'Understand,' said he: 'in saying as much as I have done, I travel
quite beyond my brief. I have been clothed with no capacity to
talk of wills, or heritages, or your cousin. I was sent here to
make but the one communication: that M. de Keroual desires to meet
his great-nephew.'
'Well,' said I, looking about me on the battlements by which we sat
surrounded, 'this is a case in which Mahomet must certainly come to
the mountain.'
'Pardon me,' said Mr. Romaine; 'you know already your uncle is an
aged man; but I have not yet told you that he is quite broken up,
and his death shortly looked for. No, no, there is no doubt about
it--it is the mountain that must come to Mahomet.'
'From an Englishman, the remark is certainly significant,' said I;
'but you are of course, and by trade, a keeper of men's secrets,
and I see you keep that of Cousin Alain, which is not the mark of a
truculent patriotism, to say the least.'
'I am first of all the lawyer of your family!' says he.
'That being so,' said I, 'I can perhaps stretch a point myself.
This rock is very high, and it is very steep; a man might come by a
devil of a fall from almost any part of it, and yet I believe I
have a pair of wings that might carry me just so far as to the
bottom. Once at the bottom I am helpless.'
'And perhaps it is just then that I could step in,' returned the
lawyer.
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