He sat in Eldrick’s office one afternoon, winding up his affairs with him. There were certain things that Eldrick & Pascoe would have to do; as for himself it was necessary for him to get back to London.
“There’s something I want to propose to you,” said Eldrick, when they had finished the immediate business. “You’re going to practise, of course?”
“Of course!” replied Collingwood, with a laugh. “If I get the chance!”
“You’ll get the chance,” said Eldrick. “What were you going in for?”
“Commercial law—company law—as a special thing,” answered Collingwood.
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you what it is,” continued Eldrick eagerly. “There’s a career for you if you’ll take my advice. Leave London—come down here and take chambers in the town, and go the Northeastern Circuit. I’ll promise you—for our firm alone—plenty of work. You’ll get more—there’s lots of work waiting here for a good, smart young barrister. Ah!—you smile, but I know what I’m talking about. You don’t know Barford men. They believe in the old adage that one should look at home before going abroad. They’re terribly litigious, too, and if you were here, on the spot, they’d give you work. What do you say, Collingwood?”
“That sounds very tempting. But I was thinking of sticking to London.”
“Not one hundredth part of the chance in London that there is here!” affirmed Eldrick. “We badly want two or three barristers in this place. A man who’s really well up in commercial and company law would soon have his hands full. There’s work, I tell you. Take my advice, and come!”
“I couldn’t come—in any case—for a few months,” said Collingwood, musingly. “Of course, if you really think there’s an opening—”
“I know there is!” asserted Eldrick. “I’ll guarantee you lots of work—our work. I’m sick of fetching men down all the way from town, or getting them from Leeds. Come!—and you’ll see.”
“I might come in a few months’ time, and try things for a year or two,” replied Collingwood. “But I’m off to India, you know, next week, and I shall be away until the end of spring—four months or so.”
“To India!” exclaimed Eldrick. “What are you going to do there?”
“Sir John Standridge,” said Collingwood, mentioning a famous legal luminary of the day, “is going out to Hyderabad to take certain evidence, and hold a sort of inquiry, in a big case, and I’m going with him as his secretary and assistant—I was in his chambers for two years, you know. We leave next week, and we shall not be back until the end of April.”
“Lucky man!” remarked the solicitor. “Well, when you return, don’t forget what I’ve said. Come back!—you’ll not regret it. Come and settle down. By the by, you’re not engaged, are you?”
“Engaged?” said Collingwood. “To what—to whom—what do you mean?”
“Engaged to be married,” answered Eldrick coolly. “You’re not? Good! If you want a wife, there’s Miss Mallathorpe. Nice, clever girl, my boy—and no end of what Barford folk call brass. The very woman for you.”
“Do you Barford people ever think of anything else but what you call brass?” asked Collingwood, laughing.
“Sometimes,” replied Eldrick. “But it’s generally of something that nothing but brass can bring or produce. After all, a rich wife isn’t a despicable thing, nowadays. You’ve seen this young lady?”
“I’ve been there once,” asserted Collingwood.
“Go again—before you leave,” counselled Eldrick. “You’re just the right man. Listen to the counsels of the wise! And while you’re in India, think well over my other advice. I tell you there’s a career for you, here in the North, that you’d never get in town.”
Collingwood left him and went out—to find a motorcar and drive off to Normandale Grange, not because Eldrick had advised him to go, but because of his promise to Harper and Nesta Mallathorpe. And once more he found Nesta alone, and though he had no spice of vanity in his composition it seemed to him that she was glad when he walked into the room in which they had first met.
“My mother is out—gone to town—to the mill,” she said. “And Harper is knocking around the park with a gun—killing rabbits—and time. He’ll be in presently to tea—and he’ll be delighted to see you. Are you going to stay in Barford much longer?”
“I’m going up to town this evening—seven o’clock train,” answered Collingwood, watching her keenly. “All my business is finished now—for the present.”
“But—you’ll be coming back?” she asked.
“Perhaps,” he said. “I may come back—after a while.”
“When you do come back,” she went on, a little hurriedly, “will you come and see us again? I—it’s difficult to explain—but I do wish Harper knew more men—the right sort of men. Do you understand?”
“You mean—he needs more company?”
“More company of the right kind. He doesn’t know many nice men. And he has so little to occupy him. He’s no head for business—my mother attends to all that—and he doesn’t care much about sport—and when he goes into Barford he only hangs about the club, and, I’m afraid, at two or three of the hotels there, and—it’s not good for him.”
“Can’t you get him interested in anything?” suggested Collingwood. “Is there
