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Trowbridge sipped his wine meditated a little sipped again and started with the promised anecdote in these terms: WHAT I am going to tell you, gentlemen, happened when I was a very young man, and when I was just setting up in business on my own account. My father had been well acquainted for many years with Mr. Fauntleroy, of the famous London banking firm of Marsh, Stracey, Fauntleroy & Graham.
Many suppose it was made to me alone, and made in the prison. I never was in the prison since I was called to the Bar, and but once before, being invited to see it by the then sheriffs. So strict is this rule, that the late Mr. Fauntleroy solicited a consultation there in vain with his other counsel and myself.
And he gave him a slip of paper. "And my name isn't Cedric Errol any more; it's Lord Fauntleroy and and good-bye, Dick." Dick winked his eyes also, and yet they looked rather moist about the lashes.
"I should refuse to believe a word of it," he said, "if it were not such a low, scoundrelly piece of business that it becomes quite possible in connection with the name of my son Bevis. It is quite like Bevis. He was always a disgrace to us. Always a weak, untruthful, vicious young brute with low tastes my son and heir, Bevis, Lord Fauntleroy. The woman is an ignorant, vulgar person, you say?"
He seemed to leave no vacancy; a phenomenon which, like many others that attended his brief career, went far to prove the illusiveness of his existence. Not, however, that the physical substance of Fauntleroy had literally melted into vapor.
The old eyes and the young ones looked into each other through a moment of silence. Then the Earl knitted his brows. "Do you NEVER forget about your mother?" he said. "No," answered Fauntleroy, "never; and she never forgets about me. I shouldn't forget about YOU, you know, if I didn't live with you. I should think about you all the more."
"I know it; it seemed mighty funny to me to see Philip's black suit with the long trousers, his broad collar, and skimpy short coat! It's what all the boys at the Eton School wear, he says. They must feel like fools! Why, I'd feel like like 'Little Lord Fauntleroy' going around with those clothes on all the time!" John's voice was full of scorn, yet his eyes twinkled with fun.
The ladies petted him and asked him questions, and the men asked him questions too, and joked with him, as the men on the steamer had done when he crossed the Atlantic. Fauntleroy did not quite understand why they laughed so sometimes when he answered them, but he was so used to seeing people amused when he was quite serious, that he did not mind. He thought the whole evening delightful.
There is a possibility that Thurtell may have killed Weare only in order to give the youth of England an impressive warning against gaming and bad company. There is a possibility that Fauntleroy may have forged powers of attorney, only in order that his fate might turn the attention of the public to the defects of the penal law. These things, we say, are possible.
"It's not exactly the way it is spelled in the dictionary," answered the Earl. "I was afraid of that," said Fauntleroy. "I ought to have asked. You see, that's the way with words of more than one syllable; you have to look in the dictionary. It's always safest. I'll write it over again."
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