CHAPTER XXVI.--WITHOUT PURCHASE.

Close to, and yet quietly secluded from, the mighty tide of busy humanity that daily surges to and fro between the Bank and the Mansion House, all up Cheapside and Cornhill, in a small dark court off the latter, was the office of Messrs. Sharpus and Juggles, solicitors. The brick edifice towered to the height of many stories; a score of names appeared on each side of the doorway in large letters; and many long dark passages and intricate stairs led to the two dingy rooms where those human spiders sat and spun the webs and meshes of the law. Their dens had a damp and mouldy odour; no ray from heaven ever fell into them, but a cold gray reflected light came from the white encaustic tiles, with which the opposite wall of the court was faced for that purpose; and of that borrowed light even the lower room, where their half-starved clerks worked into the still hours of the night--a veritable cave of Trophonius, if one might judge by their sad, seedy, and dejected appearance--was deprived from its situation; and in all these courts and chambers gas was burned daily in those terrible seasons when the London fogs assume somewhat the solidity and hue of pea-soup. Mr. Sharpus sat in his private room, surrounded by boxes of wood or japanned tin and ticketed dockets of papers, that were mouldy and dirty--as their contents too probably were--while fly-blown prospectuses, plans, and advertisements of lands, houses, and messuages for sale, and so forth, covered the discoloured walls.

Juggles, his partner, was a suave, slimy, and meekly-mannered man, "with the eye of a serpent and the voice of a dove;" but our present business is with the former, who was a thin round-shouldered individual, with a cold keen face, an impending forehead, sunken dark gray eyes, the expression of which varied between cunning and solemnity, pride, vulgar assurance, and occasionally restlessness. Shrewd of head and stony of heart, he was not quite the kind of man at whose mercy one would wish to be. He had a hard-worked and sometimes worried aspect; but now an abject white fear, with an unmistakably hunted expression, came over his face, when one of the clerks from the lower den ushered in, without much ceremony, Mr. Guilfoyle, who had in his hand a sporting paper, which he was reading as he entered.

"You here again?" exclaimed Sharpus, laying down his pen, and carefully closing the door.

"Yes, by Jove, again!" replied Guilfoyle, with barely a nod, and seating himself with his hat on.

"So soon!" groaned Sharpus; and reseating himself, he eyed, with an expression of haggard hate, Guilfoyle, who continued to read from the paper hurriedly, excitedly, and half aloud, some report of a steeplechase.

"The Devil--threw his rider--remounted; at the next fence Raglan took the lead, followed by Fairy and Beauty, and Beau, the Devil lying next; last fence but one taken by the quintette almost simultaneously, when Raglan, Beauty, and Beau came away together, the first-named winning a very fine race by half a length--Beauty being third, and close upon Beau, but Fairy was nowhere. D--nation! there is a pot of money gone, or not won, which amounts to the same thing in the end!" and crushing up the paper, he threw it on the writing-table of Sharpus.

"Wanting more money?" said the latter, in a hollow voice.

"Precisely so; out at the elbows--in low water--phrase it as you will. I have sold even my horse at last," replied the other, folding his arms, and regarding the lawyer mockingly.

"And the ring given you by--by the King of Bavaria?" said Sharpus, with a sickly smile.

"I retain but a paste imitation of that remarkable brilliant; and that I may present you as a mark of my regard and esteem."

"I thought you had made something by a mercantile transaction, as you phrased it, when last on the Continent?"

"So I did; 'the mercantile transaction' being nothing less than breaking the bank at Homburg, by steadily and successfully backing the red, and sending home all those who came for wool most decidedly shorn."

"You should have saved some of those ill-gotten gains for future contingencies," said Sharpus.

"How much easier it is to advise and to speculate than to act with care and decision!" sneered Guilfoyle.

"I pity your poor wife," said the lawyer, sincerely enough.

"She has no documentary proof that she is such," replied Guilfoyle, angrily. "Pshaw! what is pity? an emotion that is often at war with reason and with sense, too; for a handsome face or a well-turned ankle may make us pity the most undeserving object."

The lawyer sighed, and at that moment sincerely pitied himself; for it had chanced that, in earlier years, an intimacy with Guilfoyle led to the latter discovering that which gave him such absolute power as to reduce him--Sharpus--to be his very slave. This was nothing less than the forgery of a bill in the name of Guilfoyle; who, before relinquishing the privilege of prosecution, on retiring the document, had obtained a complete holograph confession of the act, which he now retained as a wrench for money, and held over the head of Sharpus, thereby compelling him to act as he pleased. After a minute's silence, during which the two men had been surveying each other, the one with hate and fear, the other with malignant triumph, Guilfoyle said, "I did Lady Naseby, as you know, a service at Berlin, when at very low water; being seen with her won me credit, which I failed not to turn to advantage. I followed her and her daughter through all Germany--at Ems, Gerolstein, Baden, and then to Wales, where I was in clover at Craigaderyn. I was a fool to fly my hawks at game so high as the peerage; and I feel sure it was that beast of a fellow Hardinge, of the Royal Welsh, who blew the gaff upon me, and prevented me from entering stakes, as I intended to do, for one of the daughters of that horse-and-cow-breeding old Welsh baronet; and they are, bar one, the handsomest girls in England."

"And that one?"

"Is Lady Estelle Cressingham."

Even the ghastly lawyer smiled at his profound assurance.

"Have you no remorse when you think of Miss Franklin?"

"No more than you have, when you have sucked a client dry, and leave him to die in the streets," replied Guilfoyle, with his strange dry mocking laugh; "remorse is the word for a fool--the unpunished crime, I have read somewhere, is never regretted. Men mourn the consequences, but never the sin or a crime itself. As for Hardinge, d--n him!" he added, grinding his teeth; "I thought to put a spoke in his wheel, by passing off Georgette as his wife, but Taffy came to his aid, and the true story was told; and yet, do you know, there were times when I played my cards exceedingly well with the Cressinghams. Besides, you always represented me to be a man of fortune."

"I have invariably done so," groaned Sharpus.

"And have stumped out pretty well to maintain the story, while hinting of--"

"Coal-mines in Labuan, shares in others in Mexico, and all manner of things, to account for the sums wrung from me--from my wife and children. But, God help me, I can do no more!"

"Bah! what do they or you want with that villa at Hampstead? But you are a good fellow, Sharpus; and, thanks to your assistance, I worked the oracle pretty well at Walcot Park for Mr. Henry Hardinge."

"Against him, you mean?"

"Of course; but, unluckily, our story wouldn't stand testing."

"Could you expect it to do so?"

"But I put a hitch in his gallop there, anyhow. By Jove, I was a great fool not to make love to the old woman, instead of her daughter."

"Meaning Lady Naseby?" said Sharpus, with surprise.

"So Burke and Debrett name her. She is just at that age--twice her daughter's--when the soft sex become remarkably soft indeed, and apt to make fools of themselves."

"She would indeed have been one had she listened to you."

"Thanks, old tape-and-parchment; I did not come here for a character, but to show you the state of my cash-book."

Again the lawyer groaned, and Guilfoyle laughed louder than ever. Delight to have a lawyer under his heel rendered him merciless; but even a worm will turn, so Sharpus said sternly, "How have you lived since the last remittance--extortion?"

"Call it as you will," replied the other, putting his glass in his eye, and smilingly switching his leg with his cane; "I have lived as most men do who live by their wits, and the follies, or it may be the crimes--O, you wince!--of others; meeting debts and emergencies as they come, content with the peace or action of the present, and never regretting the past, or fearing the future! With the help of an ace, king, and queen, when my betting-book or a stroke of billiards failed me, and with your great kindness, my dear old Sharpus, I have, till now, always kept my funds far above zero."

"Your life is a great sham--a very labyrinth of deceit!" exclaimed the lawyer, furiously.

"And yours, friend Sharpus?"

"Is spent in slaving for my family, and endeavouring to atone for, or to buy the concealment of, one great error--the error that made you--ay, men such as you--my master!"

Guilfoyle laughed heartily, and said,

"I require 600l. instantly!"

"Not a penny--not another penny!"

"We shall see. Sharpus, though a bad lot, I know that you are not the utter rogue that most of your profession are--"

"Leave my office, scoundrel, or I shall kill you!" said Sharpus, in a low voice of concentrated passion, as he became deadly pale, and a dangerous white gleam came into his stealthy restless eyes, which seemed to search in vain for a weapon.

"If I leave your office it will be for the purpose of laying before the nearest police-magistrate a certain document you may remember to have written; and I am so loth to kill the goose that lays my golden eggs," continued the other, in his quiet mocking tone. "But remember, Mr. Sharpus," he added, in a lofty and bullying manner, as he grasped the shoulder of the listener, "that the forgery of a document is not deemed an error in legal practice here, as in Spain or Scotland, but a crime meriting penal servitude; and shall I tell you what that means--you, who have now wealth, ease, position, a handsome wife, and several children? You will be torn from all these for ever, as a felon!"

Drops of perspiration poured over the poor wretch's temples as his tormentor continued: "Think of being in Millbank, beside the muggy Thames, and the years that would find you there, a bondsman and a slave, who for the least misconduct would be lashed like a faulty hound, and ironed in a blackhole. Hard work, aggravated by the consciousness of infamy; clad in the gray livery of disgrace; your name effaced from the Law List, and for it substituted the letter or number on your prison garb!"

"For God's sake, hush!" implored the wretched lawyer, in terror, lest the speaker's voice might reach the room of Juggles, or the ears of the clerks below; "hush, and I shall do all you wish."

"Come--that is acting like a reasonable being."

"Will 200l. do you--this time?"

"Two hundred devils! I want 600l. at least."

"I shall be ruined with my partner; he must know ere long where all these moneys have gone."

"That is nothing to me; tell him if you dare."

Sharpus burst into tears, and said, piteously,

"At present I can give but 200l.--the rest shall follow."

"Well, you can do something else for me, and I may trouble you no more."

"How?" asked Sharpus, eagerly and incredulously, with a dreary and bewildered air.

"Get me some employment, where there is little to do; I hate brain-work."

"Employment!--where? with whom?"

"Civil or military, I care not which."

"Military! impossible--too old. Stay, I have it!" exclaimed the lawyer; "you have been in the Militia, I know."

"Three months in the Royal Diddlesex."

"What say you to an appointment in Lord Aberdeen's new Land Transport Corps? It will be easily got--a handsome uniform and great éclat, though the officers are nearly all taken from the ranks. The duties are simple enough--conveyance of baggage, and carrying off the wounded after an action."

"Not to bury the dead?--ugly work that."

"No, no."

"By Jove, I'll go!" he exclaimed, as Sharpus filled up the cheque.

Sharpus strove in vain to conceal his delight.

"I have of course done a few things which would hardly bear the 'light of the world's bull's-eye' turned upon them, but the Horse Guards know nothing of them. You have noble and powerful clients, and can do this easily for me. Bravo!" And they actually shook hands over the matter, as if over a bargain.

Sharpus lost no time in using the necessary influence, and--though not exactly a cadet after Mr. Cardwell's heart--this commission was decidedly one without purchase; and on the strength of having been once in the boasted constitutional force, "Henry Hawkesby Guilfoyle, gent., late Lieutenant, Diddlesex Militia," appeared in the Gazette ere long, as one of twenty-four comets of the long-since disbanded Land Transport Corps, for service in the Crimea.