OUR friend, Wynne Williams, made a much longer stay than he had expected in London. From him, too, Tom Sedley received about this time a mysterious summons to town, so urgent and so solemn that he felt there was something extraordinary in it; and on consultation with the Etherage girls, those competent advisers settled that he should at once obey it.

Tom wrote to Agnes on the evening of his arrival —

“I have been for an hour with Wynne Williams; you have no notion what a good fellow he is, and what a wonderfully clever fellow. There is something very good in prospect for me, but not yet certain, and I am bound not to tell a human being. But you, I will, of course, the moment I know it for certain. It may turn out nothing at all; but we are working very hard all the same.”

In the meantime, down at Malory, things were taking a course of which the good people of Cardyllian had not a suspicion.

With a little flush over his grim, brown face, with a little jaunty swagger, and a slight screwing of his lips, altogether as if he had sipped a little too much brandy-and-water — though he had nothing of the kind that day — giggling and chuckling over short sentences; with a very determined knitting of his eyebrows, and something in his eyes unusually sinister, which a sense of danger gives to a wicked face, Mr. Dingwell walked down the clumsy stairs of the steward’s house, and stood within the hatch.

There he meditated for a few moments, with compressed lips, and a wandering sweep of his eyes along the stone urns and rose bushes that stood in front of the dwarf wall, which is backed by the solemn old trees of Malory.

“In for a penny, in for a pound.”

And he muttered a Turkish sentence, I suppose equivalent; and thus fortified by the wisdom of nations, he stepped out upon the broad gravel walk, looked about him for a second or two, as if recalling recollections, in a sardonic mood, and then walked round the corner to the front of the house, and up the steps, and pulled at the door bell; the knocker had been removed in tenderness to Lord Verney’s irritable nerves.

Two of his tall footmen in powder and livery were there, conveyed into this exile from Ware; for calls of inquiry were made here, and a glimpse of state was needed to overawe the bumpkins.

“His lordship was better; was sitting in the drawing-room; might possibly see the gentleman; and who should he say, please?”

“Say, Mr. Dingwell, the great Greek merchant, who has a most important communication to make.”

His lordship would see Mr. Dingwell. Mr. Dingwell’s name was called to a second footman, who opened a door, and announced him.

Lady Wimbledon, who had been sitting at the window reading aloud to Lord Verney at a little chink of light, abandoned her pamphlet, and rustled out by another door, as the Greek merchant entered.

Dim at best, and very unequal was the light. The gout had touched his lordship’s right eyeball, which was still a little inflamed, and the doctor insisted on darkness.

There was something diabolically waggish in Mr. Dingwell’s face, if the noble lord could only have seen it distinctly, as he entered the room. He was full of fun; he was enjoying a coming joke, with perhaps a little spice of danger in it, and could hardly repress a giggle.

The Viscount requested Mr. Dingwell to take a chair, and that gentleman waited till the servant had closed the door, and then thanked Lord Verney in a strange nasal tone, quite unlike Mr. Dingwell’s usual voice.

“I come here, Lord Verney, with an important communication to make. I could have made it to some of the people about you — and you have able professional people — or to your nephew; but it is a pleasure, Lord Verney, to speak instead to the cleverest man in England.”

The noble lord bowed a little affably, although he might have questioned Mr. Dingwell’s right to pay him compliments in his own house; but Mr. Dingwell’s fiddlestick had touched the right string, and the noble instrument made music accordingly. Mr. Dingwell, in the dark, looked very much amused.

“I can hardly style myself that, Mr. Dingwell.”

“I speak of business, Lord Verney; and I adopt the language of the world in saying the cleverest man in England.”

“I’m happy to say my physician allows me to listen to reading, and to talk a little, and there can be no objection to a little business either,” said Lord Verney, passing by the compliment this time, but, on the whole, good-humouredly disposed toward Mr. Dingwell.

“I’ve two or three things to mention, Lord Verney; and the first is money.”

Lord Verney coughed drily. He was suddenly recalled to a consciousness of Mr. Dingwell’s character.

“Money, my lord. The name makes you cough, as smoke does a man with an asthma. I’ve found it all my life as hard to keep, as you do to part with. If I had but possessed Lord Verney’s instincts and abilities, I should have been at this moment one of the wealthiest men in England.”

Mr. Dingwell rose as he said this, and bowed towards Lord Verney.

“I said I should name it first; but as your lordship coughs, we had, perhaps, best discuss it last. Or, indeed, if it makes your lordship cough very much, perhaps we had better postpone it, or leave it entirely to your lordship’s discretion — as I wouldn’t for the world send this little attack into your chest.”

Lord Verney thought Mr. Dingwell less unreasonable, but also more flighty, than he had supposed.

“You are quite at liberty, sir, to treat your subjects in what order you please. I wish you to understand that I have no objection to hear you; and — and you may proceed.”

“The next is a question on which I presume we shall find ourselves in perfect accord. I had the honour, as you are very well aware, of an intimate acquaintance with your late brother, the Honourable Arthur Verney, and beyond measure I admired his talents, which were second in brilliancy only to your own. I admired even his principles— but I see they make you cough also. They were, it is true, mephitic, sulphurous, such as might well take your breath, or that of any other moral man, quite away; but they had what I call the Verney stamp upon them; they were perfectly consistent, and quite harmonious. His, my lord, was the intense and unflinching rascality, if you permit me the phrase, of a man of genius, and I honoured it. Now, my lord, his adventures were curious, as you are aware, and I have them at my fingers’ ends — his crimes, his escape, and, above all, his life in Constantinople — ha, ha, ha! It would make your hair stand on end. And to think he should have been your brother! Upon my soul! Though, as I said, the genius — the genius, Lord Verney — the inspiration was there. In that he was your brother.”

“I’m aware, sir, that he had talent, Mr. Dingwell, and could speak — about it. At Oxford he was considered the most promising young man of his time — almost.”

“Yes, except you; but you were two years later.”

“Yes, exactly. I was precisely two years later about it.”

“Yes, my lord, you were always about it; so he told me. No matter what it was — a book, or a boot-jack, or a bottle of port, you were always about it. It was a way you had, he said — about it.”

“I wasn’t aware that anyone remarked any such thing — about it,” said Lord Verney, very loftily.

It dawned dimly upon him that Mr. Dingwell, who was a very irregular person, was possibly intoxicated. But Mr. Dingwell was speaking, though in a very nasal, odd voice, yet with a clear and sharp articulation, and in a cool way, not the least like a man in that sort of incapacity. Lord Verney concluded, therefore, that Mr. Dingwell was either a remarkably impertinent person, or most insupportably deficient in the commonest tact. I think he would have risen, even at the inconvenience of suddenly disturbing his flannelled foot, and intimated that he did not feel quite well enough to continue the conversation, had he not known something of Mr. Dingwell’s dangerous temper, and equally dangerous knowledge and opportunities; for had they not subsidized Mr. Dingwell, in the most unguarded manner, and on the most monstrous scale, pending the investigation and proof before the Lords? “It was inevitable,” Mr. Larkin said, “but also a little awkward; although they knew that the man had sworn nothing but truth.” Very awkward, Lord Verney thought, and therefore he endured Mr. Dingwell.

But the “great Greek merchant,” as, I suppose half jocularly, he termed himself, not only seemed odious at this moment, by reason of his impertinence, but also formidable to Lord Verney, who, having waked from his dream that Dingwell would fly beyond the Golden Horn when once his evidence was given, and the coronet well fixed on the brows of the Hon. Kiffyn Fulke Verney, found himself still haunted by this vampire bat, which hung by its hooked wing, sometimes in the shadows of Rosemary Court — sometimes in those of the old Steward’s House — sometimes hovering noiselessly nearer — always with its eyes upon him, threatening to fasten on his breast, and drain him.

The question of money he would leave “to his discretion.” But what did his impertinence mean? Was it not minatory? And to what exorbitant sums in a choice of evils might not “discretion” point?

“This d — d Mr. Dingwell,” thought Lord Verney “will play the devil with my gout. I wish he was at the bottom of the Bosphorus.”

“Yes. And your brother, Arthur — there were points in which he differed from you. Unless I’m misinformed, he was a first-rate cricketer, the crack bat of their team, and you were nothing; he was one of the best Grecians in the university, and you were plucked.”

“I— I don’t exactly see the drift of your rather inaccurate and extremely offensive observations, Mr. Dingwell,” said Lord Verney, wincing and flushing in the dark.

“Offensive? Good heaven! But I’m talking to a Verney, to a man of genius; and I say, how the devil could I tell that truth could offend, either? With this reflection I forgive myself, and I go on to say what will interest you.”

Lor............