LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2361, 28 October 1881, Page 4

LITERATURE.

TOUCH-AND GO WITH A GREAT ESTATE. (“ London Society.”) Charter I. When a lawyer consents to toll the story of the most remarkable case in which ho was over engaged, he does so on the express understanding that tho confidences of his clients shall be observed, however long they were made. After full consideration I can see no possible objection to telling the story of the most singular piece of business that I ever knew in tho course of a very long experience indeed. But my cbitf roasonfor finding no objection is that I can do so without naming ror.l names. That being fully understood, I shall be able to keep to the literal truth without having recourse to fictitious incidents in order to lead my readers away from the real quarter. For nothing but the real names, both of places and people, could possibly tell more than I am amply justified in tailing. Perhaps, after all, lam a little over scrupulous ; but I don’t think tint will ba regarded as a fault on the wrong side. No doubt some of my readers will gather that tho period of my professions! adventure was previous to the passing of the Municipal Reform Act of 1835, a date far back enough, at any rate, to give me the right to amuse myself, if not my readers, with a—let mo say elderly—solicitor's first conti ibution to literature. Apart from real names, the facts of tho esse are true, word for word.

My father and I wore in partnership as solicitors in the good old town of Burgham, which you may plr.ee in any county you please. I was born there, and so was my lather before me, and my grandfather before him ; and the name cf Key (to take my first alias) was as well known as the spire 'of St. Miohael’s. Our office, in the very shadow of tho spire, consisting of an outer office for the clerks, of one private room for my father, of another for myself, and of a third, In which an articled clerk sat among tho office lumber, and amused himself as well as want of opportuni y allowed. Hfa name, I remember, was wbat I will call—more for the sake of appropriateness than of any. thing else—Richard Musty ; and a queer young fellow he was —the queerest, I used to think, within six thousand miles of Burg, ham. He was a country parson's son, and of about my own ago ; so that I was ready and even eager when he first came to us to make a friend and companion of him out of office hours, so far as my greater professional dignity allowed; but It was impossible. What good or return he expected to got oat of the premium ho had paid us was a mystery; he had found the money hard to raise, and he might just as well have thrown it into the river. He was steady, too steady by ha f ; he was older, young as he wan, than I am now. But he was as fit to be a lawyer as lamto be a poet; and I can’t say more. Sometimes I need to think him a born hopeless fool, and I don’t believe ho ever came to know the difference between a cestui qne trust and a surrebutter. He had never left his father and mother till he went to Cambridge with a view of taking orders ; bat family misfortunes had obliged him to leave college without a degree, and so—l believe to his intense misery—he had made np his mind to be a failure in another direction. He was always shabby, never too clean, never did anything wrong—morally, never anything right—intellectually, and eeemed to have no friends. What he did with his time, in or out of the office, neither myself nor my father was able for weeks to discover.

* What, in the name of goodness, aro you doing there, Musty ? I remember saying to him at last, when, impelled by a fit of curiosity, I went one day suddenly into his room, and caught him with a camel’s hair paint brush Instead of a pen in his baud, with which ha seemed to be busily engaged In washing a skin cf parchment with pure water. ‘ Have you forgotten that that lease is to be ready in an hour ? Not that I expected to get the lease from him in a mouth, but I wanted an excuse for my sudden intrusion. He turned as red as fire. ‘Nothing, nothing at all, Mr Key,’said he.

• '* Nothing” ia the worst thin? you oau do here,’said I sternly. I was idle enough myself in those davs, hut it was in a very different sort of way. ‘ I must know what you are doing with that old deed.’ ‘lt—it isn’t a deed, indeed,’ stammered he, as if his occupation were criminal instead of merely imbecile. ‘ Look here. Mr Key. I found It up there on that shelf, and I don’t imagine it can be of any use to you,’ he went on, with a curious emphasis on the ‘ you :’ if the fellow hadn't been so simply soared, and so incapable of such a thing at any time, I should have suspected a sneer. I looked at it, and I was yet more puzzled, for It was not a legal document at all, •It is a medireval Latin manuscript,’said he. * But it is of no value. So far as I have reed, it appears to be a treatise by some monkish writer concerning tho Praises of St. Willibrord, who was, I believe, a saint and bishop of the Benedictines. "What horrible hideous jargon those miserable monks used to call Latin, to bo sure ! Just listen hero. Nictelamlnlbus ita depauperates— ’ It might have been Hebrew to mo ; for, though I had been pretty good in Latin at the Grammar school, tho yellow document ia question wes written in such a close, cramped, ancient, and illegible hand, and was so full of abbreviations and contractions to boot, that Musty’s skill in deciphering a single word a littlo surprised me, t ‘ Havo you got any more of these ?’ asked he.

‘ If there’s one,’ said I, 1 there may be fifty. I suppose it came here with old Parson Evans’s papers, when he died —the old rector of Bt. Michael’s you know—aud, being parchment, I suppose they looked legal. Yes, Musty, I think you had better devote your time to reading them and cleaning them all. It scams to me that's about all you’re likely to he fit for here. Never mind the lease,’ I said, with what I took for fine sarcasm. ‘ Get on with St. Willibrord, as you seem so fond of that stylo.’ ‘ Style !’ cried he. forgetting all his shyness, and bringing his fist down upon the table with an angry bang. * Call that style ! And to think that those inestimable lost books of Livy may bo hidden from the light by trash and rubbish about some wretched St. Willibrord—that they may even ha here, under my very hand ! Ah, if such a triumph ns that were for me—if, like Cardinal Mai, who gave Cicero’s ‘ Republic’ to the world— But I believe snob things are not much in your line, Mr Key.’ So that was Dick’s Musty’s craze. Well, if he liked to waste his time in grubbing under old Latin sermons In the hope of dis covering the lost books of Livy, the craze did nobody any harm hut himself, but decidedly he was not fit for a lawyer. I told my father tho story, thinking it a good joke ; but tho old gentleman, though the most good-natured man alive, took the matter vary differently from what I had expected. Ha started up and went straight Into Dick’s room.

‘ Mr Thomas'—he always called me Mr Thomas in tho office—Mr Thomas tells me, young gentleman,’—ha broke out, * that you are reading Latin sermons instead of studying your profession—you, a poor man, who will have to earn your own daily bread with brains of which yon haven’t an ounce to spare. Yon’re not wasting my time, but you gave me a premium to see that you didn’t waste your own. And as duty’s duty, young gentleman. I’ll seo that you don’t. Old Latin sermons—they’re no use here. Give that rubbish to me. I’ll look it up in my own desk, and if I find out that it’s nothing but what you say, I’ll get rid of it for waste parchment ; I won’t have such staff and rubbish lumbering about here. Here, give it to me, without another word. It sha’n’t be my fault if you choose to waste your time. ’ Dick Musty sighed —he even turned pale. But there was no arguing with my father. The old sermon —for such it was, and nothing more—-waa duly locked up iu my father’s desk, and there that matter ended. And I think it proves pretty clearly that Ulchard Musty was a very odd sort of an articled clerk indeed, H .wever, It seemed to show that his brain, if addled and muddled by useless studies. wa- not quite so hopelessly absent ss I had hitherto believe ?. I had not been back at my own work half an hour, when my father came into myrosm looking pale and unwell. ■ Tom ’ ha said, * I had a bad headache when I got up this morning ; and instead of getting better it's been getting worse and worse all day. I’m afraid it made me overJrritable just now when you told me about

that young nincompoop of a Musty, and don’t fool like myself at all. I shall go homo and l!o down, for my head’s just split ting. There'll bo nothing to-day you cant attend to ; I shall bo all right to-morrow, 1 daresay.’ Now my father was a man who had never known what it moans to bo ill. Still, though a mere headache in his case was a ground for a little anxiety, I was not in the least prepared, when, at the usual hour, I loft the office and went home to dinner, to find that my mother had sent for the doctor, who had made my father go to bod at once ; and. next morning declared him to bo In tho first stage of typhoid fever, of which there wore several cases about just then Burghom was not drained so well thon aa it is now.

I felt tho good of having one’s head a fow years old than one’s shoulders when I wont to business that morning, and, full of anxiety for my father, Sit down at his table and in his chair, with tho whole of tho ofilco upon my own hands, and with an unusual amount of heavy and responsible work to be done. My father had been so much in tho habit of attending to everything himself, down to tho minutest details, while !, on tho contrary, had always taken everything so easily, not to say Idly, that I was almost painfully norvous about that first day, which was nearly as now a feeling to mo as a headache to my father. And therefore —need I say It?—I had scarcely opened the last of the offi'e letters before somebody did call—a Mr Horace Jones. And tho name meant nothing to mo ; for though Miss Jones of the Brambles was a good client to ours, still she had no relation named Horace, and the surname was, in reality, an exceedingly common one. Enter Mr Horace Jones, however ; and 1 did not like tho look of him Not being a professional story teller, whatever may be said of ns lawyers to the contrary and notwithstanding, I will not try to describe hjtn otherwise than by saying that I knew him to be a cad and a blackguard as soon as I set eyes on him. There are men—l have known many of them —who have tho art of drinking, gambling, and worse, without turning a hair of their outward respectability; but Mr Horace Jones was not among them. Drunkard, gambler, and worse was written from the crown of his hat to the of his toes. And in inch a case a man finds It hard to be taken for a gentleman. ‘ Who aro you, sir ?’ be asked roughly. ‘ I called to see old Mr Key *lf you mean my father, ’ said I, In as dignified a manner aa I could, ‘I am sorry to say he Is very unwell, and may not be able to leave hla house for some time. If it Is anything to which I can attend, I am his partner, and —’ _ „ . «o ! Well, you’ll do, I daresay. For that matter, you must do; for mine’s business that won’t keep, I o»n tell you. Got a cocktail handy ? No ? Precious lot yon English lawyers —, So the old ns’s kicked tho bucket at last, I hear. Wished to— Hades I’d known It before. Well, never too late for that sort of thing. So tho sooner you get things fixed, young man, the better for you.’ 1 It seems to mo, Mr Jones, that you have made some mistake, said I. * Mistake ! Dj yon mean to say you don’t know me ? Well, I suppose when a man has been away from his native homo twentyseven years about the world, he does get ohr.nged, more or leas, and can’t, when I come to think of it, expect to be recognised at at once by them that weren’t born when ho went away. Bat—mistake 1 Don't you be mistaken, young man. So old Jones of the Brambles has gone under the daisies — that’s what I mean.' *Mr Jones of the Brambles ? Why, ha died three years ago. Yon can’t -possibly have any claim on the estate now.’ ‘ Three years ago i Three times three times three —twenty-seven years ago. More fool I not to have found it out ages ago ! I broke tho old cove’s heart, I believe. Bum things rome hearts must be, to be sure. And as for having no claim —Oho! Old Jones of the Brambles, that died twentyseven years back, was my father; and I’m young Jones, old Jones’s son. Twig now ?’

Waa the fellow mad or drunk ? thought I. Certainly he waa right In saying that a Mr Jones of the Brambles had died twentyseven years ago. But that was long ago, according to something more important than years. That was when the Brambles, near Burgham, was nothing better than an old farmhouse on the edge of a largo rough piece of moorland which was collectively known by that appropriate name. But Mr Jones the first’s eon waa dead too, as I had said, three years ago ; and Mr Jones the second had died when the Brambles—

Bat, as this is a legal story, I shall make no apology for entering into the history of a title, not only because it Is absolutely essential, hut because it is exceptionally simple and easy to follow. Indeed, the whole point of the story depends upon its absolute freedom from complications and questions of every sort’and kind. Tho Brambles, then, otherwise called Easton Field, was a farm just beyond the last dwelling-house in the High street of Bnrghatn; that ia to say, the continuity of tho High street ends abruptly at its eastern end, and the open country begins at once, without any shading off of villas and cottages as is usual even in smaller towns, and as Is the case at the street’s western extremity. lam now, of course, speaking of the Brambles—as Easton Field was always commonly called—as it was when I was quite a child, and when its clamps and patches of heather and thorny bottoms were the playground of the town. Indeed, it muot have been a sort of town playground in quite ancient times, for there was a broad fiat meadow still called ‘the Butts’ from days long before those of the rifle volunteers This rather nondescript tract had belonged to Wolwood Priory, and, that being diesolved, had gone to one of the colleges—T forget which —in the University of Oxford. It was valueless as land ; for building space was then practically worthless at a place like Burghan, though the case would be very different now ; and to turn it to agricultural purposes would have required an exceedingly large capital, with very little prospect of a speedy return. I should say its net annual va’ue to the Oxford College might have been as much as five or six pounds a year. But there happened to be in Burgham, ab;ut fifty years before the time of my story, an uncommonly sharp fellow, a land surveyor, of tho name of John Jones. I think he must have been the cleverest fellow that was ever born in Burgham. Anyhow, he bought the whole Interest of the Oxford College in the land for a mere song, let a part of it to a neighbouring farmer for some trifle or other, and left his son, Wilfred Jones, a —ooal-field. (To he continued .)