PTER XXIII

BULLY POMEROY

The man held a candle in a hand that wavered and strewed tallow
broadcast; the light from this for a moment dazzled the visitors. Then
the draught of air extinguished it, and looking over the servant's
shoulder--he was short and squat--Mr. Thomasson's anxious eyes had a
glimpse of a spacious old-fashioned hall, panelled and furnished in oak,
with here a blazon, and there antlers or a stuffed head. At the farther
end of the hall a wide easy staircase rose, to branch at the first
landing into two flights, that returning formed a gallery round the
apartment. Between the door and the foot of the staircase, in the warm
glow of an unseen fire, stood a small heavily-carved oak table, with
Jacobean legs, like stuffed trunk-hose. This was strewn with cards,
liquors, glasses, and a china punch-bowl; but especially with cards,
which lay everywhere, not only on the table, but in heaps and batches
beneath and around it, where the careless hands of the players had
flung them.

Yet, for all these cards, the players were only two. One, a man
something under forty, in a peach coat and black satin breeches, sat on
the edge of the table, his eyes on the door and his chair lying at his
feet. It was his voice that had shouted for Jarvey and that now saluted
the arrivals with a boisterous 'Two to one in guineas, it's a catchpoll!
D'ye take me, my lord?'--the while he drummed merrily with his heels on
a leg of the table. His companion, an exhausted young man, thin and
pale, remained in his chair, which he had tilted on its hinder feet; and
contented himself with staring at the doorway.

The latter was our old friend, Lord Almeric Doyley; but neither he nor
Mr. Thomasson knew one another, until the tutor had advanced some paces
into the room. Then, as the gentleman in the peach coat cried, 'Curse
me, if it isn't a parson! The bet's off! Off!' Lord Almeric dropped his
hand of cards on the table, and opening his mouth gasped in a paroxysm
of dismay.

'Oh, Lord,' he exclaimed, at last. 'Hold me, some one! If it isn't
Tommy! Oh, I say,' he continued, rising and speaking in a tone of
querulous remonstrance, 'you have not come to tell me the old man's
gone! And I'd pitted him against Bedford to live to--to--but it's like
him! It is like him, and monstrous unfeeling. I vow and protest it is!
Eh! oh, it is not that! Hal--loa!'

He paused there, his astonishment greater even than that which he had
felt on recognising