Now the germinal spot of this veracious history consists in the fact that numbered amongst Mr James Hancock's most prized clients was a young gentleman of the name of Bevan; the gentleman, in short, whom Miss Fanny Lambert described as "frightfully rich and a beast."

Mr Charles Maximilian Bevan, to give him his full title, inhabited a set of chambers in the "Albany," midway between the Piccadilly end and the end opening upon Vigo Street.

He was a young man of about twenty-three years of age, of a not unpleasing but rather heavy appearance, absolutely unconscious of the humour that lay in himself or in the world around him, and possessed of a fine, furious, old-fashioned temper; a temper that would burst out over an ill-cooked beef steak or a missing stud, and which vented itself chiefly upon his valet Strutt. In most of us the port of our ancestors runs to gout; in Mr Bevan it ran to temper.

[Pg 37]

He was a bachelor. Hamilton Cox, the author of "The Pillar of Salt," once said that the Almighty had appointed Charles Bevan to be a bachelor, and that he had taken up his appointment. To his friends it seemed so, and it seemed a pity, for he was an orphan and very wealthy, and had no unpleasant vices. He possessed Highshot Towers and five thousand acres of land in the richest part of Buckinghamshire, a moor in Scotland which he let each autumn to a man from Chicago, and a house in Mayfair which he also let.

Mr Bevan was not exactly a miser, but he was careful; no cabman ever received more from him than his legal fare; he studied the city news in the Times each morning, and Strutt was kept informed as to the price of Consols by the state of his master's temper, also as to the dividends declared by the Great Northern, South Eastern, London North Western Railways, and the Glasgow Gas Works, in all of which concerns Mr Bevan was a heavy holder.

In his life he had rarely been known to give a penny to a beggar man, yet each year he gave a good many pounds to the Charity Organisation Society, and the Hospitals,[Pg 38] feeling sure that money invested in these institutions would not be misspent, and might even, perhaps, bear some shadowy dividend in the life to come.

He had a horror of cardsharpers, poets, foreigners, inferior artists, and badly dressed people in general—every one, in fact, beyond the pale of what he was pleased to call "Respectability"—but beyond all these and above all these, he had a horror of spendthrifts.

The Bevans had always been like that; there had been drinking Bevans, and fighting Bevans, and foolish Bevans of various descriptions, even open-handed Bevans, but there had never been a thoroughpaced squandering Bevan. Very different was it with the Lamberts, whose estate lay contiguous to that of Bevan, down in Bucks. How the Lamberts had held together as a family for four hundred years, certain; through the spacious times of Elizabeth, the questionable time of Charles, the winter of the Commonwealth; how the ship of Lambert passed entire between the Scylla of the Cocoa tree and the charybdis of Crockfords; how it weathered the roaring forties, are question[Pg 39] constituting a problem indissoluble, even when we take into account the known capacity of the Lamberts for trimming, swashbuckling and good fellowship generally. A problem, however, upon which the present story will, perhaps, cast some light.

How jolly Jack Lambert played with Gerald Fiennes till he lost his house, his horses, his carriages, and his deaf and dumb negro servant. How with a burst of laughter he staked his wife and won back his negro, staked both, and retrieved his horses and his carriages, and at five o'clock of a bright May morning rose from the table having eternally broken and ruined Fiennes, was a story current in the days when William, the first of the Bevans, was a sober cloth merchant in Wych Street, and Charles, the first of the Stuarts, held his pleasant Court at Windsor—Carpe Diem, it was the motto of jolly Jack Lambert. Festina Lente said William of the cloth-yard.

The houses of Bevan and Lambert had never agreed, brilliancy and dulness rarely do, they had intermarried, however, with the result that the present George Lambert and the present Charles Bevan were cousins of a sort, cousins that had never spoken one to[Pg 40] the other, and, moreover, at the present moment, were engaged, as we know, in active litigation as to the rights of fishing in an all but fishless stream some twelve feet broad, which separated the estates and the kinsmen.

Some twelve months previously it appears Strutt being sent down to Highshot Towers to superintend some alterations, had found in the gun-room a fishing-rod, and yielding to his cockney instincts, had fished, catching by some miracle a dilapidated looking jack.

He had promptly been set upon and beaten by a person whom Lambert called his keeper, and who, according to Strutt, swam the stream like an otter, hit him in the eye, broke the rod, and vanished with the jack.

So began the memorable action of Bevan v. Lambert, which, having been won in the Queen's Bench by Charles Bevan, was now at the date of our story, waiting its turn to appear before the Lords Justices of Appeal. It was stated, such was the animus with which this lawsuit was conducted, that George Lambert was cutting down timber to defray the costs of the lawyers, a fallacious statement, for the estate of Lambert was mortgaged beyond the hope of redemption.