CHAPTER X.

A MISSIVE FOR SQUIRE CARR.

Domestic relations did not progress very pleasantly at Squire Carr's. It was the old story; the old grievance; the one that had disturbed the internal economy of the home ever since Benjamin became a grown man: Benjamin required money, and the squire protested he had it not to give. Ben, he said, wanted to ruin him.

This time Ben had come home particularly out at elbows, metaphorically speaking; literally, he was, in regard to clothes, rather better off than usual. Ben had quitted his home the previous April, with a very fair sum of money in his pocket, drawn from the squire; where he had spent the time since was not very clear, unless he had been, as the squire expressed it, dodging about the continent; two or three letters having been received from him at long intervals, dated from different parts of it. Ben was not accustomed to be particularly communicative on the subject of his own wanderings; and all he said now was, that he had made a "pedestrian tour." One other thing was a vast deal more clear--that he had brought back empty pockets.

He was now worrying the squire to advance him funds for a visit to Australia, where he should be sure to make his fortune. Three or four fellows, whom he knew, were going, he said; they had a fine prospect before them, and he had the opportunity offered him of joining them. The worrying had begun on the very evening subsequent to the visit of Mr. Arkell and Robert Carr; a week or more had gone on since; and Ben systematically continued his importunities. The squire turned a stone-deaf ear. Ben had once before got money from him to make his fortune in Australia; and had come home after a two years' absence without a shirt to his back: Squire Carr must live to be an older man than he was now, before he forgot that. Valentine Carr put in _his_ voice against it; he had for a long while been angrily resentful at these sums of money being advanced to Ben, far larger ones, he suspected, than the reigning powers allowed to come to his knowledge; and he was now raising his voice in opposition. He was the heir; and the estate, he said, was already impoverished too much.

One cloudy Saturday morning, close, hot, and unhealthy, Valentine Carr was mounting his horse to go to Westerbury. They had breakfasted early; breakfast was always taken early at the squire's, but especially so on Saturdays, the market day at Westerbury. Squire Carr was standing by his son, giving him various directions.

"You'll see how prices run to-day, Valentine; but mark you, I'll not sell a sheaf of the old corn if the market's flat. And the new you need not think of soliciting offers for, for I shall not sell yet awhile. The barley market ought to be brisk to-day; some of the maltsters, I hear, are already preparing to steep; and you may, perhaps, get rid of some loads. Have you the samples?"

Valentine Carr dived with one hand into his capacious pocket, by way of answer, and just showed some three or four little bags tied round with tape.

"You'll get first prices, mind, or you won't sell. Not a farmer in all the county can show better barley this year than ours. Do you hear?"

"I know," ungraciously returned Valentine. "I believe you think I'm a child still. I can't ride off to market without you, but you go on at me in this fashion: and it's nigh upon thirty years now since I went first."

"I know my own business better than anybody, and I can't afford to let things go below their value," rejoined the squire. "A halfpenny a bushel would make a difference to me now, and I should feel it. I'm shorter of money than I ought to be."

"Money goes in many ways that it ought not to go in," said Valentine, gathering up his bridle with a sniff. And the squire knew that it was a side-thrust at Ben. "Anything more?"

"You had better call on Emma, and ask whether she has made a list of the plate and pictures. If she has not, you may tell her that I shall come over next week and go over the things for myself. She might have sent it to me days ago. I'll not have so much as a plated spoon omitted, and so I told her. That's all."

Valentine Carr touched his horse and rode at a quick trot down the avenue. When the squire looked round, he found Benjamin--who had just got down to breakfast--at his side.

"We shall have a nasty, hot, muggy day, Ben!"

"Yes," said Ben, "we get these days sometimes in September. Father, if you won't let me have the two hundred, will you let me have one? I don't want to lose this chance, and my friends will have sailed. They are putting in three hundred each, but----"

"How many times are you going to tell me that?" interrupted the squire. "I don't believe it; no, I don't believe you have any friends who are possessed of three hundred to put. It is of no use your bothering, Ben; I haven't got the money to spare."

"Not got it to spare, when you have just come in to twenty thousand pounds!" returned Ben, not, however, venturing to speak in any tone but a conciliating one. "I only wish I had come in to a tithe of it! It was a slice of good luck that you never expected, squire, and you might be generous enough to help me once again."

In truth, the good luck had been so entirely unlooked for, that Squire Carr could not find in his heart to snub Ben for saying so, quite as fiercely as he might otherwise have done. "It was just a chance, Ben, Robert Carr's dying as he did."

"A very good chance for us. Look here, father: I can't stop on here, nagged at by Valentine, out of purse, out of _your_ favour----"

"Whose fault is it that you are out of my favour?" interrupted the squire, taking off his old drab wide-awake to straighten a dent in the brim.

"Well, I suppose it's mine," acknowledged Ben. "What is a hundred pounds to the twenty thousand you have come into? A drop of water in the ocean."

"And if you got the hundred pounds and started with it, you'd be writing home in three months for another hundred! It has always been the case, Ben."

The words seemed to imply symptoms of so great a concession, compared to the positive refusal hitherto accorded him, that Ben Carr's hopes went up like a sky-rocket. He saw the hundred pounds in his possession and himself ploughing the deep waters, as vividly as though the picture had been presented to him in a magic mirror.

"It is a chance that I have never had, squire. These men are steady, industrious, practical fellows, who will keep me to my work, whether I will or not. They go out to make money, and I shall make some. Who knows but I may return home with a fortune to match this, just come to you?"

"Ben, you harp upon this money of Marmaduke's; but let me tell you that I don't know what I should have done without it. I have had nothing but drains upon me for years: you've been one of them."

"The old hypocrite!" thought Ben, "he's rolling in money, besides this new windfall. Well, sir," he said aloud, "I shall write----"

"Who's this?" interrupted the squire, who did not see so well as he once did.

It was the postman. Letters were not frequent at the squire's, as they are at many houses. The man was coming up the avenue, in the distance as yet. Squire Carr walked towards him and stretched out his hand for the letters.

The postman gave him two. One was a large, blue, formidable-looking packet, addressed to himself; the other was a perfumed, mignonne, three-cornered sort of missive, for Benjamin Carr, Esq.

"Here, Ben, I don't know who your correspondent may be," said the squire, tossing him the note. "She's an idiot, that's certain; nobody, above one, would think of sending a doll's thing like that through the post. It's a wonder it wasn't lost."

Benjamin Carr glanced at the handwriting and slipped the note into the pocket of his shooting coat. Sauntering to a little distance, while the squire was busy with his own letter, he there took it out, opened, and began to read it: a closely-written epistle, on thin foreign paper.

He was startled by something very like the bellow of a bull. Turning round, he saw the squire in a fine commotion, and the noise had come from him.

"Why, what is the matter?" exclaimed Ben, advancing.

"Matter!" ejaculated Squire Carr--"_matter!_ They are mad; or else I am dreaming."

He held the formidable document before his eyes. He turned it, he gazed at it, he shook it, he pinched himself to see whether he _was_ dreaming. If any man ever believed that his eyes played him false, Squire Carr believed his did then.

"What is it?" repeated the astonished Ben.

It was a notice from Mr. Fauntleroy that an action was entered upon--to eject him from the possession of that bijou of a house; to wrest from him the fortune; to give Marmaduke's money to Robert Carr; to forbid him to touch or remove so much (his own words just before to his son) as a plated spoon of the effects; to reduce him, in short, to a poor wretched non-inheriting beggar again. Not that all this, or the half of it, was stated; it was implied, and that was enough for the squire's vivid imagination.

"Ben, my boy, what does it mean?" he gasped.

"I'm sure I don't know," said Ben, considerably crestfallen.

"I'm not dreaming, am I?" asked the squire. "Mercy be good to us! What can they have found? Perhaps old Marmaduke made a will after all! They'd never enter an action without being justified. Get the horse into the dog-cart and drive me to the station, Ben. I must go over to see Fauntleroy. Hang him! the sly old villain! I should like to twist his neck."

"But you will promise me the hundred pounds, father?"

"Hundred pounds be shot!" shrieked the squire in a fury. "I've just got notice that I'm ruined, and he asks me for a hundred pounds! No, sir! nor a hundred pence. How can I afford money, now this inheritance is threatened?"

Benjamin Carr had a great mind to tell his father, that even if it were threatened and taken, he was as well off now as he had been a short while before. But it was not a time to press matters, and he drove the squire to the station in silence.

On that busy Saturday morning--and Saturdays were always busy days at the office of Mr. Fauntleroy--the clerks were amazed by the disturbed entrance of Squire Carr, pushing, agitated, restless; far more amazed than was perhaps their master, Mr. Fauntleroy. He had half expected it.

There ensued a hasty explanation; but the squire scarcely allowed himself to listen to it. Of all the blows that could have come upon him, this was the worst.

"And what do you think of yourself, pray, to be taking up a cause against the Carr family, when you have stuck by it for half a century, or it by you?"

"By old Marmaduke; by no others of it," returned Mr. Fauntleroy, who was secretly enjoying the squire's perplexity beyond everything.

"Why do you turn round against him now? I did not expect it of you, Fauntleroy."

"I don't understand you, squire."

"You are turning against the money he left, which is the same thing, wanting to make ducks and drakes of it."

"Marmaduke Curr's grandson came here and asked me if I would act for him as his solicitor, and I assented," said Mr. Fauntleroy. "In entering this action against you, I am but obeying his instructions."

"Marmaduke Carr's grandson!" scoffed the squire. "Who is he, the ill-born cur"--not but that the squire's words were somewhat plainer--"that he should presume to set himself up in his false pretences?"

"Ill-born or well-born, my clients are the same to me, provided their cause is good, and they pay me," coolly rejoined Mr. Fauntleroy.

"Well, is it a hoax?" asked the squire, coming nearer to the point, for Mr. Fauntleroy was taking a stealthy glance at his watch.

"If you mean is the action a hoax, most certainly it is not. Robert Carr looks upon it that he has the best right to his grandfather's money, and----"

"Why do you call him Robert _Carr_?" interposed the squire, in a flash of anger.

"What else can I call him? I wish you'd be a little cooler, and let me finish. And he has given me instructions to spare no pains, no expense, in maintaining this action against you."

"Is he a fool?" asked the squire. "It's one of two things: either he is a fool--for he must know that such an action can't be sustained under present circumstances, and so must you--or else he has got some secret information that I am in ignorance of. _Has_ he got it? Is there a will of Marmaduke's found?"

"Of course there's not," said Mr. Fauntleroy, taken by surprise; "I should have heard of it, if there had been. As to any other information, I can't say; I don't know of any."

"Look here, Fauntleroy: if there is to be an action--not that I should think the fellow will be mad enough to go on with it--will you act for me?"

"I can't," said Mr. Fauntleroy; "I am acting for him."

"Turn him over. Who's he? I'd rather have you myself. And I must say you might have been neighbourly enough not to take this up against me."

"What does that signify? If I had not taken it up, somebody else would. And you have your own solicitors, you know, squire."

The squire growled. His solicitors were Mynn and Mynn, of Eckford--quiet, steady-going practitioners; but in so desperate a cause as this, the squire would have felt himself safer with a keen and not over-scrupulous man, such as Mr. Fauntleroy.

"You will not act for me, then?"

"I can't, squire."

"And you mean to carry it on to action?"

"I must do it. They are my positive instructions."

Squire Carr turned off in desperation, nearly upsetting Mr. Kenneth as he stamped through the outer office. As fast as he could, he stamped up to the railway station, and took the first train to Eckford, arriving at the office of Mynn and Mynn in a white heat.

Mynn and Mynn themselves were nearly myths, so far as their clients could get hold of them. Old Mynn had the gout perpetually; and the younger brother, George Mynn, had a chronic sort of asthma, and could not speak to people half his time. What business was absolutely necessary for a principal to do, George Mynn mostly did it. He made the journeys to London, he attended the sessions and assizes at Westerbury; but it very often happened that, when a client called at the office, neither would be there.

As it was, on this day. A young man of the name of Richards was head of the office just now, for the managing clerk had died, and Mynn and Mynn were looking out for another. A sharp, clever, unscrupulous man was this Richards, who, if he proved as clever when he got into practice for himself, would stand a fair chance of getting out of it again. He was alone when Squire Carr entered, and leaned over his desk to shake hands with him. He was a great friend of Valentine Carr's, and sometimes dined at the squire's on Sundays--a thin, weaselly sort of man, not unlike Valentine himself, with a cast in one eye.

"Mr. George Mynn here to-day?"

"He is here to-day, squire; but he is not in just now. He's gone to Westerbury."

"I want to see him; I must see him," cried the squire, wiping his hot brows. "The most infamous thing has happened, Richards, that you ever heard of. They are going to try and wrest my Uncle Marmaduke's property from me."

"Who is?" asked Richards, in wonder.

"The son of that Robert Carr who went off with Martha Ann Hughes. It was before your time; but perhaps you have heard of it. There are children; and one of them has been down here, and has given Fauntleroy instructions to proceed against me and force me to give up the property."

"But I thought there was no marriage?" cried Richards. "Mr. Mynn was talking about it the other day."

"Neither was there."

Richards paused a moment, and then burst into a fit of laughter. To make pretensions of claiming property in such a case, amused him excessively.

"Well, they are doing it," said Squire Carr. "But I am astonished at Fauntleroy taking up such a cause. It's infamous, you know. They can do it only to annoy me; for they must be aware it's an action that will not lie."

"I say, squire, you must take care of one thing," said Richards, with the familiarity that characterised him, and which to some minds was exceedingly offensive--"mind they don't get up a false marriage."

"A false marriage! Why, the parties are dead."

"Oh, I mean proofs--false proofs. I've known such things done. When a fortune's at stake, you know, any means seem right ones."

"And I dare say they'd be capable of it," assented the squire. "Well, it must be seen to immediately. Here's what I had sent from Fauntleroy."

He drew out of his pocket the large letter, and Richards ran his eyes over it.

"They mean mischief," was his laconic remark.

"When _can_ I see Mr. George Mynn?" asked the squire, the usual difficulties of getting at that gentleman striking upon his mind, especially after the last sentence, as a personal wrong. "Why doesn't he get a confidential clerk to do the outdoor work, so as to be in to see clients himself?"

"They are about engaging one, I believe," said Mr. Richards, alluding to the confidential clerk; "but he won't enter before December or January."

"Not before December or January!" retorted Squire Carr, as if that were another personal wrong.

"I heard George Mynn say we could do without one until then. So we can. The assize business is over, and there won't be much press for the next month or two. For my part, I wish they'd do without one for good. _I_ could manage all they want done, if they'd let me."

"Well, look you here, Richards. I shall go on to the 'Bell' and get a bit of dinner at the ordinary, and then I shall come back here and wait till he comes in."

"He mayn't come in at all again to-day--sure not to, if he doesn't get back from Westerbury till late," was the satisfactory rejoinder of Richards; and Squire Carr felt that he should like to strike somebody in the dilemma, if he only knew whom.

"Then you will have to take my instructions," he said, sharply; "I shall be back in an hour."

"Very good," said Mr. Richards. "And we can talk this business over to-morrow, squire, as much as you like; for I am coming to your place for the day. I've promised Valentine, and I want to make the acquaintance of your second son."

For this Mr. Richards was but a clerk of some months standing at Mynn and Mynn's; to which situation he had come from a distance, and, therefore, had not yet enjoyed the honour of an introduction to Mr. Benjamin Carr.

Thus the great cause, "Carr _versus_ Carr," was inaugurated. Those connected with it little dreamt of the strange excitement it was to create, ere the termination came.