Bommaney had succeeded in composing himself and in washing away the traces of his tears. Then he had taken a stiffish dose of brandy and water, and was something like his own man again. He received his visitor cordially, and in his anxiety not to seem low-spirited was a little more boisterous than common.
‘I’m busy, you see,’ he said, waving a hand at the papers scattered on the desk, and keeping up the farce of prosperous merchandise to the last, ‘but I can spare _you_ a minute or two, old man. What brings you up to town?’
‘I’ve come here to settle,’ said the visitor. He was a florid man with crisp black hair with a hint of gray in it, and he was a countryman from head to heel. He seemed a little disposed to flaunt his bucolics upon the town, his hat, his necktie, his boots and gaiters, were of so countrified a fashion, and yet he looked somehow more of a gentleman than Bommaney.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve come to settle.’ He rubbed his hands and laughed here, not because there was anything humorous and amusing in his thoughts, but out of sheer health and jollity of nature. Bommaney, still distrustful of his own aspect, and afraid of being observed, sat opposite to him with bent head and fidgeted with his papers, blindly pretending to arrange them.
‘To settle,’ he said absently. Then, rousing himself with an effort, ‘I thought you hated London?’
‘Ah, my boy,’ said his visitor, ‘when you’re in the shafts with a whip behind you, you’ve got to go where you are driven.’
‘Yes,’ said Bommaney mechanically, ‘that is so. That _is_ so.’
The visitor was laughing and rubbing his hands again in perfect happiness and self-contentment, and had no eye for Bommaney’s abstraction.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s Patty’s doing. I’ve sold up every stick and stone, and I’ve taken a house in Gower Street. Do you know, Bommaney,’ he added, with an air and voice suddenly serious and confidential, ‘the country’s going to the devil. Land’s sinking in value every year. I’ve been farming at a growing loss these six years, and rents don’t come in as they used to do. I got my chance and I took it. Lord Bellamy wanted to join the Mount Royal and the three estates. My little bit o’ land lay between ‘em, and I sold it to him. Sold it, too, begad, as well as I could have done half a dozen years ago.’