corner of Lincoln’s Inn inhabited for the most part by youthful barristers fresh from their pupillage and that sad species of middle-aged attorney on whom the light of professional fortune has ceased to shine.

Here, at the very top of the utmost flight of stairs, in rooms that it was jocularly supposed had not seen a charwoman’s broom since the days of the Chartist demonstrations, lived a gentleman named Mr. Guyle. Of Mr. Guyle, with whom it was thought that Mr. Crabbe had been at school long centuries before, it may be said that he was in his way quite as legendary a figure as his boyhood companion. And yet his celebrity was of an entirely different character to the man in whose company he was alleged to have been flogged when the two of them absented themselves from their desks to pick raspberries from a nearby market garden at about the time of the Battle of Austerlitz. Mr. Crabbe went everywhere in the world and was esteemed for his worldliness. Mr. Guyle, on the other hand, went nowhere and was equally esteemed for his detachment. Mr. Crabbe knew dukes and duchesses, dined at grand soirées and administered the affairs of landed estates. Mr. Guyle knew only his immediate neighbours, dined in a public
house and had his most intimate conversations with the old woman who darned his shirts, and yet it was to Mr. Guyle—humbly and with a due sense of the latter’s expertise—that Mr. Crabbe went when he needed an opinion.

Indeed Mr. Guyle’s opinions were famous. The claim to an earldom, it was said, had perished on account of what Mr. Guyle had to say about it, and a bevy of old men quartered in a municipal almshouse had been awarded ten guineas a year for life as a consequence of an ancient will that Mr. Guyle had grubbed up in some overlooked depository. All this Mr. Crabbe gratefully acknowledged as he nodded at the lounging porter (who, knowing Mr. Crabbe of old, greeted him with the most reverential bow) and made his way up Mr. Guyle’s four rackety staircases to Mr. Guyle’s room.

Entering this sanctum, at whose door stood a jug that had pretty clearly contained Mr. Guyle’s pint of midday porter brought across by a potboy an hour since, Mr. Crabbe was immediately conscious of an almost Arctic chill settling around his limbs. Mr. Guyle had never been known to have a fire, even in January, and disdained warmth as he disdained all social invitations. No coy blandishment, not one dispatched by royalty itself, had ever seduced Mr. Guyle. He sat now as he always sat, at a little desk beneath a great shelf of books—books differing from those in Mr. Crabbe’s chamber by virtue of their shabbiness and torn bindings—with further books piled around him almost to the level of his knees, and a great tray of legal papers laid out on a second desk at his side, a little old man with a shock of white hair and a palsied hand that yet moved over the page beneath him as if pursued by Mr. Guyle and anxious to evade his grasp. There was dust everywhere: dust on the cracked and rheumy window; dust over the drugget that made shift as Mr. Guyle’s carpet; dust on the framed portraits of my lords Eldon, Coke and other luminaries that hung on the wall; and dust, it may be presumed, in the ventricles of Mr. Guyle’s ancient legal heart.

“How do you do, Crabbe?” Mr. Guyle enquired when he saw him, in a way that suggested that the exploits of their youth still lay before them, would not perhaps be referred to but could not altogether be discounted in any colloquy that they might undertake. “Keeping well,
I take it? My clerk’s ill, or I’d have him bring you tea.” And he laughed mercilessly, as if to imply that this was the merest jest.

“It’s a very cold day,” Mr. Crabbe observed, gingerly availing himself of a chair that harboured some very ancient copies of the
Law Review
.