The Ashiel Mystery | Page 9

the way up a steep and narrow flight of stairs, which rose out of
the black shadows at the end of the passage.
"Ladies find these stairs rather dark, I'm afraid," he remarked pleasantly,
as he held open a door and ushered Juliet and her maid into an empty
room. "Will you kindly wait here," he continued. "Mr. Findlay is
engaged for the moment. You are a leetle before your time, I believe."
He pulled out his watch and examined it closely. "Not quite the hour
yet," he repeated, and closed it with a snap. "But Mr. Findlay will see
you as soon as he is disengaged."
With a flourish of his handkerchief he withdrew, shutting the door
behind him.
Juliet sat down on a hard chair covered with green leather, and told her
maid to take another. Her spirits were damped. The sight of Mr. Nicol,
as the clerk was named, often had that effect upon persons who saw
him for the first time; indeed he was found to be a very useful check on
troublesome clients, who arrived full of determination to have their
own way, and were often so cowed by their preliminary interview with
Nicol as to feel it a privilege and a relief subsequently to be bullied by
Mr. Ince, or persuaded by Mr. Findlay into the belief that what they had
previously decided on was the last thing advisable to do.
Mr. Findlay frequently remarked to Mr. Ince, when his partner's easily
roused temper was more highly tried than usual by some imbecile
mistake of the clerk's, that Nicol might have faults as a clerk and as a
man, but that, as a buffer, he was the nearest approach to perfection
obtainable in this world of makeshifts.
To which Mr. Ince would reply with point and fluency that fenders
could be had by the dozen from any shipping warehouse, at a lower
cost than one week's salary of Nicol's would represent, and would be

far more efficient in the office. Still he did not suggest dismissing the
man.
Juliet, as she sat and looked round the musty little waiting-room, felt
that here was an end of her dreams of the resplendent family she was to
find pining to take her to its heart. She felt certain that she could never
have any feelings in common with people who could employ a firm of
solicitors which in its turn was served by the man who had received her.
Romance and the clerk could never, she thought, meet under one roof.
And such a roof! The room in which she sat was so dark, so gloomy, so
bare and cheerless, that Juliet began to wonder whether she would not
have been wiser not to have come. This was not a place, surely, which
fond parents would choose for a long-deferred meeting with their child,
after years of separation. She walked to the window, but the only view
was of a blank wall, and that so close that she could have touched it by
leaning out. No wonder the room was dark, even at midday in August.
The walls were lined with bookshelves, where heavy volumes, all
dealing with the same subject, that of law, stood shoulder to shoulder in
stout bindings of brown leather.
There was a fireplace of cracked and dirty marble with an engraving
hung over it, representing the coronation of Queen Victoria. A gas
stove occupied the grate, and a gas bracket stuck out from the wall on
either side of the picture.
On the small round mahogany table that stood in the middle of the
room lay a Bible, and a copy of the St. James's Gazette, which was
dated a week back. Juliet took it up and read an account of a cricket
match without much enthusiasm. Then she flung it down and wandered
about the room once more; but she had exhausted all its possibilities;
and though she took a volume entitled Causes Célèbres from the shelf,
and turned its pages hopefully, she put it back with a grimace at its
dullness and a sort of surprise at finding anything drier than the cricket.
She had waited half an hour, when the door opened and the face of
Nicol was introduced round the corner of it.
"Will you please come this way," he said.

Telling her maid to stay where she was, Juliet followed him. He opened
the other door on the landing, and announced her in a loud voice as,
with a quickened pulse, she passed him, and entered the room.
There were two men standing by the hearth. One of them came forward
to receive her.
"How do you do, Miss Byrne," he said; "I am glad you were able to
come. I am Jeremy Findlay, at your service."
Mr.